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Visualizing GPT-OSS-20B embeddings

melonmars.github.io

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Re: Visualizing GPT-OSS-20B embeddings

#21
post #17

Without a way to tune it, this visualization is as much about the dimensionality reduction algorithm used as the embeddings themselves, because trade-offs are unavoidable when you go from a very high dimensional space to a 2D one. I would not read too much into it.

This demo is a lot more useful for comparing word embeddings: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/WordEmbeddingDemo/index.html

You can choose which dimensions to show, pick which embeddings to show, and play with vector maths between them in a visual way

It doesn't show the whole set of embeddings, though I am sure someone could fix that, as well as adapting it to use the gpt-oss model instead of the custom (?) mini set it uses.

Re: Visualizing GPT-OSS-20B embeddings

#22
post #3

What do people learn from visualizations like this? What is the most important problem anyone has solved this way? Speaking as somewhat of a co-defendant.

Embedding visualizations have helped identify bias in word embeddings (Word2Vec), debug entity resolution systems, and optimize document retrieval by revealing semantic clusters that inform better indexing strategies.

Re: Visualizing GPT-OSS-20B embeddings

#23
post #3

What do people learn from visualizations like this? What is the most important problem anyone has solved this way? Speaking as somewhat of a co-defendant.

Not everything has to be directly informative or solve a problem. Sometimes data visualization can look pretty for pretty's sake. Dimensionality reduction/clustering like this may be less useful for identifying trends in token embeddings, but for other types of embeddings it's extremely useful.

Agreed. The fact that it has any structure at all is fascinating (and super pretty). Could signal at interesting internal structures. I would love to see a version for Qwen-3 and Mistral too!

I wonder if being trained on significant amounts of synthetic data gave it any unique characteristics.

Re: Visualizing GPT-OSS-20B embeddings

#25
post #3

What do people learn from visualizations like this? What is the most important problem anyone has solved this way? Speaking as somewhat of a co-defendant.

Embedding visualizations have helped identify bias in word embeddings (Word2Vec), debug entity resolution systems, and optimize document retrieval by revealing semantic clusters that inform better indexing strategies.

Interesting, glad to know it's been useful for some specific contributions. (Not questioning that interesting-looking, appealing displays as overviews for general awareness are also worthwhile.)
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