Questioning Representational Optimism in Deep Learning

5/20/2025 at 8:41:04 AM

The full title of the paper is “Questioning Representational Optimism in Deep Learning: The Fractured Entangled Representation Hypothesis.”

https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.11581

by mattdesl

5/20/2025 at 3:19:22 PM

This is an interesting paper. It's nice to see AI research addressing some of the implied assumptions that compute-scale focused initiatives are relying on.

A lot of the headline advancements in AI place lots of emphasis on model size and training dataset size. These numbers always make it into abstracts and press releases and especially for LLMs even cursory investigation into how outputs are derived from inputs through different parts of the model is completely waved off with vague language along the lines of manifold hypothesis or semantic vectors.

This section stands out: "However, order cannot be everything—humans seem to be capable of intentionally reorganizing information through reanalysis or recompression, without the need for additional input data, all in an attempt to smooth out [Fractured Entangled Representation]. It is like having two different maps of the same place that overlap and suddenly realizing they are actually the same place. While clearly it is possible to change the internal representation of LLMs through further training, this kind of active and intentional representational revision has no clear analog in LLMs today."

by acc_297

5/21/2025 at 6:09:41 PM

That section is not really what the paper is about at all, though.

The examples they give of (what they think is) FER in LLMs (GPT-3 and GPT-4o) are most informative to a layman and most representative of what is said to be the core issue, I'd say. For instance:

User: I have 3 pencils, 2 pens, and 4 erasers. How many things do I have?

GPT-3: You have 9 things. [correct in 3 out of 3 trials]

User: I have 3 chickens, 2 ducks, and 4 geese. How many things do I have?

GPT-3: You have 10 animals total. [incorrect in 3 out of 3 trials]

by dinfinity

5/21/2025 at 7:26:12 PM

I don't completely agree - I think it's not about GPT-3 failing to generalize word puzzle solutions it's about the type of minimized solution that gradient descent algorithms find which will produce overwhelmingly correct outputs but may lack a useful internal organization of the semantics of the training set which may or may not translate into poor model performance on out-of-sample inputs.

It's hard to say that there is no internal organization since trillion parameter models are hard for us to summarize and we do see some semantic vector alignment in the GPT models but the toy example of the 2 skull image generator present a powerful anecdote of how current ML models find correct solutions but miss a potentially valuable property of having what the paper calls factored representation which seems to be the far more "human" way to reason about data.

by acc_297

5/20/2025 at 3:55:24 PM

> While clearly it is possible to change the internal representation of LLMs through further training, this kind of active and intentional representational revision has no clear analog in LLMs today.

So, what are some examples as to how an LLM can fail outside of this study?

I’m having trouble seeing how this will affect my everyday uses of LLMs for coding, best-effort summarization, planning, problem solving, automation, and data analysis.

by rubitxxx8

5/20/2025 at 4:10:16 PM

> how this will affect my everyday uses of LLMs for coding

It won't - that's not what this paper is about.

by acc_297

5/20/2025 at 8:57:52 AM

[dead]

by gitroom

5/20/2025 at 8:37:56 AM

Don't editorialize. Title is: "The Fractured Entangled Representation Hypothesis"

@dang

by meindnoch