In plain words: Treating a transformer's attention as curved space, this framework predicts token meanings bend as layers stack instead of moving in straight lines. Measured trajectories showed more sharp turns and longer detours than chance or dimensionality explain, and context edits bent them in meaning-consistent ways.
Abstract
We present a geometric framework for understanding Transformer-based language models, drawing an explicit analogy to General Relativity. Queries and keys induce an effective metric on representation space, and attention acts as a discrete connection that implements parallel transport of value vectors across tokens. Stacked layers provide discrete time-slices through which token representations evolve on this curved manifold, while backpropagation plays the role of a least-action principle that shapes loss-minimizing trajectories in parameter space. If this analogy is correct, token embeddings should not traverse straight paths in feature space; instead, their layer-wise steps should bend and reorient as interactions mediated by embedding space curvature. To test this prediction, we design experiments that expose both the presence and the consequences of curvature: (i) we visualize a curvature landscape for a full paragraph, revealing how local turning angles vary across tokens and layers; (ii) we show through simulations that excess counts of sharp/flat angles and longer length-to-chord ratios are not explainable by dimensionality or chance; and (iii) inspired by Einstein's eclipse experiment, we probe deflection under controlled context edits, demonstrating measurable, meaning-consistent bends in embedding trajectories that confirm attention-induced curvature.
Riccardo Di Sipio, Jairo Diaz-Rodriguez, Luis Serrano
arXiv:2511.03060 · cs.LG, cs.CL, math.DG · submitted Nov 4, 2025
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