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Evaluating whether large language models (LLMs) capture the structure of natural language beyond local fluency remains an open challenge. Existing evaluation methods, largely based on task performance or short-context behavior, provide…
While textual frequency has been validated as relevant to human cognition in reading speed, its relatedness to Large Language Models (LLMs) is seldom studied. We propose a novel research direction in terms of textual data frequency, which…
How do large language models (LLMs) develop and evolve over the course of training? How do these patterns change as models scale? To answer these questions, we introduce \textit{Pythia}, a suite of 16 LLMs all trained on public data seen in…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently been shown to produce estimates of psycholinguistic norms, such as valence, arousal, or concreteness, for words and multiword expressions, that correlate with human judgments. These estimates are…
Languages are not created randomly but rather to communicate information. There is a strong association between languages and their underlying meanings, resulting in a sparse joint distribution that is heavily peaked according to their…
Emergence, the phenomenon of a rapid performance increase once the model scale reaches a threshold, has achieved widespread attention recently. The literature has observed that monosemantic neurons in neural networks gradually diminish as…
We use large language models (LLMs) to uncover long-ranged structure in English texts from a variety of sources. The conditional entropy or code length in many cases continues to decrease with context length at least to $N\sim 10^4$…
In modern LLMs, linguistic features function not as stylistic artifacts but as probes of probability mass, allocated under training alignment objectives. Language models trained with contemporary pipelines exhibit severe reshaping of…
Large language models (LLMs) work by manipulating the geometry of input embedding vectors over multiple layers. Here, we ask: how are the input vocabulary representations of language models structured, and how and when does this structure…
Existing scaling laws for Large Language Models (LLMs), predominantly monotonic power laws, fail to explain emerging non-monotonic phenomena such as catastrophic overtraining and quantization-induced degradation, where performance…
We formulate a stochastic process, FiLex, as a mathematical model of lexicon entropy in deep learning-based emergent language systems. Defining a model mathematically allows it to generate clear predictions which can be directly and…
This paper introduces a novel Bayesian learning model to explain the behavior of Large Language Models (LLMs), focusing on their core optimization metric of next token prediction. We develop a theoretical framework based on an ideal…
We investigate the performance of large language models on repetitive deterministic prediction tasks and study how the sequence accuracy rate scales with output length. Each such task involves repeating the same operation n times. Examples…
A major driver of AI products today is the fact that new skills emerge in language models when their parameter set and training corpora are scaled up. This phenomenon is poorly understood, and a mechanistic explanation via mathematical…
Language-model (LM) surprisal is widely used as a proxy for contextual predictability and has been reported to correlate with metaphor novelty judgments. However, surprisal is tightly intertwined with lexical frequency. We explore this…
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…
Predicting upcoming words is a core mechanism of language comprehension and may be quantified using Shannon entropy. There is currently no empirical consensus on how many human responses are required to obtain stable and unbiased entropy…
Large language models (LLM) such as OpenAI's ChatGPT and GPT-3 offer unique testbeds for exploring the translation challenges of turning literacy into numeracy. Previous publicly-available transformer models from eighteen months prior and…
Multilingual Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable cross-lingual abilities, yet often exhibit a systematic bias toward the representations from other languages, resulting in semantic interference when generating content in…
Neural collapse ($\mathcal{NC}$) is a phenomenon observed in classification tasks where top-layer representations collapse into their class means, which become equinorm, equiangular and aligned with the classifiers. These behaviours --…