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Large language models are known to memorize parts of their training data, posing risk of copyright violations. To systematically examine this risk, we pretrain language models (1B/3B/8B) from scratch on 83B tokens, mixing web-scale data…

Large language models (LLMs) achieve state-of-the-art performance on multiple language tasks, yet their safety guardrails can be circumvented, leading to harmful generations. In light of this, recent research on safety mechanisms has…

Understanding the training dynamics of transformers is important to explain the impressive capabilities behind large language models. In this work, we study the dynamics of training a shallow transformer on a task of recognizing…

Attention-based transformers have become the standard architecture in many deep learning fields, primarily due to their ability to model long-range dependencies and handle variable-length input sequences. However, the attention mechanism…

Identifying words that impact a task's performance more than others is a challenge in natural language processing. Transformers models have recently addressed this issue by incorporating an attention mechanism that assigns greater attention…

Large language models (LLMs) have shown promising efficacy across various tasks, becoming powerful tools in numerous aspects of human life. However, Transformer-based LLMs suffer a performance degradation when modeling long-term contexts…

Modern large language models (LLMs) excel at tasks that require storing and retrieving knowledge, such as factual recall and question answering. Transformers are central to this capability because they can encode information during training…

Speculative decoding accelerates LLM inference by drafting future tokens with a small model, but drafter models degrade sharply under template perturbation and long-context inputs. We identify a previously-unreported phenomenon we call…

Recent advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable progress in visual understanding. This impressive leap raises a compelling question: how can language models, initially trained solely on…

Reasoning has become a central capability in large language models. Recent research has shown that reasoning performance can be improved by looping an LLM's layers in the latent dimension, resulting in looped reasoning language models.…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are trained with next-token prediction, implemented in autoregressive Transformers via causal masking for parallelism. This creates a subtle misalignment: residual connections tie activations to the current…

Steering large language models (LLMs) is usually done by either instruction prompting or activation steering. Prompting often gives strong control, but caches guidance tokens at every layer and can clutter long interactions; activation…

Large transformer models are known to produce high-norm tokens. In vision transformers (ViTs), such tokens have been mathematically modeled through the singular vectors of the linear approximations of layers. However, in large language…

The mechanisms by which reasoning training reshapes LLMs' internal computations remain unclear. We study lightweight steering vectors inserted into the base model's residual stream and trained with a reinforcement-learning objective. These…

When humans describe a visual scene, they do not process the entire image uniformly; instead, they selectively fixate on regions relevant to their intended description. In contrast, current multimodal large language models (MLLMs) attend to…

In many reasoning tasks, large language models (LLMs) rely on structured external knowledge, such as graphs and tables, which is typically linearized into sequential token representations. However, even when sufficient knowledge is…

Large Language Models (LLMs) often lack meaningful confidence estimates for their outputs. While base LLMs are known to exhibit next-token calibration, it remains unclear whether they can assess confidence in the actual meaning of their…

Generative language models are usually pretrained on large text corpus via predicting the next token (i.e., sub-word/word/phrase) given the previous ones. Recent works have demonstrated the impressive performance of large generative…

Transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) rely on positional encodings to provide sequence position information to their attention mechanism. Rotary Positional Encodings (RoPE), which encode relative position by rotating queries and…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive capabilities but still suffer from the issue of hallucinations. A significant type of this issue is the false premise hallucination, which we define as the phenomenon when LLMs generate…