The Truth Lies Somewhere in the Middle (of the Generated Tokens)

Fuente: arXiv
Enregistré dans:
Détails bibliographiques
Auteurs principaux: Wang, Sophie L., Isola, Phillip, Cheung, Brian
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
Sujets:
Accès en ligne:
Tags: Ajouter un tag
Pas de tags, Soyez le premier à ajouter un tag!
_version_ 1866913110488514560
author Wang, Sophie L.
Isola, Phillip
Cheung, Brian
author_facet Wang, Sophie L.
Isola, Phillip
Cheung, Brian
contents How should hidden states generated autoregressively be collapsed into a representation that reflects a language model's internal state? Despite tokens being generated under causal masking, we find that mean pooling across their hidden states yields more semantic representations than any individual token alone. We quantify this through kernel alignment to reference spaces in language, vision, and protein domains. The improvement through mean pooling is consistent with information being distributed across generated tokens rather than localized to a single position. Furthermore, representations derived from generated tokens outperform those from prompt tokens, and alignment across generation reveals interpretable dynamics in model behavior.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_09969
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The Truth Lies Somewhere in the Middle (of the Generated Tokens)
Wang, Sophie L.
Isola, Phillip
Cheung, Brian
Machine Learning
Computation and Language
How should hidden states generated autoregressively be collapsed into a representation that reflects a language model's internal state? Despite tokens being generated under causal masking, we find that mean pooling across their hidden states yields more semantic representations than any individual token alone. We quantify this through kernel alignment to reference spaces in language, vision, and protein domains. The improvement through mean pooling is consistent with information being distributed across generated tokens rather than localized to a single position. Furthermore, representations derived from generated tokens outperform those from prompt tokens, and alignment across generation reveals interpretable dynamics in model behavior.
title The Truth Lies Somewhere in the Middle (of the Generated Tokens)
topic Machine Learning
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.09969