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Large language models may encounter factual knowledge during pre-training yet fail to reliably use that knowledge after fine-tuning. Despite growing empirical evidence that MLP layers store factual associations and fine-tuning affects…

How can pretrained language models (PLMs) learn factual knowledge from the training set? We investigate the two most important mechanisms: reasoning and memorization. Prior work has attempted to quantify the number of facts PLMs learn, but…

Despite the recent observation that large language models (LLMs) can store substantial factual knowledge, there is a limited understanding of the mechanisms of how they acquire factual knowledge through pretraining. This work addresses this…

Many capable large language models (LLMs) are developed via self-supervised pre-training followed by a reinforcement-learning fine-tuning phase, often based on human or AI feedback. During this stage, models may be guided by their inductive…

Pretraining on large, semantically rich datasets is key for developing language models. Surprisingly, recent studies have shown that even synthetic data, generated procedurally through simple semantic-free algorithms, can yield some of the…

Large language models (LLMs) can store a vast amount of world knowledge, often extractable via question-answering (e.g., "What is Abraham Lincoln's birthday?"). However, do they answer such questions based on exposure to similar questions…

Pre-trained language models (LMs) are used for knowledge intensive tasks like question answering, but their knowledge gets continuously outdated as the world changes. Prior work has studied targeted updates to LMs, injecting individual…

Language models are typically evaluated on their success at predicting the distribution of specific words in specific contexts. Yet linguistic knowledge also encodes relationships between contexts, allowing inferences between word…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are capable of recalling multilingual factual knowledge present in their pretraining data. However, most studies evaluate only the final model, leaving the development of factual recall and crosslingual…

In this paper, we study whether transformer-based language models can extract predicate argument structure from simple sentences. We firstly show that language models sometimes confuse which predicates apply to which objects. To mitigate…

Large language models store biomedical facts with uneven strength after pretraining: some facts are present in the weights but are not reliably accessible under deterministic decoding (latent knowledge), while others are scarcely…

We investigate the extent to which modern, neural language models are susceptible to structural priming, the phenomenon whereby the structure of a sentence makes the same structure more probable in a follow-up sentence. We explore how…

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…

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…

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…

Language models retain a significant amount of world knowledge from their pre-training stage. This allows knowledgeable models to be applied to knowledge-intensive tasks prevalent in information retrieval, such as ranking or question…

To what extent can a neural network systematically reason over symbolic facts? Evidence suggests that large pre-trained language models (LMs) acquire some reasoning capacity, but this ability is difficult to control. Recently, it has been…

Large language models (LLMs) are typically trained on shuffled corpora, yielding models whose knowledge is frozen at train time and whose temporal grounding remains poorly understood. In this work, we study the impact of pre-training…

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…

Language models (LMs) pretrained on large corpora of text from the web have been observed to contain large amounts of various types of knowledge about the world. This observation has led to a new and exciting paradigm in knowledge graph…