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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

Intelligent systems must maintain and manipulate task-relevant information online to adapt to dynamic environments and changing goals. This capacity, known as working memory, is fundamental to human reasoning and intelligence. Despite…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Hua-Dong Xiong , Li Ji-An , Jiaqi Huang , Robert C. Wilson , Kwonjoon Lee , Xue-Xin Wei

Since hardware resources are limited, the objective of training deep learning models is typically to maximize accuracy subject to the time and memory constraints of training and inference. We study the impact of model size in this setting,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-06-24 Zhuohan Li , Eric Wallace , Sheng Shen , Kevin Lin , Kurt Keutzer , Dan Klein , Joseph E. Gonzalez

Large Language Models (LLMs) are advancing at a remarkable pace, with myriad applications under development. Unlike most earlier machine learning models, they are no longer built for one specific application but are designed to excel in a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Valentin Hartmann , Anshuman Suri , Vincent Bindschaedler , David Evans , Shruti Tople , Robert West

Transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized Natural Language Processing by demonstrating exceptional performance across diverse tasks. This study investigates the impact of the parameter initialization scale on the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-22 Junjie Yao , Zhongwang Zhang , Zhi-Qin John Xu

Recent work on Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) has revealed striking limits in their working memory capacity, similar to what has been found in human behavioral studies. Specifically, these models' performance drops…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-19 Dongyu Gong , Hantao Zhang

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

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable proficiency across various tasks. Given the potent applications of LLMs in numerous fields, there has been a surge in LLM development. In developing LLMs, a common…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-01-09 Chen-An Li , Hung-Yi Lee

Transformer language models have demonstrated impressive generalization capabilities in natural language domains, yet we lack a fine-grained understanding of how such generalization arises. In this paper, we investigate length…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Ziyang Cai , Nayoung Lee , Avi Schwarzschild , Samet Oymak , Dimitris Papailiopoulos

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

The training of modern large language models (LLMs) takes place in a regime where most training examples are seen only a few times by the model during the course of training. What does a model remember about such examples seen only a few…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-03-31 A. Emin Orhan

Large Language Models (LLMs) are known to memorize portions of their training data, sometimes even reproduce content verbatim when prompted appropriately. Despite substantial interest, existing LLM memorization research has offered limited…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Yizhan Huang , Zhe Yang , Meifang Chen , Huang Nianchen , Jianping Zhang , Michael R. Lyu

Large Transformer models have achieved impressive performance in many natural language tasks. In particular, Transformer based language models have been shown to have great capabilities in encoding factual knowledge in their vast amount of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-12-02 Chen Zhu , Ankit Singh Rawat , Manzil Zaheer , Srinadh Bhojanapalli , Daliang Li , Felix Yu , Sanjiv 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

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

This paper studies how the model architecture and data configurations influence the empirical memorization capacity of generative transformers. The models are trained using synthetic text datasets derived from the Systematized Nomenclature…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-18 Anton Changalidis , Aki Härmä

We propose a new method for estimating how much a model knows about a datapoint and use it to measure the capacity of modern language models. Prior studies of language model memorization have struggled to disentangle memorization from…

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

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate the capacity to reconstruct and trace learned content from their training data under specific elicitation conditions, yet this capability does not manifest in standard generation contexts. This…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Toshiyuki Shigemura

Models trained on a new task typically degrade on prior tasks, a phenomenon known as forgetting. Traditionally, mitigating forgetting has required replaying stored exemplars from prior tasks, which is often impractical. By contrast,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Martin Marek , Dongkyu Cho , Shikai Qiu , Rumi Chunara , Pavel Izmailov , Andrew Gordon Wilson