Related papers: D-Models and E-Models: Diversity-Stability Trade-o…

Despite widespread success in language understanding and generation, large language models (LLMs) exhibit unclear and often inconsistent behavior when faced with tasks that require probabilistic reasoning. In this work, we present the first…

Prospect Theory (PT) models human decision-making behaviour under uncertainty, among which linguistic uncertainty is commonly adopted in real-world scenarios. Although recent studies have developed some frameworks to test PT parameters for…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are a powerful tool for statistical text analysis, with derived sequences of next-token probability distributions offering a wealth of information. Extracting this signal typically relies on metrics such as…

The emergence of discourse-like tokens such as "wait" and "therefore" in large language models (LLMs) has offered a unique window into their reasoning processes. However, systematic analyses of how such signals vary across training…

In this paper, we investigate the phenomena of "selection biases" in Large Language Models (LLMs), focusing on problems where models are tasked with choosing the optimal option from an ordered sequence. We delve into biases related to…

Probabilistic next-token prediction trained using cross-entropy loss is the basis of most large language models. Given a sequence of previous values, next-token prediction assigns a probability to each possible next value in the vocabulary.…

Autoregressive neural language models (LMs) generate a probability distribution over tokens at each time step given a prompt. In this work, we attempt to systematically understand the probability distributions that LMs can produce, showing…

Language modeling has shifted in recent years from a distribution over strings to prediction models with textual inputs and outputs for general-purpose tasks. This position paper highlights the often overlooked implications of this shift…

Large Language Models (LLMs), such as GPT, are considered to learn the latent distributions within large-scale web-crawl datasets and accomplish natural language processing (NLP) tasks by predicting the next token. However, this mechanism…

We analyze how large language models (LLMs) represent out-of-context words, investigating their reliance on the given context to capture their semantics. Our likelihood-guided text perturbations reveal a correlation between token likelihood…

The relationship between the quality of a string, as judged by a human reader, and its probability, $p(\boldsymbol{y})$ under a language model undergirds the development of better language models. For example, many popular algorithms for…

Standard evaluations of Large language models (LLMs) focus on task performance, offering limited insight into whether correct behavior reflects appropriate underlying mechanisms and risking confirmation bias. We introduce a simple,…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms for safety alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs), such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), encounter the challenge of distribution shift. Current approaches typically address this issue…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved state-of-the-art performance on a broad range of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, including document processing and code generation. Autoregressive Language Models (ARMs), which generate…

Recent work has shown that larger language models have better predictive power for eye movement and reading time data. While even the best models under-allocate probability mass to human responses, larger models assign higher-quality…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in clinical applications through prompt engineering, allowing flexible clinical predictions. However, they struggle to produce reliable prediction probabilities, which are crucial for…

Language model (LM) decoding is based on the next-token prediction (NTP) probability distribution. For neural LMs (e.g., Transformer-based), NTP distribution is essentially a softmax-regularized dot product between an encoded input context…

The widespread adoption of large language models (LLMs) makes it important to recognize their strengths and limitations. We argue that in order to develop a holistic understanding of these systems we need to consider the problem that they…

Large language models (LLMs) require careful alignment to balance competing objectives - factuality, safety, conciseness, proactivity, and diversity. Existing studies focus on individual techniques or specific dimensions, lacking a holistic…

Reliable uncertainty quantification (UQ) is essential for ensuring trustworthy downstream use of large language models, especially when they are deployed in decision-support and other knowledge-intensive applications. Model certainty can be…