Papers › Probing with Noise: Unpicking the Warp and Weft of Embeddings
Probing with Noise: Unpicking the Warp and Weft of Embeddings
Filip Klubička, John D. Kelleher
Improving our understanding of how information is encoded in vector space can yield valuable interpretability insights. Alongside vector dimensions, we argue that it is possible for the vector norm to also carry linguistic information. We develop a method to test this: an extension of the probing framework which allows for relative intrinsic interpretations of probing results. It relies on introducing noise that ablates information encoded in embeddings, grounded in random baselines and confidence intervals. We apply the method to well-established probing tasks and find evidence that confirms the existence of separate information containers in English GloVe and BERT embeddings. Our correlation analysis aligns with the experimental findings that different encoders use the norm to encode different kinds of information: GloVe stores syntactic and sentence length information in the vector norm, while BERT uses it to encode contextual incongruity.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Methods
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections