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When language models are trained on textual data, they acquire both knowledge about the structure of language as well as knowledge of facts about the world. At inference time, their knowledge of facts can be leveraged to solve interesting…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-03 John Kirchenbauer , Janny Mongkolsupawan , Yuxin Wen , Tom Goldstein , Daphne Ippolito

Knowledge-dependent tasks typically use two sources of knowledge: parametric, learned at training time, and contextual, given as a passage at inference time. To understand how models use these sources together, we formalize the problem of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-01-13 Shayne Longpre , Kartik Perisetla , Anthony Chen , Nikhil Ramesh , Chris DuBois , Sameer Singh

Prior works have shown that fine-tuning on new knowledge can induce factual hallucinations in large language models (LLMs), leading to incorrect outputs when evaluated on previously known information. However, the specific manifestations of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-20 Renfei Dang , Peng Hu , Zhejian Lai , Changjiang Gao , Min Zhang , Shujian Huang

Hallucination is often regarded as a major impediment for using large language models (LLMs), especially for knowledge-intensive tasks. Even when the training corpus consists solely of true statements, language models still generate…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-12 Yuji Zhang , Sha Li , Jiateng Liu , Pengfei Yu , Yi R. Fung , Jing Li , Manling Li , Heng Ji

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Hippolyte Pilchen , Romain Fabre , Franck Signe Talla , Patrick Perez , Edouard Grave

Training Transformers on algorithmic tasks frequently demonstrates an intriguing abrupt learning phenomenon: an extended performance plateau followed by a sudden, sharp improvement. This work investigates the underlying mechanisms for such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-24 Pulkit Gopalani , Wei Hu

Large language models are known to hallucinate when faced with unfamiliar queries, but the underlying mechanism that govern how models hallucinate are not yet fully understood. In this work, we find that unfamiliar examples in the models'…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-30 Katie Kang , Eric Wallace , Claire Tomlin , Aviral Kumar , Sergey Levine

Despite exceptional capabilities in knowledge-intensive tasks, Large Language Models (LLMs) face a critical gap in understanding how they internalize new knowledge, particularly how to structurally embed acquired knowledge in their neural…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Yixin Ou , Yunzhi Yao , Ningyu Zhang , Hui Jin , Jiacheng Sun , Shumin Deng , Zhenguo Li , Huajun Chen

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable performance on a variety of NLP tasks, and are being rapidly adopted in a wide range of use cases. It is therefore of vital importance to holistically evaluate the factuality of their…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-26 Jiaqing Yuan , Lin Pan , Chung-Wei Hang , Jiang Guo , Jiarong Jiang , Bonan Min , Patrick Ng , Zhiguo Wang

Language models are prone to hallucination - generating text that is factually incorrect. Finetuning models on high-quality factual information can potentially reduce hallucination, but concerns remain; obtaining factual gold data can be…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-14 Benjamin Newman , Abhilasha Ravichander , Jaehun Jung , Rui Xin , Hamish Ivison , Yegor Kuznetsov , Pang Wei Koh , Yejin Choi

Pretrained language models can encode a large amount of knowledge and utilize it for various reasoning tasks, yet they can still struggle to learn novel factual knowledge effectively from finetuning on limited textual demonstrations. In…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Xiao Zhang , Miao Li , Ji Wu

Large Language Models (LLMs) store and retrieve vast amounts of factual knowledge acquired during pre-training. Prior research has localized and identified mechanisms behind knowledge recall; however, it has only focused on English…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-12 Constanza Fierro , Negar Foroutan , Desmond Elliott , Anders Søgaard

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Ruichen Xu , Kexin Chen

Large language models are known to suffer from the hallucination problem in that they are prone to output statements that are false or inconsistent, indicating a lack of knowledge. A proposed solution to this is to provide the model with…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-10-01 Tobias Norlund , Lovisa Hagström , Richard Johansson

The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has significantly advanced the development of natural language processing (NLP), especially in text generation tasks like question answering. However, model hallucinations remain a major…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-01 Zhongxin Liu , Zhiwei Wang , Jun Niu , Ying Li , Hongyu Sun , Meng Xu , He Wang , Gaofei Wu , Yuqing Zhang

Large language models (LLMs) often exhibit abrupt emergent behavior, whereby new abilities arise at certain points during their training. This phenomenon, commonly referred to as a ''phase transition'', remains poorly understood. In this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-01 Yuko Nakagi , Keigo Tada , Sota Yoshino , Shinji Nishimoto , Yu Takagi

Models of language trained on very large corpora have been demonstrated useful for NLP. As fixed artifacts, they have become the object of intense study, with many researchers "probing" the extent to which linguistic abstractions, factual…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-09-21 Leo Z. Liu , Yizhong Wang , Jungo Kasai , Hannaneh Hajishirzi , Noah A. Smith

Recent language models generate false but plausible-sounding text with surprising frequency. Such "hallucinations" are an obstacle to the usability of language-based AI systems and can harm people who rely upon their outputs. This work…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-21 Adam Tauman Kalai , Santosh S. Vempala

During language acquisition, children follow a typical sequence of learning stages, whereby they first learn to categorize phonemes before they develop their lexicon and eventually master increasingly complex syntactic structures. However,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-06-07 Linnea Evanson , Yair Lakretz , Jean-Rémi King

Neural conditional language generation models achieve the state-of-the-art in Neural Machine Translation (NMT) but are highly dependent on the quality of parallel training dataset. When trained on low-quality datasets, these models are…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-06-16 Joël Tang , Marina Fomicheva , Lucia Specia