ResearchResearch paperInterpretability · Robotics & Embodied AI · Efficiency & Inference1 source · Oct 7, 2026

Fully Interpretable Minimal Transformers: From Geometry to Algorithm

We present a framework for building and interpreting minimal transformer models.

Key points

  • By constraining a transformer's embedding dimension and head size to 2, we enable full two-dimensional visualization of its internal representations.
  • We train a transformer on a simple task where it must produce the most recently observed even number whenever the '+' operator appears in a sequence of digits.
  • We introduce a suite of interpretability visualizations that make the algorithmic interpretation of this procedure explicit.
  • Our framework offers a pedagogical and experimental testbed to explore how transformers use informational geometry to implement next-token prediction.

Sources (1)

  • [1]Fully Interpretable Minimal Transformers: From Geometry to Algorithm
    arXiv (AI, ML, NLP, CV, robotics, multi-agent) · Oct 7, 11:01 AM
    We present a framework for building and interpreting minimal transformer models.
    By constraining a transformer's embedding dimension and head size to 2, we enable full two-dimensional visualization of its internal representations.

Extractive summary: sentences quoted from the sources.

Before this

  1. Oct 7, 2026Iris-3B: Going Beyond the Latent with Pixel-Space Diffusion Training, Conversion and Fine-Tuning
  2. Oct 6, 2026openbmb/MiniCPM-V-4.7-35B-A3B-gguf
  3. Oct 6, 2026EmbeddingGemma 2: an open, lightweight multimodal embedding model
  4. Oct 5, 2026LiquidAI/d1-omni-600M
  5. Oct 5, 2026MC-Sparse: Deconstructing and Closing the Dense-Sparse Attention Gap in Diffusion Transformers
  6. Sep 30, 2026Cloudflare/clef-flash

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