# Sky sphere representation in language models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.27092 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.27092/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 8 of its 15 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Sparse Autoencoders Find Highly Interpretable Features in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.08600/) (2023)
- [Understanding intermediate layers using linear classifier probes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.01644/) (2016)
- [Probing Classifiers: Promises, Shortcomings, and Advances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12452/) (2021)
- [Language Models Represent Space and Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.02207/) (2023)
- [Can Language Models Encode Perceptual Structure Without Grounding? A Case Study in Color](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.06129/) (2021)
- [Activation Oracles: Training and Evaluating LLMs as General-Purpose Activation Explainers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.15674/) (2025)
- [When Models Manipulate Manifolds: The Geometry of a Counting Task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.04480/) (2026)
- [Symmetry in language statistics shapes the geometry of model representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.15029/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We analyze whether language models of size ~100B have a representation of the night sky map that is decodable from their residual stream. We find that most of the considered open-source models do have such a representation, and it often even surfaces to the top principal components on prompts that ask questions like ``what is close to this object in the night sky''. In all but one model this representation showed significant scores in LOO testing, containing up to 65-85% of variance (R2-score) and having median angular error down to 12^circ-21^circ. We verify that our representation is not a simple leak from a correlated flat representation. To our knowledge, this representation is the first example of a curved high-dimensional irreducible feature manifold. Codes used in the paper are published at https://github.com/l3erdnik/Decodable-sky