Related papers: Convergence and Divergence of Language Models unde…

Large language models (LLMs) achieve strong average performance yet remain unreliable at the instance level, with frequent hallucinations, brittle failures, and poorly calibrated confidence. We study reliability through the lens of…

Log-likelihood vectors define a common space for comparing language models as probability distributions, enabling unified comparisons across heterogeneous settings. We extend this framework to training checkpoints and intermediate layers,…

Large language models (LLMs) perform very well in several natural language processing tasks but raise explainability challenges. In this paper, we examine the effect of random elements in the training of LLMs on the explainability of their…

What can large language models learn? By definition, language models (LM) are distributions over strings. Therefore, an intuitive way of addressing the above question is to formalize it as a matter of learnability of classes of…

As large language models attract increasing attention and find widespread application, concurrent challenges of reliability also arise at the same time. Confidence calibration, an effective analysis method for gauging the reliability of…

Large language models (LLMs) are demonstrably capable of cross-lingual transfer, but can produce inconsistent output when prompted with the same queries written in different languages. To understand how language models are able to…

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved widespread success on a variety of in-context few-shot tasks, but this success is typically evaluated via correctness rather than consistency. We argue that self-consistency is an important…

We propose an alternate approach to quantifying how well language models learn natural language: we ask how well they match the statistical tendencies of natural language. To answer this question, we analyze whether text generated from…

The impact of random seeds in fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) has been largely overlooked despite its potential influence on model performance.In this study, we systematically evaluate the effects of random seeds on LLMs using the…

Speculative decoding accelerates autoregressive large language model (LLM) inference by using a lightweight draft model to propose candidate tokens that are then verified in parallel by the target model. The speedup is significantly…

Scaling up language models has led to unprecedented performance gains, but little is understood about how the training dynamics change as models get larger. How do language models of different sizes learn during pre-training? Why do larger…

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in natural language generation, yet they continue to display puzzling behaviors -- such as repetition and incoherence -- even when exhibiting low perplexity. This highlights a…

Pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown success in a diverse set of language inference and understanding tasks. The pre-training stage of LLMs looks at a large corpus of raw textual data. The BabyLM shared task compares LLM…

As the scale of training corpora for large language models (LLMs) grows, model developers become increasingly reluctant to disclose details on their data. This lack of transparency poses challenges to scientific evaluation and ethical…

Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) offer a promising parallel generation paradigm but suffer from slow inference due to numerous refinement steps and the inability to use standard KV caching. We introduce CDLM (Consistency Diffusion Language…

Training stability of large language models(LLMs) is an important research topic. Reproducing training instabilities can be costly, so we use a small language model with 830M parameters and experiment with higher learning rates to force…

Recent studies have shown that as Transformer-based language models become larger and are trained on very large amounts of data, the fit of their surprisal estimates to naturalistic human reading times degrades. The current work presents a…

Large language models (LLMs) have been widely used for problem-solving tasks. Most recent work improves their performance through supervised fine-tuning (SFT) with labeled data or reinforcement learning (RL) from task feedback. In this…

The standard paradigm of neural language generation adopts maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) as the optimizing method. From a distributional view, MLE in fact minimizes the Kullback-Leibler divergence (KLD) between the distribution of the…

Language models trained on natural text learn to represent numbers using periodic features with dominant periods at $T=2, 5, 10$. In this paper, we identify a two-tiered hierarchy of these features: while Transformers, Linear RNNs, LSTMs,…