Towards Improved Sentence Representations using Token Graphs

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Mantri, Krishna Sri Ipsit, Schönlieb, Carola-Bibiane, Lähner, Zorah, Eliasof, Moshe
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Mantri, Krishna Sri Ipsit
Schönlieb, Carola-Bibiane
Lähner, Zorah
Eliasof, Moshe
author_facet Mantri, Krishna Sri Ipsit
Schönlieb, Carola-Bibiane
Lähner, Zorah
Eliasof, Moshe
contents Obtaining a single-vector representation from a Large Language Model's (LLM) token-level outputs is a critical step for nearly all sentence-level tasks. However, standard pooling methods like mean or max aggregation treat tokens as an independent set, discarding the rich relational structure captured by the model's self-attention layers and making them susceptible to signal dilution. To address this, we introduce GLOT, a lightweight, structure-aware pooling module that reframes pooling as relational learning followed by aggregation. Operating on the outputs of a frozen LLM, GLOT first constructs a latent token-similarity graph, then refines token representations with a graph neural network, and finally aggregates them using a readout layer. Experimentally, our approach is remarkably robust and efficient: on a diagnostic stress test where 90% of tokens are random distractors, GLOT maintains over 97% accuracy while baseline methods collapse. Furthermore, it is competitive with state-of-the-art techniques on benchmarks like GLUE and MTEB with 20x fewer trainable parameters and speeds up the training time by over 100x compared with parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods. Supported by a theoretical analysis of its expressive power, our work shows that learning over token graphs is a powerful paradigm for the efficient adaptation of frozen LLMs. Our code is published at https://github.com/ipsitmantri/GLOT.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_03389
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publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Towards Improved Sentence Representations using Token Graphs
Mantri, Krishna Sri Ipsit
Schönlieb, Carola-Bibiane
Lähner, Zorah
Eliasof, Moshe
Machine Learning
Obtaining a single-vector representation from a Large Language Model's (LLM) token-level outputs is a critical step for nearly all sentence-level tasks. However, standard pooling methods like mean or max aggregation treat tokens as an independent set, discarding the rich relational structure captured by the model's self-attention layers and making them susceptible to signal dilution. To address this, we introduce GLOT, a lightweight, structure-aware pooling module that reframes pooling as relational learning followed by aggregation. Operating on the outputs of a frozen LLM, GLOT first constructs a latent token-similarity graph, then refines token representations with a graph neural network, and finally aggregates them using a readout layer. Experimentally, our approach is remarkably robust and efficient: on a diagnostic stress test where 90% of tokens are random distractors, GLOT maintains over 97% accuracy while baseline methods collapse. Furthermore, it is competitive with state-of-the-art techniques on benchmarks like GLUE and MTEB with 20x fewer trainable parameters and speeds up the training time by over 100x compared with parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods. Supported by a theoretical analysis of its expressive power, our work shows that learning over token graphs is a powerful paradigm for the efficient adaptation of frozen LLMs. Our code is published at https://github.com/ipsitmantri/GLOT.
title Towards Improved Sentence Representations using Token Graphs
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.03389