Emotion Beyond Words: A Jacobian-Lens Decomposition of Emotion Representations in Qwen3-32B
Tristan Day
I investigated how much of a language model’s internal emotion representation is accessible to verbal readout: a question relevant to AI-welfare assessments that rely on self-report. Using Qwen3-32B, I extracted activation vectors for 171 emotions and found that their geometry recovers the familiar valence–arousal circumplex within a richer, approximately ten-dimensional structure. I then used the Jacobian lens to interpret this geometry and sparsely decompose each emotion vector into vocabulary-readable directions. A 16-token code captured only about 2–3% of squared vector norm, although this was 3.6–4.7 times greater than matched-random controls. Lens readouts also recovered the principal valence and arousal axes. A subsequent steering experiment did not establish the hypothesized dissociation between verbal report and behavior because the full-vector manipulation failed. The project therefore contributes a new framework for measuring internal representation, sparse verbal readability, self-report, and behavioral influence separately.
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@misc {
title={
(HckPrj) Emotion Beyond Words: A Jacobian-Lens Decomposition of Emotion Representations in Qwen3-32B
},
author={
Tristan Day
},
date={
},
organization={Apart Research},
note={Research submission to the research sprint hosted by Apart.},
howpublished={https://apartresearch.com}
}


