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Data selection during supervised fine-tuning (SFT) can critically change the behavior of large language models (LLMs). Although existing work has studied the effect of selecting data based on heuristics such as perplexity, difficulty, or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Siyuan Liu , Tinghong Chen , Xinghan Li , Yifei Wang , Jingzhao Zhang

Benchmarks establish a standardized evaluation framework to systematically assess the performance of large language models (LLMs), facilitating objective comparisons and driving advancements in the field. However, existing benchmarks fail…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-16 Ziqian Zhang , Xingjian Hu , Yue Huang , Kai Zhang , Ruoxi Chen , Yixin Liu , Qingsong Wen , Kaidi Xu , Xiangliang Zhang , Neil Zhenqiang Gong , Lichao Sun

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across diverse domains. However, effectively leveraging their vast knowledge for training smaller downstream models remains an open challenge, especially in domains like…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-28 Davor Vukadin , Marin Šilić , Goran Delač

We assess how the code reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs) generalize to different kinds of programs. We present techniques for obtaining in- and out-of-distribution programs with different characteristics: code sampled from…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-04-09 Rem Yang , Julian Dai , Nikos Vasilakis , Martin Rinard

Large language models exhibit a puzzling inconsistency: they solve complex problems yet frequently fail on seemingly simpler ones. We investigate whether LLMs internally encode problem difficulty in a way that aligns with human judgment,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-22 William Lugoloobi , Chris Russell

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Fangru Lin , Valentin Hofmann , Xingchen Wan , Weixing Wang , Zifeng Ding , Anthony G. Cohn , Janet B. Pierrehumbert

Training large language models (LLMs) for external tool usage is a rapidly expanding field, with recent research focusing on generating synthetic data to address the shortage of available data. However, the absence of systematic data…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-27 Shadi Iskander , Nachshon Cohen , Zohar Karnin , Ori Shapira , Sofia Tolmach

How can "weak teacher models" such as average human annotators or existing AI systems, effectively supervise LLMs to improve performance on hard reasoning tasks, especially those that challenge and requires expertise or daily practice from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-26 Xuan He , Da Yin , Nanyun Peng

Large language models (LLMs) are incredible and versatile tools for text-based tasks that have enabled countless, previously unimaginable, applications. Retrieval models, in contrast, have not yet seen such capable general-purpose models…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-09-10 Julian Killingback , Hamed Zamani

Predicting problem-difficulty in large language models (LLMs) refers to estimating how difficult a task is according to the model itself, typically by training linear probes on its internal representations. In this work, we study the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Stefano Civelli , Pietro Bernardelle , Nicolò Brunello , Gianluca Demartini

Education that suits the individual learning level is necessary to improve students' understanding. The first step in achieving this purpose by using large language models (LLMs) is to adjust the textual difficulty of the response to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-23 Seiji Gobara , Hidetaka Kamigaito , Taro Watanabe

Pre-trained language models (LMs) perform well in In-Topic setups, where training and testing data come from the same topics. However, they face challenges in Cross-Topic scenarios where testing data is derived from distinct topics -- such…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-05 Andreas Waldis , Yufang Hou , Iryna Gurevych

Post-training of Large Language Models (LLMs) is crucial for unlocking their task generalization potential and domain-specific capabilities. However, the current LLM post-training paradigm faces significant data challenges, including the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-31 Junyu Luo , Bohan Wu , Xiao Luo , Zhiping Xiao , Yiqiao Jin , Rong-Cheng Tu , Nan Yin , Yifan Wang , Jingyang Yuan , Wei Ju , Ming Zhang

Standardized math assessments require expensive human pilot studies to establish the difficulty of test items. We investigate the predictive value of open-source large language models (LLMs) for evaluating the difficulty of multiple-choice…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-22 Christabel Acquaye , Yi Ting Huang , Marine Carpuat , Rachel Rudinger

While large language models (LLMs) have shown exceptional capabilities in understanding complex queries and performing sophisticated tasks, their generalization abilities are often deeply entangled with memorization, necessitating more…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-04 Zhenting Qi , Hongyin Luo , Xuliang Huang , Zhuokai Zhao , Yibo Jiang , Xiangjun Fan , Himabindu Lakkaraju , James Glass

Language models (LMs), despite their advances, often depend on spurious correlations, undermining their accuracy and generalizability. This study addresses the overlooked impact of subtler, more complex shortcuts that compromise model…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-13 Yuqing Zhou , Ruixiang Tang , Ziyu Yao , Ziwei Zhu

Curriculum learning (CL), motivated by the intuition that learning in increasing order of difficulty should ease generalization, is commonly adopted both in pre-training and post-training of large language models (LLMs). The intuition of CL…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Maximilian Mordig , Andreas Opedal , Weiyang Liu , Bernhard Schölkopf

In this work, we present a systematic and comprehensive empirical evaluation of state-of-the-art reranking methods, encompassing large language model (LLM)-based, lightweight contextual, and zero-shot approaches, with respect to their…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-26 Abdelrahman Abdallah , Bhawna Piryani , Jamshid Mozafari , Mohammed Ali , Adam Jatowt

Large Language Models (LLMs) display strikingly different generalization behaviors: supervised fine-tuning (SFT) often narrows capability, whereas reinforcement-learning (RL) tuning tends to preserve it. The reasons behind this divergence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-01 Haoyue Bai , Yiyou Sun , Wenjie Hu , Shi Qiu , Maggie Ziyu Huan , Peiyang Song , Robert Nowak , Dawn Song

While large language models (LLMs) showcase unprecedented capabilities, they also exhibit certain inherent limitations when facing seemingly trivial tasks. A prime example is the recently debated "reversal curse", which surfaces when…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-25 Zhengkai Lin , Zhihang Fu , Kai Liu , Liang Xie , Binbin Lin , Wenxiao Wang , Deng Cai , Yue Wu , Jieping Ye