Shared Emotion Geometry Across Small Language Models: A Cross-Architecture Study of Representation, Behavior, and Methodological Confounds

TL;DR

This study reveals a universal emotion geometry across diverse small language models, showing that shared representations persist despite behavioral differences and that RLHF influences immature models' representations.

Contribution

It demonstrates the universality of emotion geometry across multiple architectures and clarifies methodological confounds in prior emotion representation studies.

Findings

Shared emotion geometry is consistent across mature architectures.

RLHF restructures representations only in immature models.

Methodological analysis decomposes comprehension-vs-generation effects into four layers.

Abstract

We extract 21-emotion vector sets from twelve small language models (six architectures x base/instruct, 1B-8B parameters) under a unified comprehension-mode pipeline at fp16 precision, and compare the resulting geometries via representational similarity analysis on raw cosine RDMs. The five mature architectures (Qwen 2.5 1.5B, SmolLM2 1.7B, Llama 3.2 3B, Mistral 7B v0.3, Llama 3.1 8B) share nearly identical 21-emotion geometry, with pairwise RDM Spearman correlations of 0.74-0.92. This universality persists across diametrically opposed behavioral profiles: Qwen 2.5 and Llama 3.2 occupy opposite poles of MTI Compliance facets yet produce nearly identical emotion RDMs (rho = 0.81), so behavioral facet differences arise above the shared emotion representation. Gemma-3 1B base, the one immature case in our dataset, exhibits extreme residual-stream anisotropy (0.997) and is restructured by RLHF across all geometric descriptors, whereas the five already-mature families show within-family base x instruct RDM correlations of rho >= 0.92 (Mistral 7B v0.3 at rho = 0.985), suggesting RLHF restructures only representations that are not yet organized. Methodologically, we show that what prior work has read as a single comprehension-vs-generation method effect in fact decomposes into four distinct layers -- a coarse method-dependent dissociation, robust sub-parameter sensitivity within generation, a true precision (fp16 vs INT8) effect, and a conflated cross-experiment bias that distorts in opposite directions for different models -- so that a single rho between two prior emotion-vector studies is not a safe basis for interpretation without the layered decomposition.