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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

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant potential in medicine, with many studies adapting them through continued pre-training or fine-tuning on medical data to enhance domain-specific accuracy and safety. However, a key…

Large language models (LLMs) achieve good performance on challenging reasoning benchmarks, yet could also make basic reasoning mistakes. This contrasting behavior is puzzling when it comes to understanding the mechanisms behind LLMs'…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-05 Chulin Xie , Yangsibo Huang , Chiyuan Zhang , Da Yu , Xinyun Chen , Bill Yuchen Lin , Bo Li , Badih Ghazi , Ravi Kumar

Reasoning is an integral part of many tasks performed by language models (LMs). However, the effects of scaling model sizes and data on reasoning abilities at pretraining time remain understudied. To rigorously investigate this problem, we…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Xinyi Wang , Shawn Tan , Shenbo Xu , Mingyu Jin , William Yang Wang , Rameswar Panda , Yikang Shen

To quantitatively and intuitively explore the generalization ability of pre-trained language models (PLMs), we have designed several tasks of arithmetic and logical reasoning. We both analyse how well PLMs generalize when the test data is…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-10-20 Cunxiang Wang , Boyuan Zheng , Yuchen Niu , Yue Zhang

As Large Language Models (LLMs) become widely adopted, understanding how they learn from, and memorize, training data becomes crucial. Memorization in LLMs is widely assumed to only occur as a result of sequences being repeated in the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-16 Igor Shilov , Matthieu Meeus , Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye

Large Language Models (LLMs) are prevalent in modern applications but often memorize training data, leading to privacy breaches and copyright issues. Existing research has mainly focused on posthoc analyses, such as extracting memorized…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-10 Tarun Ram Menta , Susmit Agrawal , Chirag Agarwal

While many have shown how Large Language Models (LLMs) can be applied to a diverse set of tasks, the critical issues of data contamination and memorization are often glossed over. In this work, we address this concern for tabular data.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-12 Sebastian Bordt , Harsha Nori , Rich Caruana

As Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in diverse applications, faithfully integrating evolving factual knowledge into these models remains a critical challenge. Continued pre-training on paraphrased data has shown…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-24 Mingkang Zhu , Xi Chen , Zhongdao Wang , Bei Yu , Hengshuang Zhao , Jiaya Jia

We are interested in understanding how well Transformer language models (TLMs) can perform reasoning tasks when trained on knowledge encoded in the form of natural language. We investigate their systematic generalization abilities on a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-22 Nicolas Gontier , Koustuv Sinha , Siva Reddy , Christopher Pal

Large Language Models (LLMs) display strikingly different generalization behaviors: supervised fine-tuning (SFT) often narrows capability, whereas reinforcement-learning (RL) tuning tends to preserve it. The reasons behind this divergence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-01 Haoyue Bai , Yiyou Sun , Wenjie Hu , Shi Qiu , Maggie Ziyu Huan , Peiyang Song , Robert Nowak , Dawn Song

Despite widespread success in language understanding and generation, large language models (LLMs) exhibit unclear and often inconsistent behavior when faced with tasks that require probabilistic reasoning. In this work, we present the first…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-29 Mobina Pournemat , Keivan Rezaei , Gaurang Sriramanan , Arman Zarei , Jiaxiang Fu , Yang Wang , Hamid Eghbalzadeh , Soheil Feizi

Large language models (LLMs) are proficient at generating fluent text with minimal task-specific supervision. Yet, their ability to provide well-grounded rationalizations for knowledge-intensive tasks remains under-explored. Such tasks,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-02 Aditi Mishra , Sajjadur Rahman , Hannah Kim , Kushan Mitra , Estevam Hruschka

State-of-the-art pre-trained language models have been shown to memorise facts and perform well with limited amounts of training data. To gain a better understanding of how these models learn, we study their generalisation and memorisation…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-03-16 Michael Tänzer , Sebastian Ruder , Marek Rei

We assess how the code reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs) generalize to different kinds of programs. We present techniques for obtaining in- and out-of-distribution programs with different characteristics: code sampled from…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-04-09 Rem Yang , Julian Dai , Nikos Vasilakis , Martin Rinard

While many have shown how Large Language Models (LLMs) can be applied to a diverse set of tasks, the critical issues of data contamination and memorization are often glossed over. In this work, we address this concern for tabular data.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-05 Sebastian Bordt , Harsha Nori , Vanessa Rodrigues , Besmira Nushi , Rich Caruana

Language modeling studies the probability distributions over strings of texts. It is one of the most fundamental tasks in natural language processing (NLP). It has been widely used in text generation, speech recognition, machine…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-18 Chengwei Wei , Yun-Cheng Wang , Bin Wang , C. -C. Jay Kuo

We compare human and large language model (LLM) generalization in the number game, a concept inference task. Using a Bayesian model as an analytical framework, we examined the inductive biases and inference strategies of humans and LLMs.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-24 Arghavan Bazigaran , Hansem Sohn

Public datasets are often used to evaluate the efficacy and generalizability of state-of-the-art methods for many tasks in natural language processing (NLP). However, the presence of overlap between the train and test datasets can lead to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-02-04 Aparna Elangovan , Jiayuan He , Karin Verspoor

Instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs) have shown strong performance on a variety of tasks; however, generalizing from synthetic to human-authored instructions in grounded environments remains a challenge for them. In this work, we…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-19 Chalamalasetti Kranti , Sherzod Hakimov , David Schlangen