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Reasoning is a core capability of large language models, yet how multi-step reasoning is learned and executed remains unclear. We study this question in a controlled cellular-automata (1dCA) framework that excludes memorisation by using…
Memorisation is a natural part of learning from real-world data: neural models pick up on atypical input-output combinations and store those training examples in their parameter space. That this happens is well-known, but how and where are…
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…
Large language models (LLMs) have been proven capable of memorizing their training data, which can be extracted through specifically designed prompts. As the scale of datasets continues to grow, privacy risks arising from memorization have…
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'…
Benchmark-based evaluation, e.g., multiple-choice questions (MCQs) and open-ended questions (OEQs), is widely used for evaluating Large Language Models (LLMs), yet their reliability is undermined by benchmark contamination. When pre-exposed…
Large language models (LLMs) cannot be trusted for economic forecasts during periods covered by their training data. Counterfactual forecasting ability is non-identified when the model has seen the realized values: any observed output is…
Large reasoning models (LRMs) produce a textual chain of thought (CoT) in the process of solving a problem, which serves as a potentially powerful tool to understand the problem by surfacing a human-readable, natural-language explanation.…
Despite their impressive performance on diverse tasks, large language models (LMs) still struggle with tasks requiring rich world knowledge, implying the limitations of relying solely on their parameters to encode a wealth of world…
Large language models (LLMs) are trained and tested extensively on symbolic representations such as code and graphs, yet real-world user tasks are often specified in natural language. To what extent can LLMs generalize across these…
We introduce the framework of "social learning" in the context of large language models (LLMs), whereby models share knowledge with each other in a privacy-aware manner using natural language. We present and evaluate two approaches for…
Validating Large Language Models with ReLM explores the application of formal languages to evaluate and control Large Language Models (LLMs) for memorization, bias, and zero-shot performance. Current approaches for evaluating these types…
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) struggle with continual learning, often suffering from catastrophic forgetting when adapting to sequential tasks. We introduce a routing-based architecture that integrates new capabilities while…
Generalization remains a central challenge in machine learning. In this work, we propose Learning from Teaching (LoT), a novel regularization technique for deep neural networks to enhance generalization. Inspired by the human ability to…
A distinction is often drawn between a model's ability to predict a label for an evaluation sample that is directly memorised from highly similar training samples versus an ability to predict the label via some method of generalisation. In…
Driven by vast and diverse textual data, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance across numerous natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Yet, a critical question persists: does their generalization arise from…
Large language models (LLMs) often require vast amounts of text to effectively acquire new knowledge. While continuing pre-training on large corpora or employing retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has proven successful, updating an LLM…
Adapting language models (LMs) to new tasks via post-training carries the risk of degrading existing capabilities -- a phenomenon classically known as catastrophic forgetting. In this paper, toward identifying guidelines for mitigating this…
Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL) are widely used post-training techniques for foundation models. However, their roles in enhancing model generalization capabilities remain unclear. This paper studies the…
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…