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Related papers: Generalization v.s. Memorization: Tracing Language…

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Memorization, or the tendency of large language models (LLMs) to output entire sequences from their training data verbatim, is a key concern for safely deploying language models. In particular, it is vital to minimize a model's memorization…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-06-02 Stella Biderman , USVSN Sai Prashanth , Lintang Sutawika , Hailey Schoelkopf , Quentin Anthony , Shivanshu Purohit , Edward Raff

The relationship between memorization and generalization in large language models (LLMs) remains an open area of research, with growing evidence that the two are deeply intertwined. In this work, we investigate this relationship by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-19 Joshua Barron , Devin White

Rote learning is a memorization technique based on repetition. Many researchers argue that rote learning hinders generalization because it encourages verbatim memorization rather than deeper understanding. This concern extends even to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Qinyuan Wu , Soumi Das , Mahsa Amani , Bishwamittra Ghosh , Mohammad Aflah Khan , Krishna P. Gummadi , Muhammad Bilal Zafar

Large language models (LLMs) have shown great capabilities in various tasks but also exhibited memorization of training data, raising tremendous privacy and copyright concerns. While prior works have studied memorization during…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-02-26 Shenglai Zeng , Yaxin Li , Jie Ren , Yiding Liu , Han Xu , Pengfei He , Yue Xing , Shuaiqiang Wang , Jiliang Tang , Dawei Yin

Despite the remarkable capabilities of modern large language models (LLMs), the mechanisms behind their problem-solving abilities remain elusive. In this work, we aim to better understand how the learning dynamics of LLM finetuning shapes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-19 Katie Kang , Amrith Setlur , Dibya Ghosh , Jacob Steinhardt , Claire Tomlin , Sergey Levine , Aviral Kumar

Large language models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated exceptional code generation capabilities. However, there is a growing debate whether LLMs are mostly doing memorization (i.e., replicating or reusing large parts of their training…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-01 Lizhe Zhang , Wentao Chen , Li Zhong , Letian Peng , Zilong Wang , Jingbo Shang

We investigate how Large Language Models (LLMs) distinguish between memorization and generalization at the neuron level. Through carefully designed tasks, we identify distinct neuron subsets responsible for each behavior. Experiments on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-10 Ko-Wei Huang , Yi-Fu Fu , Ching-Yu Tsai , Yu-Chieh Tu , Tzu-Ling Cheng , Cheng-Yu Lin , Yi-Ting Yang , Heng-Yi Liu , Keng-Te Liao , Da-Cheng Juan , Shou-De Lin

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved impressive results in natural language processing but are prone to memorizing portions of their training data, which can compromise evaluation metrics, raise privacy concerns, and limit…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-03 Eduardo Slonski

The capabilities and limitations of Large Language Models have been sketched out in great detail in recent years, providing an intriguing yet conflicting picture. On the one hand, LLMs demonstrate a general ability to solve problems. On the…

Large language models (LMs) have been shown to memorize parts of their training data, and when prompted appropriately, they will emit the memorized training data verbatim. This is undesirable because memorization violates privacy (exposing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-07 Nicholas Carlini , Daphne Ippolito , Matthew Jagielski , Katherine Lee , Florian Tramer , Chiyuan Zhang

Large Language Models (LLMs), trained on massive corpora with billions of parameters, show unprecedented performance in various fields. Though surprised by their excellent performances, researchers also noticed some special behaviors of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-05 Bowen Chen , Namgi Han , Yusuke Miyao

Large Language Models have received significant attention due to their abilities to solve a wide range of complex tasks. However these models memorize a significant proportion of their training data, posing a serious threat when disclosed…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-07-16 Jérémie Dentan , Davide Buscaldi , Aymen Shabou , Sonia Vanier

Memorisation is a natural part of learning from real-world data: neural models pick up on atypical input-output combinations and store those training examples in their parameter space. That this happens is well-known, but how and where are…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-12 Verna Dankers , Ivan Titov

Large language models (LLMs) excel on a variety of reasoning benchmarks, but previous studies suggest they sometimes struggle to generalize to unseen questions, potentially due to over-reliance on memorized training examples. However, the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-01 Yihuai Hong , Dian Zhou , Meng Cao , Lei Yu , Zhijing Jin

When language models (LMs) are trained to forget (or "unlearn'') a skill, how precisely does their behavior change? We study the behavior of transformer LMs in which tasks have been forgotten via fine-tuning on randomized labels. Such LMs…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-05 Eric Zhang , Leshem Chosen , Jacob Andreas

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional multitasking abilities, fine-tuning these models on downstream, domain-specific datasets is often necessary to yield superior performance on test sets compared to their…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-15 Haoran Yang , Yumeng Zhang , Jiaqi Xu , Hongyuan Lu , Pheng Ann Heng , Wai Lam

While large language models (LLMs) have shown exceptional capabilities in understanding complex queries and performing sophisticated tasks, their generalization abilities are often deeply entangled with memorization, necessitating more…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-04 Zhenting Qi , Hongyin Luo , Xuliang Huang , Zhuokai Zhao , Yibo Jiang , Xiangjun Fan , Himabindu Lakkaraju , James Glass

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable capabilities in question answering (QA), but metrics for assessing their reliance on memorization versus retrieval remain underdeveloped. Moreover, while finetuned models are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Peter Carragher , Abhinand Jha , R Raghav , Kathleen M. Carley

Memorization in large language models (LLMs) makes them vulnerable to data extraction attacks. While pre-training memorization has been extensively studied, fewer works have explored its impact in fine-tuning, particularly for LoRA…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-27 Fei Wang , Baochun 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
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