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Pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) encapsulate large amounts of knowledge and take enormous amounts of compute to train. We make use of this resource, together with the observation that LLMs are able to transfer knowledge and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-14 Malcolm L. Wolff , Shenghao Yang , Kari Torkkola , Michael W. Mahoney

Language model (LM) pre-training is useful in many language processing tasks. But can pre-trained LMs be further leveraged for more general machine learning problems? We propose an approach for using LMs to scaffold learning and…

To evaluate knowledge in large language models (LLMs), current methods query the model and then evaluate its generated responses. In this work, we ask whether evaluation can be done before the model has generated any text. Concretely, is it…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-30 Daniela Gottesman , Mor Geva

While large language models (LLMs) are extensively used, there are raising concerns regarding privacy, security, and copyright due to their opaque training data, which brings the problem of detecting pre-training data on the table. Current…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-01 Anqi Zhang , Chaofeng Wu

Large Language Models (LLMs) often lack meaningful confidence estimates for their outputs. While base LLMs are known to exhibit next-token calibration, it remains unclear whether they can assess confidence in the actual meaning of their…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-10 Preetum Nakkiran , Arwen Bradley , Adam Goliński , Eugene Ndiaye , Michael Kirchhof , Sinead Williamson

Large language models have demonstrated exceptional performance, yet struggle with complex tasks such as numerical reasoning, plan generation. Integrating external tools, such as calculators and databases, into large language models (LLMs)…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-18 Chenghao Li , Liu Liu , Baosheng Yu , Jiayan Qiu , Yibing Zhan

Large Language Models (LLMs) are rapidly reshaping machine translation (MT), particularly by introducing instruction-following, in-context learning, and preference-based alignment into what has traditionally been a supervised…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-29 Baban Gain , Dibyanayan Bandyopadhyay , Asif Ekbal , Trilok Nath Singh

The prohibitive training costs of Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as a significant bottleneck in the development of next-generation LLMs. In this paper, we show that it is possible to significantly reduce the training costs of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-16 Chenze Shao , Fandong Meng , Jie Zhou

Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionised the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and have achieved state-of-the-art performance in practically every task in this field. However, the prevalent approach used in text generation,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-12 Nicolo Micheletti , Samuel Belkadi , Lifeng Han , Goran Nenadic

Large language models (LLMs) with billions of parameters excel at predicting the next token in a sequence. Recent work computes non-vacuous compression-based generalization bounds for LLMs, but these bounds are vacuous for large models at…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-07-26 Sanae Lotfi , Yilun Kuang , Brandon Amos , Micah Goldblum , Marc Finzi , Andrew Gordon Wilson

The ability of machine learning models to store input information in hidden layer vector embeddings, analogous to the concept of `memory', is widely employed but not well characterized. We find that language model embeddings typically…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Benjamin L. Badger

Researchers face a critical choice: how to use -- or not use -- large language models in their work. Using them well requires understanding the mechanisms that shape what LLMs can and cannot do. This chapter makes LLMs comprehensible…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-23 Daniele Barolo

Predictive analysis is a cornerstone of modern decision-making, with applications in various domains. Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful tools in enabling nuanced, knowledge-intensive conversations, thus aiding in complex…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-26 Qin Chen , Yuanyi Ren , Xiaojun Ma , Yuyang Shi

Language models (LMs) are pre-trained on raw text datasets to generate text sequences token-by-token. While this approach facilitates the learning of world knowledge and reasoning, it does not explicitly optimize for linguistic competence.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-17 Atsuki Yamaguchi , Maggie Mi , Nikolaos Aletras

Understanding what defines a good representation in large language models (LLMs) is fundamental to both theoretical understanding and practical applications. In this paper, we investigate the quality of intermediate representations in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-13 Oscar Skean , Md Rifat Arefin , Yann LeCun , Ravid Shwartz-Ziv

We propose a method to teach multiple large language models (LLM) to collaborate by interleaving their generations at the token level. We model the decision of which LLM generates the next token as a latent variable. By optimizing the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-28 Shannon Zejiang Shen , Hunter Lang , Bailin Wang , Yoon Kim , David Sontag

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved notable progress. Despite their success, next-token prediction (NTP), the dominant method for LLM training and inference, is constrained in both contextual coverage and inference efficiency due to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Xiaohao Liu , Xiaobo Xia , Weixiang Zhao , Manyi Zhang , Xianzhi Yu , Xiu Su , Shuo Yang , See-Kiong Ng , Tat-Seng Chua

Topic modeling is traditionally applied to word counts without accounting for the context in which words appear. Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) offer contextualized word embeddings, which capture deeper meaning and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-12-30 Morgane Austern , Yuanchuan Guo , Zheng Tracy Ke , Tianle Liu

Large language model (LLM) tokenizers act as structured compressors: by mapping text to discrete token sequences, they determine token count (and thus compute and context usage) and the statistical structure seen by downstream models.…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2026-01-15 Mete Erdogan , Abhiram Gorle , Shubham Chandak , Mert Pilanci , Tsachy Weissman

Recent empirical evidence shows that LLM representations encode human-interpretable concepts. Nevertheless, the mechanisms by which these representations emerge remain largely unexplored. To shed further light on this, we introduce a novel…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Yuhang Liu , Dong Gong , Yichao Cai , Erdun Gao , Zhen Zhang , Biwei Huang , Mingming Gong , Anton van den Hengel , Javen Qinfeng Shi