The Origins of Representation Manifolds in Large Language Models

Alexander Modell, Patrick Rubin-Delanchy, Nick Whiteley

Keywords: mechanistic interpretability, linear representation hypothesis, superposition

TL;DR: We describe a mathematical framework which could explain how and why representation manifolds emerge in large language models.

Abstract: There is a large ongoing scientific effort in mechanistic interpretability to map embeddings and internal representations of AI systems into human-understandable concepts. A key element of this effort is the linear representation hypothesis, which posits that neural representations are sparse linear combinations of `almost-orthogonal' direction vectors, reflecting the presence or absence of different features. This model underpins the use of sparse autoencoders to recover features from representations. Moving towards a fuller model of features, in which neural representations could encode not just the presence but also a potentially continuous and multidimensional value for a feature, has been a subject of intense recent discourse. We describe why and how a feature might be represented as a manifold, demonstrating in particular that cosine similarity in representation space may encode the intrinsic geometry of a feature through shortest, on-manifold paths, potentially answering the question of how distance in representation space and relatedness in concept space could be connected. The critical assumptions and predictions of the theory are validated on text embeddings and token activations of large language models.

Primary Area: foundation or frontier models, including LLMs

Submission Number: 12331