Three Phases of Internal Processing in Transformer LLMs: Semantic Emergence, Layer Inflection Points, and Training Corpus Signatures

We identify three universal phases of internal processing in transformer language models through systematic analysis of Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct: a Chaos Phase (L0-L8) dominated by training corpus tokens, an Organization Phase (L9-L23), and a Crystallization Phase where the correct token abruptly emerges. We distinguish false emergence (generic placeholders in hard queries) from real emergence, and show that emergence layer correlates negatively with final token probability.