{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/emergence-of-a-high-dimensional-abstraction","title":"Emergence of a High-Dimensional Abstraction Phase in Language Transformers","arxiv_id":"2405.15471","date":"2024-05-24","proceeding":null,"authors":["Emily Cheng","Diego Doimo","Corentin Kervadec","Iuri Macocco","Jade Yu","Alessandro Laio","Marco Baroni"],"abstract":"A language model (LM) is a mapping from a linguistic context to an output token. However, much remains to be known about this mapping, including how its geometric properties relate to its function. We take a high-level geometric approach to its analysis, observing, across five pre-trained transformer-based LMs and three input datasets, a distinct phase characterized by high intrinsic dimensionality. During this phase, representations (1) correspond to the first full linguistic abstraction of the input; (2) are the first to viably transfer to downstream tasks; (3) predict each other across different LMs. Moreover, we find that an earlier onset of the phase strongly predicts better language modelling performance. In short, our results suggest that a central high-dimensionality phase underlies core linguistic processing in many common LM architectures.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.15471v4","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2405.15471v4.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"emergence-of-a-high-dimensional-abstraction","repo_url":"https://github.com/chengemily1/id-llm-abstraction","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"MIT"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"language-modeling","task_name":"Language Modeling"},{"task_slug":"language-modelling","task_name":"Language Modelling"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2405.15471","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}