Check Your LLM's Secret Dictionary! Five Lines of Code Reveal What Your LLM Learned (Including What It Shouldn't Have)
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Abstract (arXiv)
We show that singular value decomposition of the lm_head} weight matrix of a transformer-based large language model -- requiring only five lines of PyTorch and no model inference -- reveals interpretable semantic subspaces directly from the model weights. Each left singular vector identifies the vocabulary tokens most readily selected when the hidden state aligns with the corresponding singular direction; inspecting these clusters exposes the model's training data composition and curation philosophy. Analysing GPT-OSS-120B, Gemma-2-2B, and Qwen2.5-1.5B, we find that singular value spectra and vocabulary cluster structures differ systematically across models: GPT exhibits a graduated hierarchy of functionally differentiated subspaces; Gemma is dominated by pre-nineteenth-century English orthography, forming a stepwise clustering structure that may contribute to high output controllability; and Qwen exhibits broad multilingual coverage alongside subspaces whose vocabulary the authors have determined to be ethically inappropriate for direct publication. Base-instruct comparison reveals that ethically concerning subspaces originate in pretraining and are not removed by post-training alignment. We introduce the Vocabulary Cluster Score (VCS) to quantify subspace coherence, and the Weighted Projection Score (WPS) as a static glitch token detector; applying WPS to GPT-OSS-120B recovers shokubutsu-hyakka-tsu (ID 137606), a well-known glitch token widely reported in the CJK language community, without any model inference. We propose a taxonomy of root causes for problematic vocabulary content and call for lm_head} SVD analysis to be adopted as a standard pre-release safety auditing step. Our findings further suggest directions toward SVD-guided tokenizer optimisation and more controllable LLM design.
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References · 15
- 2015Neural Machine Translation of Rare Words with Subword Unitscited by 2,898
- 2019Root Mean Square Layer Normalizationcited by 1,425
- 2023Eliciting Latent Predictions from Transformers with the Tuned Lenscited by 579
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- 2025Boundless Byte Pair Encoding: Breaking the Pre-tokenization Barriercited by 31
- 2024Backward Lens: Projecting Language Model Gradients into the Vocabulary Spacecited by 30
- 2024Glitch Tokens in Large Language Models: Categorization Taxonomy and Effective Detectioncited by 27
- 2024Retrofitting Large Language Models with Dynamic Tokenizationcited by 15
- 2025TokAlign: Efficient Vocabulary Adaptation via Token Alignmentcited by 11
- 2024GlitchProber: Advancing Effective Detection and Mitigation of Glitch Tokens in Large Language Modelscited by 3
- 2024GlitchMiner: Mining Glitch Tokens in Large Language Models via Gradient-based Discrete Optimizationcited by 3
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