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