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ZENODO
Preprint . 2026
License: CC BY
Data sources: ZENODO
ZENODO
Preprint . 2026
License: CC BY
Data sources: Datacite
ZENODO
Preprint . 2026
License: CC BY
Data sources: Datacite
ZENODO
Preprint . 2026
License: CC BY
Data sources: Datacite
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The Origami Structure of Transformer Representations: Crease-Plateau Geometry and Its Applications

Authors: Yang, Haolin;

The Origami Structure of Transformer Representations: Crease-Plateau Geometry and Its Applications

Abstract

We uncover a geometric structure universally present in transformer language models: the representation change ∆ℓ = Hℓ − Hℓ−1 between adjacent layers undergoes a characteristic dimensionality collapse at a small number of crease layers, followed by an extended plateau of nearly isometric processing. We analyze this structure through three complementary metrics—effective rank of ∆, pairwise token distance correlation across layers, and principal direction alignment of representation change vectors. On GPT-2 Small (12 layers), a single crease at layers 1–3 collapses ∆ to effective rank 1 (98% variance explained by the top singular vector), while the subsequent 7 plateau layers operate with near-perfect pairwise distance preservation (ρ = 0.962). Extending to GPT-2 Medium (24 layers), the crease consolidates to a single sharper fold at layer 3, and the plateau expands to 18 layers with improved isometry (ρ = 0.988). We demonstrate two practical applications of this geometric understanding: (1) crease-aware fine-tuning, where freezing the crease zone and training only plateau layers achieves identical domain adaptation performance to full-model fine-tuning at 77% parameter count; and (2) trainable v-rotation, a control primitive that rotates the dominant direction of the crease transformation via an SVD-constrained orthogonal matrix, achieving +62% target domain perplexity improvement while preserving base capabilities (+16% on held-out evaluation). Our findings establish a structural principle of transformer representations—that information gain is non-uniform across layers and concentrated at creases—and provide both diagnostic and interventional tools for exploiting this principle.

Keywords

LLM, Transformer, transformer representations, layer pruning, model interpretability, layer geometry, representation isometry, Machine Learning, effective rank, training dynamics, scaling laws, Computation and Language

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selected citations
These citations are derived from selected sources.
This is an alternative to the "Influence" indicator, which also reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically).
BIP!Citations provided by BIP!
popularity
This indicator reflects the "current" impact/attention (the "hype") of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network.
BIP!Popularity provided by BIP!
influence
This indicator reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically).
BIP!Influence provided by BIP!
impulse
This indicator reflects the initial momentum of an article directly after its publication, based on the underlying citation network.
BIP!Impulse provided by BIP!
0
Average
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