Lexical Reference Frames: Interpreting LM Residual Streams in Native Semantics
The vocabulary of a language model is its native semantics: the embedding and the unembedding fix the meaning of a state at the two ends of the residual stream. Between them, existing methods either reuse a fixed lens or treat the states as a point cloud, and neither reads a state the way the model does. We argue that every hidden state has a native reference frame, induced by the layers that read it next and adaptive to the context. Lexical reference frames approximate it by reading a state through the model's own remaining layers with a stated number of rounds of attention between positions and a typical attention output for the rest, without fitting to the model's output. No lens, with...
| Authors | Jian Gu, Hongyu Zhang, Chunyang Chen et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 15 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 15 October 2026 |
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