Computation Over Geometry: Meaning Identity Is Computed, Not Shipped in the Embeddings

Excerpt

arXiv:2609.28290v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Meaning identity (whether two sentences say the same thing after wording changes) is treated in retrieval and RAG as a geometric fact about independently encoded sentence vectors. We show that, for frozen off-the-shelf encoders and language models, it is not: identity is computed when both sentences share one forward pass, and is not a property of the embedding geometry those systems ship. On overlap-matched PAWS-X, purpose-built encoders (BGE, E5,