Context Is King: How In-Context Specification Shapes the Geometry of Concepts
Large language models place structured concepts on geometrically faithful manifolds: weekdays lie on a circle, months on another, usually taken to be a fixed world-model the network stores and looks up. We show that context is king: the structure a model actually uses is set by the in-context specification. A declarative rule fixes not only which relations the geometry encodes but its topology type: the same tokens form a cycle or a branching tree on command, built even on arbitrary, meaning-free tokens with no prior to inherit, which a relabeled stored shape cannot do. When the specification conflicts with a strong pretrained prior, the context-set geometry dominates it in capable models...
| Authors | Elad David, Max Fomin |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 27 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 27 July 2026 |
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