Related papers: Characterizing Mechanisms for Factual Recall in La…

Analogical reasoning is a unique ability of humans to address unfamiliar challenges by transferring strategies from relevant past experiences. One key finding in psychology is that compared with irrelevant past experiences, recalling…

Many dynamic processes, including common scenarios in robotic control and reinforcement learning (RL), involve a set of interacting subprocesses. Though the subprocesses are not independent, their interactions are often sparse, and the…

When an LLM learns a new fact during finetuning (e.g., new movie releases, newly elected pope, etc.), where does this information go? Are entities enriched with relation information immediately, or do models recall information just-in-time…

As language models (LMs) scale, they develop many novel behaviors, good and bad, exacerbating the need to evaluate how they behave. Prior work creates evaluations with crowdwork (which is time-consuming and expensive) or existing data…

Why do language models trained on contradictory data prefer correct answers? In controlled experiments with small transformers (3.5M--86M parameters), we show that this preference tracks the compressibility structure of errors rather than…

Large language models (LLMs) are revolutionizing every aspect of society. They are increasingly used in problem-solving tasks to substitute human assessment and reasoning. LLMs are trained on what humans write and are thus exposed to human…

Prediction head is a crucial component of Transformer language models. Despite its direct impact on prediction, this component has often been overlooked in analyzing Transformers. In this study, we investigate the inner workings of the…

One of the most common complaints about large language models (LLMs) is their prompt sensitivity -- that is, the fact that their ability to perform a task or provide a correct answer to a question can depend unpredictably on the way the…

Can we localize the weights and mechanisms used by a language model to memorize and recite entire paragraphs of its training data? In this paper, we show that while memorization is spread across multiple layers and model components,…

Answering multi-hop reasoning questions requires retrieving and synthesizing information from diverse sources. Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle to perform such reasoning consistently. Here we propose an approach to pinpoint and rectify…

Fact-checking is a potentially useful application of Large Language Models (LLMs) to combat the growing dissemination of disinformation. However, the performance of LLMs varies across geographic regions. In this paper, we evaluate the…

From generating headlines to fabricating news, the Large Language Models (LLMs) are typically assessed by their final outputs, under the safety assumption that a refusal response signifies safe reasoning throughout the entire process.…

Two of the central factors believed to underpin human sentence processing difficulty are expectations and retrieval from working memory. A recent attempt to create a unified cognitive model integrating these two factors relied on the…

We conducted three experiments to investigate how large language models (LLMs) evaluate posterior probabilities. Our results reveal the coexistence of two modes in posterior judgment among state-of-the-art models: a normative mode, which…

Recently proposed evaluation benchmarks aim to characterize the effective context length and the forgetting tendencies of large language models (LLMs). However, these benchmarks often rely on simplistic 'needle in a haystack' retrieval or…

Language models often struggle with handling factual knowledge, exhibiting factual hallucination issue. This makes it vital to evaluate the models' ability to recall its parametric knowledge about facts. In this study, we introduce a…

Understanding and mitigating hallucinations in Large Language Models (LLMs) is crucial for ensuring reliable content generation. While previous research has primarily focused on "when" LLMs hallucinate, our work explains "why" and directly…

Counterfactual statements, which describe events that did not or cannot take place, are beneficial to numerous NLP applications. Hence, we consider the problem of counterfactual detection (CFD) and seek to enhance the CFD models. Previous…

Scaled post-training now drives many of the largest capability gains in language models (LMs), yet its effect on pretrained knowledge remains poorly understood. Not all forgetting is equal: Forgetting one fact (e.g., a U.S. president or an…

Large language models (LLMs) are a promising venue for natural language understanding and generation tasks. However, current LLMs are far from reliable: they are prone to generate non-factual information and, more crucially, to contradict…