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Recent work has shown that large pretrained Language Models (LMs) can not only perform remarkably well on a range of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks but also start improving on reasoning tasks such as arithmetic induction, symbolic…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-08-11 Jing Qian , Hong Wang , Zekun Li , Shiyang Li , Xifeng Yan

Emergent symbolic representations are critical for enabling developmental learning agents to plan and generalize across tasks. In this work, we investigate whether large language models (LLMs) can translate human natural language…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-29 Ziqi Ma , Sao Mai Nguyen , Philippe Xu

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit various emergent abilities. Among these abilities, some might reveal the internal working mechanisms of models. In this paper, we uncover a novel emergent capability in models: the intrinsic ability to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-17 Junhao Chen , Shengding Hu , Zhiyuan Liu , Maosong Sun

Associative learning--forming links between co-occurring items--is fundamental to human cognition, reshaping internal representations in complex ways. Testing hypotheses on how representational changes occur in biological systems is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Camila Kolling , Vy Ai Vo , Mariya Toneva

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities, yet their scalability raises a critical question: Have we reached the scaling ceiling? This paper addresses this pivotal question by developing a unified theoretical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-24 Charles Luo

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated proficiency across various natural language processing (NLP) tasks but often require additional training, such as continual pre-training and supervised fine-tuning. However, the costs…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-07 Da Ma , Lu Chen , Pengyu Wang , Hongshen Xu , Hanqi Li , Liangtai Sun , Su Zhu , Shuai Fan , Kai Yu

Large Language Models (LLMs) show strong generalization across diverse tasks, yet the internal decision-making processes behind their predictions remain opaque. In this work, we study the geometry of hidden representations in LLMs through…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-26 Abhinav Joshi , Divyanshu Bhatt , Ashutosh Modi

Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) followed by Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a standard post-training recipe for improving Large Language Models (LLM) reasoning, but why it works remains unclear. We revisit the common claim that ``SFT memorizes,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Hangzhan Jin , Sitao Luan , Tianwei Ni , Sicheng Lyu , Guillaume Rabusseau , Reihaneh Rabbany , Doina Precup , Mohammad Hamdaqa

Scaling autoregressive large language models (LLMs) has driven unprecedented progress but comes with vast computational costs. In this work, we tackle these costs by leveraging unstructured sparsity within an LLM's feedforward layers, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Edoardo Cetin , Stefano Peluchetti , Emilio Castillo , Akira Naruse , Mana Murakami , Llion Jones

In-context learning, the ability to adapt based on a few examples in the input prompt, is a ubiquitous feature of large language models (LLMs). However, as LLMs' in-context learning abilities continue to improve, understanding this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-03 Can Demircan , Tankred Saanum , Akshay K. Jagadish , Marcel Binz , Eric Schulz

Sparsity has long been a central theme in LLM efficiency, but its role in context processing remains unresolved. As LLM workloads shift toward longer contexts and agentic interactions, the compute and memory bottlenecks of attention become…

Large Language Models (LLMs) often generate inconsistent responses when prompted with semantically equivalent paraphrased inputs. Recently, activation steering, a technique that modulates LLMs' behaviours by adjusting their latent…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-23 Jingyuan Yang , Rongjun Li , Weixuan Wang , Ziyu Zhou , Zhiyong Feng , Wei Peng

Language models (LMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in NLP, yet adapting them efficiently and robustly to specific tasks remains challenging. As their scale and complexity grow, fine-tuning LMs on labelled data often…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-27 Zhengyan Shi

Despite their impressive capabilities, Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit unwanted uncertainty, a phenomenon where a model changes a previously correct answer into an incorrect one when re-prompted. This behavior undermines trust and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Tiasa Singha Roy , Ayush Rajesh Jhaveri , Ilias Triantafyllopoulos

We revisit the likelihood ratio between a pretrained large language model (LLM) and its finetuned variant as a criterion for out-of-distribution (OOD) detection. The intuition behind such a criterion is that, the pretrained LLM has the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-07 Andi Zhang , Tim Z. Xiao , Weiyang Liu , Robert Bamler , Damon Wischik

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated potential in reasoning tasks, but their performance on linguistics puzzles remains consistently poor. These puzzles, often derived from Linguistics Olympiad (LO) contests, provide a minimal…

This paper explores the spatial reasoning capability of large language models (LLMs) over textual input through a suite of five tasks aimed at probing their spatial understanding and computational abilities. The models were tested on both…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-24 Maggie Bai , Ava Kim Cohen , Eleanor Koss , Charlie Lichtenbaum

Distribution shifts introduce uncertainty that undermines the robustness and generalization capabilities of machine learning models. While conventional wisdom suggests that learning causal-invariant representations enhances robustness to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-28 Abbavaram Gowtham Reddy , Celia Rubio-Madrigal , Rebekka Burkholz , Krikamol Muandet

Transformer-based pretrained language models (PLMs) have achieved great success in modern NLP. An important advantage of PLMs is good out-of-distribution (OOD) robustness. Recently, diffusion models have attracted a lot of work to apply…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-07-27 Huazheng Wang , Daixuan Cheng , Haifeng Sun , Jingyu Wang , Qi Qi , Jianxin Liao , Jing Wang , Cong Liu

Despite the increasing prevalence of large language models (LLMs), we still have a limited understanding of how their representational spaces are structured. This limits our ability to interpret how and what they learn or relate them to…