The Origins of Representation Manifolds in Large Language Models
Overview
Paper Summary
This paper proposes a theory of how large language models (LLMs) represent features as manifolds, geometric shapes in the model's internal representation space. They suggest that cosine similarity between representations reflects the distance between features, and offer some supporting evidence by analyzing text embeddings and activations from models like GPT2-small and text-embedding-large-3.
Explain Like I'm Five
Imagine words as points in a complex shape inside a computer's brain. This study suggests these shapes reflect the relationships between words, with similar words closer together on the shape.
Possible Conflicts of Interest
None identified
Identified Limitations
Rating Explanation
This paper presents a novel and interesting theoretical framework for understanding feature representation in LLMs. While the empirical validation is preliminary and faces some methodological challenges, the proposed concepts and hypotheses offer a valuable starting point for future research in mechanistic interpretability. The limitations regarding generalizability, difficulty proving isometry, manual metric selection, and potential oversimplification are significant, but do not negate the value of the theoretical contribution, warranting a rating of 4.
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