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When Models Manipulate Manifolds: The Geometry of a Counting Task

transformer-circuits.pub · 11,724 words · saved by 8 readers

Intelligent systems need perception to understand, predict, and navigate their environment. These sensory capabilities reflect what's useful for survival in a specific environment: bats use echolocation, migratory birds sense magnetic fields, Arctic reindeer shift their UV vision seasonally. But when your world is made of text, what do you see?  Language models encounter many text-based tasks that benefit from visual or spatial reasoning: parsing ASCII art, interpreting tables, or handling text wrapping constraints. Yet their only “sensory” input is a sequence of integers representing tokens. They must learn perceptual abilities from scratch, developing specialized mechanisms in the process. In this work, we investigate the mechanisms that enable Claude 3.5 Haiku to perform a natural perceptual task which is common in pretraining corpora and involves tracking position in a document. We find learned representations of position that are in some ways quite similar to the biological neuron

When Models Manipulate Manifolds: The Geometry of a Counting Task Transformer Circuits Thread When Models Manipulate Manifolds: The Geometry of a Counting Task When Models Manipulate Manifolds: The Geometry of a Counting Task Authors Wes Gurnee * , Emmanuel Ameisen * , Isaac Kauvar, Julius Tarng, Adam Pearce, Chris Olah, Joshua Batson *‡ Affiliations Anthropic Published October 21st, 2025 * Core Research Contributor; ‡ Correspondence to joshb@anthropic.com Introduction Intelligent systems need perception to understand, predict, and navigate their environment. These sensory capabilities reflect

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