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Many of the thousands of attested languages share common configurations of features, creating a spectrum from typologically very rare (e.g., object-verb-subject word order) or impossible languages to very common combinations of features…

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved state-of-the-art performance on a series of natural language understanding tasks. However, these LLMs might rely on dataset bias and artifacts as shortcuts for prediction. This has significantly…

While Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive reasoning capabilities, growing evidence suggests much of their success stems from memorized answer-reasoning patterns rather than genuine inference. In this work, we investigate a…

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in various tasks, including personalized recommendations. Existing evaluation methods often focus on rating prediction, relying on regression errors between actual and predicted ratings. However, user…

Motivation is a central driver of human behavior, shaping decisions, goals, and task performance. As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly aligned with human preferences, we ask whether they exhibit something akin to motivation.…

We study how large language models (LLMs) reason about memorized knowledge through simple binary relations such as equality ($=$), inequality ($<$), and inclusion ($\subset$). Unlike in-context reasoning, the axioms (e.g., $a < b, b < c$)…

This paper introduces a novel Bayesian learning model to explain the behavior of Large Language Models (LLMs), focusing on their core optimization metric of next token prediction. We develop a theoretical framework based on an ideal…

Large language models (LLMs) are demonstrably capable of cross-lingual transfer, but can produce inconsistent output when prompted with the same queries written in different languages. To understand how language models are able to…

The world's languages exhibit certain so-called typological or implicational universals; for example, Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) languages typically use postpositions. Explaining the source of such biases is a key goal of linguistics. We…

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at text summarization, a task that requires models to select content based on its importance. However, the exact notion of salience that LLMs have internalized remains unclear. To bridge this gap, we…

The rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) has driven progress in reasoning tasks -- from program synthesis to scientific hypothesis generation -- yet their ability to handle ranked preferences and structured algorithms in combinatorial…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in reasoning and prediction across different domains. Yet, their ability to infer temporal regularities from structured behavioral data remains underexplored. This paper…

While a large body of literature suggests that large language models (LLMs) acquire rich linguistic representations, little is known about whether they adapt to linguistic biases in a human-like way. The present study probes this question…

A central goal of cognitive modeling is to develop models that not only predict human behavior but also provide insight into the underlying cognitive mechanisms. While neural network models trained on large-scale behavioral data often…

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human intentions has become a critical task for safely deploying models in real-world systems. While existing alignment approaches have seen empirical success, theoretically understanding how these…

Reward models (RMs) are a crucial component in the alignment of large language models' (LLMs) outputs with human values. RMs approximate human preferences over possible LLM responses to the same prompt by predicting and comparing reward…

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) highlight the need to align their behaviors with human values. A critical, yet understudied, issue is the potential divergence between an LLM's stated preferences (its reported alignment with…

Neural language models are black-boxes--both linguistic patterns and factual knowledge are distributed across billions of opaque parameters. This entangled encoding makes it difficult to reliably inspect, verify, or update specific facts.…

While large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong capability in structured prediction tasks such as semantic parsing, few amounts of research have explored the underlying mechanisms of their success. Our work studies different…

How do language models learn to make predictions during pre-training? To study this, we extract learning curves from five autoregressive English language model pre-training runs, for 1M unseen tokens in context. We observe that the language…