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Fantastic Semantics and Where to Find Them: Investigating Which Layers of Generative LLMs Reflect Lexical Semantics

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arxiv 2403.01509 v2 pith:AOJHS7EF submitted 2024-03-03 cs.CL

classification cs.CL
keywords semanticslayerslexicallanguagemodelsevolutiongenerativehidden
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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Large language models have achieved remarkable success in general language understanding tasks. However, as a family of generative methods with the objective of next token prediction, the semantic evolution with the depth of these models are not fully explored, unlike their predecessors, such as BERT-like architectures. In this paper, we specifically investigate the bottom-up evolution of lexical semantics for a popular LLM, namely Llama2, by probing its hidden states at the end of each layer using a contextualized word identification task. Our experiments show that the representations in lower layers encode lexical semantics, while the higher layers, with weaker semantic induction, are responsible for prediction. This is in contrast to models with discriminative objectives, such as mask language modeling, where the higher layers obtain better lexical semantics. The conclusion is further supported by the monotonic increase in performance via the hidden states for the last meaningless symbols, such as punctuation, in the prompting strategy. Our codes are available at https://github.com/RyanLiut/LLM_LexSem.

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Forward citations

Cited by 4 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

  1. A Comprehensive Study of Decoder-Only LLMs for Text-to-Image Generation

    cs.CV 2025-06 conditional novelty 7.0 of 10

    Layer-normalized averaging of all decoder-only LLM hidden states, rather than last-layer embeddings, improves text-to-image compositional alignment and beats T5 on GenAI-Bench.

  2. NITP: Next Implicit Token Prediction for LLM Pre-training

    cs.CL 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0 of 10

    NITP augments standard next-token prediction with implicit semantic prediction in representation space using shallow-layer self-supervision, reporting consistent downstream gains on 0.5B-9B models including 5.7% on MM...

  3. TruthFlow: Truthful LLM Generation via Representation Flow Correction

    cs.CL 2025-02 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    TruthFlow uses flow matching to produce query-specific representation corrections, improving truthfulness on TruthfulQA open-ended generation across several LLMs.

  4. On-the-Fly Adaptive Distillation of Transformer to Dual-State Linear Attention

    cs.LG 2025-06 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    On-the-fly distillation of Transformer layers to dual-state linear attention produces about 2.3x faster simulated LLM serving than Llama2-7B with roughly comparable benchmark accuracy.

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