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Catastrophic forgetting is a significant challenge in continual learning, in which a model loses prior knowledge when it is fine-tuned on new tasks. This problem is particularly critical for large language models (LLMs) undergoing continual…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Ege Süalp , Mina Rezaei

Length generalization, defined as the ability to extrapolate from shorter training sequences to longer test ones, is a significant challenge for language models. This issue persists even with large-scale Transformers handling relatively…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-15 Yongchao Zhou , Uri Alon , Xinyun Chen , Xuezhi Wang , Rishabh Agarwal , Denny Zhou

Language models typically need to be trained or finetuned in order to acquire new knowledge, which involves updating their weights. We instead envision language models that can simply read and memorize new data at inference time, thus…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-18 Yuhuai Wu , Markus N. Rabe , DeLesley Hutchins , Christian Szegedy

Large Language Models (LLMs) are capable of displaying a wide range of abilities that are not directly connected with the task for which they are trained: predicting the next words of human-written texts. In this article, I review recent…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-12-19 Stefano Nolfi

Scientific research faces high costs and inefficiencies with traditional methods, but the rise of deep learning and large language models (LLMs) offers innovative solutions. This survey reviews transformer-based LLM applications across…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-16 Kaiyuan Tian , Linbo Qiao , Baihui Liu , Gongqingjian Jiang , Shanshan Li , Dongsheng Li

Human beings primarily understand the world through concepts (e.g., dog), abstract mental representations that structure perception, reasoning, and learning. However, how large language models (LLMs) acquire, retain, and forget such…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-08 Barry Menglong Yao , Sha Li , Yunzhi Yao , Minqian Liu , Zaishuo Xia , Qifan Wang , Lifu Huang

Recent research demonstrated that training large language models involves memorization of a significant fraction of training data. Such memorization can lead to privacy violations when training on sensitive user data and thus motivates the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-29 Vitaly Feldman , Guy Kornowski , Xin Lyu

Transformer-based large language models have displayed impressive in-context learning capabilities, where a pre-trained model can handle new tasks without fine-tuning by simply augmenting the query with some input-output examples from that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-18 Hongkang Li , Meng Wang , Songtao Lu , Xiaodong Cui , Pin-Yu Chen

Training data leakage from Large Language Models (LLMs) raises serious concerns related to privacy, security, and copyright compliance. A central challenge in assessing this risk is distinguishing genuine memorization of training data from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Trishita Tiwari , Ari Trachtenberg , G. Edward Suh

Large Language Models (LLMs) are typically trained on data mixtures: most data come from web scrapes, while a small portion is curated from high-quality sources with dense domain-specific knowledge. In this paper, we show that when training…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Xinran Gu , Kaifeng Lyu , Jiazheng Li , Jingzhao Zhang

Recent research has explored the memorization capacity of multi-head attention, but these findings are constrained by unrealistic limitations on the context size. We present a novel proof for language-based Transformers that extends the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-03-11 Léo Dana , Muni Sreenivas Pydi , Yann Chevaleyre

When do diffusion models reproduce their training data, and when are they able to generate samples beyond it? A practically relevant theoretical understanding of this interplay between memorization and generalization may significantly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-26 Sam Buchanan , Druv Pai , Yi Ma , Valentin De Bortoli

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

This paper empirically investigates the relationship between subword vocabulary size and the performance of large language models (LLMs) to provide insights on how to define the vocabulary size. Experimental results show that larger…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Sho Takase , Ryokan Ri , Shun Kiyono , Takuya Kato

Summarization is a core task in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) and the introduction of large context windows reaching millions of tokens make it possible to process entire books in a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-12 Tairan Fu , Javier Conde , Pedro Reviriego , Javier Coronado-Blázquez , Nina Melero , Elena Merino-Gómez

Large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4 and LLaMA-3 utilize the powerful in-context learning (ICL) capability of Transformer architecture to learn on the fly from limited examples. While ICL underpins many LLM applications, its full…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-21 Xingxuan Zhang , Haoran Wang , Jiansheng Li , Yuan Xue , Shikai Guan , Renzhe Xu , Hao Zou , Han Yu , Peng Cui

Models for learning probability distributions such as generative models and density estimators behave quite differently from models for learning functions. One example is found in the memorization phenomenon, namely the ultimate convergence…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-03-03 Hongkang Yang , Weinan E

This position paper argues that understanding generalization in diffusion models requires fundamentally new theoretical frameworks that go beyond both classical statistical learning theory and the benign overfitting paradigm developed for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Pierre Marion , Yu-Han Wu

Large language models must balance their weight-encoded knowledge with in-context information from prompts to generate accurate responses. This paper investigates this interplay by analyzing how models of varying capacities within the same…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-17 Mohammad Reza Samsami , Mats Leon Richter , Juan Rodriguez , Megh Thakkar , Sarath Chandar , Maxime Gasse

Large language models (LLMs) can struggle to memorize factual knowledge in their parameters, often leading to hallucinations and poor performance on knowledge-intensive tasks. In this paper, we formalize fact memorization from an…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-10 Jiayuan Ye , Vitaly Feldman , Kunal Talwar