LLM内部隐含人类感知的几何结构,且随层级变化短暂出现。
Geometry of Human Perceptual Domains Emerges Transiently in LLM Representations

- 分析多个模型在不同层级的嵌入空间,发现感知域几何结构自发形成。
- 早期层结构弱,中层最清晰,后期逐渐减弱,呈现动态演变过程。
- 揭示了感知几何在模型中的临时性,适合研究模型内部机制者阅读。
尽管大语言模型(LLMs)仅在文本数据上训练,但其内部表示在嵌入空间中仍展现出丰富的几何结构。本文研究这些结构是否与人类对颜色、音高、情绪和味道等不同感知域的组织方式相似。我们分析了多个开源Transformer架构在残差流中逐层演化的内在几何结构。结果显示:第一,尽管无直接感知监督,多种感知域均出现逐层几何结构;第二,不同感知域表现出不同的演化轨迹,其几何结构与人类基线的对齐程度也随模型深度和域而异;第三,几何结构遵循一致的表征路径:早期层结构稀疏,中层逐步组织化,后期趋于衰减,表明感知几何是模型内部转换过程中的瞬时产物。该发现为理解人类感知几何如何在LLMs中涌现提供了新视角,并为内部表示的机制分析提供了原则性路径。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
While large language models (LLMs) are trained purely on textual data, prior work has shown that their internal representations can exhibit rich geometric structure in embedding space. Building on this line of work, we investigate whether such structure is similar to human perceptual organisation across different domains (e.g., color, pitch, emotion, and taste). Specifically, we study the layer-wise emergence of intrinsic geometrical structure corresponding to perceptual modalities within the residual streams of multiple open-weight transformer architectures. Our results reveal three key findings. First, we observe the emergence of layer-wise geometric structure across multiple perceptual domains, despite the absence of any direct perceptual supervision during training. Second, these perceptual domains exhibit distinct emergence profiles, with both geometric structure and its alignment with human baselines following domain- and model-specific trajectories across depth. Third, this emergence follows a consistent representational trajectory: geometry is weak or diffuse in early layers, becomes progressively organised in intermediate layers, and is attenuated in later layers, suggesting that perceptual geometry arises transiently as part of the model's internal transformation pipeline. This provides new insight into how and where human-like perceptual geometry arises in LLMs, offering a principled pathway for mechanistic analysis of internal representations.
Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。