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Related papers: How Do Large Language Models Acquire Factual Knowl…

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Large language models (LLMs) can recall a wide range of factual knowledge across languages. However, existing factual recall evaluations primarily assess fact retrieval in isolation, where the queried entity is explicitly named and the fact…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Yihong Liu , Bingyu Xiong , Hinrich Schütze

Language models (LMs) have been shown to memorize a great deal of factual knowledge contained in their training data. But when an LM generates an assertion, it is often difficult to determine where it learned this information and whether it…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-26 Ekin Akyürek , Tolga Bolukbasi , Frederick Liu , Binbin Xiong , Ian Tenney , Jacob Andreas , Kelvin Guu

Fine-tuning pre-trained large language models (LLMs) on a diverse array of tasks has become a common approach for building models that can solve various natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, where and to what extent these models…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-29 Zheng Zhao , Yftah Ziser , Shay B. Cohen

Large Language Models (LLMs) are typically trained on data mixtures: most data come from web scrapes, while a small portion is curated from high-quality sources with dense domain-specific knowledge. In this paper, we show that when training…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Xinran Gu , Kaifeng Lyu , Jiazheng Li , Jingzhao Zhang

Large language models (LLMs) can perform remarkably complex tasks, yet the fine-grained details of how these capabilities emerge during pretraining remain poorly understood. Scaling laws on validation loss tell us how much a model improves…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-10 Emmy Liu , Kaiser Sun , Millicent Li , Isabelle Lee , Lindia Tjuatja , Jen-tse Huang , Graham Neubig

Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed the natural language processing landscape and brought to life diverse applications. Pretraining on vast web-scale data has laid the foundation for these models, yet the research community is now…

Catastrophic forgetting remains a formidable obstacle to building an omniscient model in large language models (LLMs). Despite the pioneering research on task-level forgetting in LLM fine-tuning, there is scant focus on forgetting during…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-23 Chonghua Liao , Ruobing Xie , Xingwu Sun , Haowen Sun , Zhanhui Kang

Previous literature has proved that Pretrained Language Models (PLMs) can store factual knowledge. However, we find that facts stored in the PLMs are not always correct. It motivates us to explore a fundamental question: How do we calibrate…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-19 Qingxiu Dong , Damai Dai , Yifan Song , Jingjing Xu , Zhifang Sui , Lei Li

The pretrained large language models (LLMs) are finetuned with labeled data for better instruction following ability and alignment with human values. In this paper, we study the learning dynamics of LLM finetuning on reasoning tasks and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Zhiwen Ruan , Yun Chen , Yutao Hou , Peng Li , Yang Liu , Guanhua Chen

While recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) bring us closer to achieving artificial general intelligence, the question persists: Do LLMs truly understand language, or do they merely mimic comprehension through pattern…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-11-15 Houquan Zhou , Yang Hou , Zhenghua Li , Xuebin Wang , Zhefeng Wang , Xinyu Duan , Min Zhang

Large language models (LLMs) acquire knowledge across diverse domains such as science, history, and geography encountered during generative pre-training. However, due to their stochasticity, it is difficult to predict what LLMs have…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Kartik Sharma , Yiqiao Jin , Rakshit Trivedi , Srijan Kumar

Post-training is essential for the success of large language models (LLMs), transforming pre-trained base models into more useful and aligned post-trained models. While plenty of works have studied post-training algorithms and evaluated…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Hongzhe Du , Weikai Li , Min Cai , Karim Saraipour , Zimin Zhang , Himabindu Lakkaraju , Yizhou Sun , Shichang Zhang

While pre-trained language models (PLMs) have shown evidence of acquiring vast amounts of knowledge, it remains unclear how much of this parametric knowledge is actually usable in performing downstream tasks. We propose a systematic…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-25 Amirhossein Kazemnejad , Mehdi Rezagholizadeh , Prasanna Parthasarathi , Sarath Chandar

Recently, there has been a trend to investigate the factual knowledge captured by Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs). Many works show the PLMs' ability to fill in the missing factual words in cloze-style prompts such as "Dante was born in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-04-01 Shaobo Li , Xiaoguang Li , Lifeng Shang , Zhenhua Dong , Chengjie Sun , Bingquan Liu , Zhenzhou Ji , Xin Jiang , Qun Liu

Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to acquire sequence-level planning abilities during training, yet their planning behavior exhibited at inference time often appears short-sighted and inconsistent with these capabilities. We…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Haijiang Yan , Jian-Qiao Zhu , Adam Sanborn

Understanding how large language models (LLMs) acquire and store factual knowledge is crucial for enhancing their interpretability and reliability. In this work, we analyze the evolution of factual knowledge representation in the OLMo-7B…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-05 Ahmad Dawar Hakimi , Ali Modarressi , Philipp Wicke , Hinrich Schütze

With the success of neural language models (LMs), their language acquisition has gained much attention. This work sheds light on the second language (L2) acquisition of LMs, while previous work has typically explored their first language…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-06-06 Miyu Oba , Tatsuki Kuribayashi , Hiroki Ouchi , Taro Watanabe

Despite their impressive performance on diverse tasks, large language models (LMs) still struggle with tasks requiring rich world knowledge, implying the limitations of relying solely on their parameters to encode a wealth of world…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-07-04 Alex Mallen , Akari Asai , Victor Zhong , Rajarshi Das , Daniel Khashabi , Hannaneh Hajishirzi

When language models are trained on textual data, they acquire both knowledge about the structure of language as well as knowledge of facts about the world. At inference time, their knowledge of facts can be leveraged to solve interesting…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-03 John Kirchenbauer , Janny Mongkolsupawan , Yuxin Wen , Tom Goldstein , Daphne Ippolito

Pretraining language models directly on web-scale corpora is the de facto paradigm. We study an alternative where the model is initially exposed to abstract structured data to ease the subsequent acquisition of rich semantic knowledge, much…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Liangze Jiang , Zachary Shinnick , Anton van den Hengel , Hemanth Saratchandran , Damien Teney