cs.CLMay 1, 2026

Controlled Paraphrase Geometry in Sentence Embedding Space: Local Manifold Modeling and Latent Probing

Authors: Leonid Bedratyuk

Abstract

The paper studies the local geometry of embedding clouds induced by \emph{controlled local classes of semantically close sentences}. The central question is how controlled paraphrase-like semantic variation is organized in sentence embedding space and whether this local structure can be explicitly modeled by low-degree fitted carriers. We introduce a local geometric modeling scheme based on affine, quadratic, and cubic fitted models. We also use a surface-based latent probing procedure that constructs synthetic latent points in a reduced local PCA space with respect to the fitted carrier. The procedure is intended as an offline method for representation-space analysis, local manifold modeling, and geometry-aware latent probing. Generated latent points are evaluated using criteria that measure consistency with the fitted surface, preservation of neighborhood structure, agreement with the empirical distribution, stability of Hessian-based second-order shape descriptors, and stability of fitted-model coefficients. Experiments on controlled sets of semantically close sentences show that nonlinear local models describe embedding clouds more accurately than affine models. Surface-based generation provides strong fitted-geometry fidelity, including surface consistency, Hessian-based shape consistency, and coefficient consistency. Downstream experiments show that geometric validity of synthetic latent points does not automatically translate into improved classification performance. The results support explicit local geometric modeling of sentence embedding space and highlight the need to distinguish geometric validity from discriminative utility. As a resource contribution, we introduce \textbf{CoPaGE-300K}, a controlled template-based dataset of semantically close sentence variants with slot-level annotations and precomputed sentence embeddings.

Explore similar work

May 7, 2026cs.LG

Invariant Features in Language Models: Geometric Characterization and Model Attribution

Language models exhibit strong robustness to paraphrasing, suggesting that semantic information may be encoded through stable internal representations, yet the structure and origin of such invariance remain unclear. We propose a local geometric framework in which semantically equivalent inputs occupy structured regions in latent space, with paraphrastic variation along nuisance directions and semantic identity preserved in invariant subspaces. Building on this view, we make three contributions: (1) a geometric characterization of invariant latent features, (2) a contrastive subspace discovery method that separates semantic-changing from semantic-preserving variation, and (3) an application of invariant representations to zero-shot model attribution. Across models and layers, empirical results support these contributions. Invariant structure emerges in specific depth regions, semantic displacement lies largely outside the nuisance subspace, and representation-level interventions indicate a causal role of invariant components in model outputs. Invariant representations also capture model-specific geometric patterns, enabling accurate attribution. These findings suggest that semantic invariance can be viewed as a local geometric property of latent representations, offering a principled perspective on how language models organize meaning.
Agnibh Dasgupta, Abdullah Tanvir, Xin Zhong
Jul 8, 2026cs.CL

Riemannian Geometry for Pre-trained Language Model Embeddings

Understanding the geometric structure of pre-trained language model embeddings matters for interpretability and safety. We ask whether sentence-level classification signal lives in the Riemannian geometry of contextual token embeddings, and probe it by extracting per-token pullback metrics from a learned encoder's analytical Jacobian and aggregating them with the Fréchet mean on the symmetric positive definite (SPD) manifold; we call this procedure Riemannian Mean Pooling (RMP). Across three datasets with non-trivial linguistic structure (CoLA, CREAK, RTE), RMP outperforms Euclidean mean pooling, while on FEVER-Symmetric, a benchmark constructed to remove annotation-driven lexical artifacts, the method correctly stays at chance. Ablations show that a randomly initialised encoder combined with Fréchet aggregation already beats Euclidean pooling on two of the three signal-bearing datasets, localising the source of the gain to the geometric aggregation rather than to learned manifold structure; the trained encoder contributes additional signal specifically on CREAK, the most knowledge-heavy of the three signal-bearing datasets.
Szczepan Konior, Alexandre Quemy, Przemysław Klocek +2
Jun 2, 2026cs.CL

When Does Complexity Conditioning Help a Frozen Sentence Embedding? A Controlled Study of Per-Sentence and Pair-Level Difficulty Adaptation

A common intuition is that sentence embeddings should adapt to the difficulty of the input. We test this intuition in a controlled, multi-seed setting: a lightweight post-encoder adapter attaches to a frozen Qwen3-Embedding-0.6B encoder, accessing only its final pooled embedding, and is evaluated on four paraphrase and semantic-similarity tasks (PAWS, MRPC, QQP, STS-B). The naive form of the idea fails: surface-based per-sentence complexity is nearly uncorrelated with frozen-baseline error (Pearson approximately 0.05) and provides no advantage over constant or shuffled controls, while degrading a saturated baseline. Even when the target is aligned to a non-circular pair-difficulty signal, the per-sentence gate still cannot reliably capture difficulty because difficulty is primarily a property of the pair, not the individual sentence. In contrast, a small pair-level residual gated by a held-out cross-encoder difficulty signal yields consistent gains on the larger and graded tasks, including +0.022 Spearman on STS-B and +0.037 on QQP, while remaining anchored to the frozen baseline across all seeds. Because this useful form operates on sentence pairs rather than individual sentences, the resulting model is best understood as a lightweight re-ranker over cached frozen embeddings, not a replacement single-vector embedding; we make no state-of-the-art claim. Our contribution is a controlled account of when difficulty-aware adaptation helps and when it fails, together with a pre-training diagnostic that predicts the available headroom.
Suhwan Hwang