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Semantic Structure in Large Language Model Embeddings (arxiv.org)
7 points by PaulHoule on Aug 29, 2025 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Word meanings inside large language models squeeze into just three dimensions, matching how humans rate words on scales like kind to cruel. Pushing a word along one direction also shifts related features in proportion to their similarity, so steering one meaning causes side effects.

Abstract

Psychological research consistently finds that human ratings of words across diverse semantic scales can be reduced to a low-dimensional form with relatively little information loss. We find that the semantic associations encoded in the embedding matrices of large language models (LLMs) exhibit a similar structure. We show that the projections of words on semantic directions defined by antonym pairs (e.g. kind - cruel) correlate highly with human ratings, and further find that these projections effectively reduce to a 3-dimensional subspace within LLM embeddings, closely resembling the patterns derived from human survey responses. Moreover, we find that shifting tokens along one semantic direction causes off-target effects on geometrically aligned features proportional to their cosine similarity. These findings suggest that semantic features are entangled within LLMs similarly to how they are interconnected in human language, and a great deal of semantic information, despite its apparent complexity, is surprisingly low-dimensional. Furthermore, accounting for this semantic structure may prove essential for avoiding unintended consequences when steering features.

Austin C. Kozlowski, Callin Dai, Andrei Boutyline
arXiv:2508.10003 · cs.CL, cs.AI · submitted Aug 4, 2025
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