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Language models significantly benefit from context tokens, such as prompts or scratchpads. They perform better when prompted with informative instructions, and they acquire new reasoning capabilities by generating a scratch-pad before…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-03 Charlie Snell , Dan Klein , Ruiqi Zhong

Large language models' behavior is often shaped by instructions such as system prompts, refusal boundaries, privacy constraints, and tool-use rules that must hold at inference time. Yet in practice these constraints can be violated under…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-27 Vitoria Guardieiro , Avishree Khare , Adam Stein , Eric Wong

Prompt engineering for large language models is challenging, as even small prompt perturbations or model changes can significantly impact the generated output texts. Existing evaluation methods of LLM outputs, either automated metrics or…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-02 Michael A. Hedderich , Anyi Wang , Raoyuan Zhao , Florian Eichin , Jonas Fischer , Barbara Plank

Process mining is increasingly using textual information associated with events to tackle tasks such as anomaly detection and process discovery. Such semantics-aware process mining focuses on what behavior should be possible in a process…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-25 Vira Pyrih , Adrian Rebmann , Han van der Aa

While instruction-tuned models have shown remarkable success in various natural language processing tasks, accurately evaluating their ability to follow instructions remains challenging. Existing benchmarks primarily focus on common…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-03 Shiyang Li , Jun Yan , Hai Wang , Zheng Tang , Xiang Ren , Vijay Srinivasan , Hongxia Jin

Recent research in behaviour understanding through language grounding has shown it is possible to automatically generate behaviour models from textual instructions. These models usually have goal-oriented structure and are modelled with…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-01-14 Debajyoti Paul Chowdhury , Arghya Biswas , Tomasz Sosnowski , Kristina Yordanova

In-context learning (ICL) has emerged as an effective solution for few-shot learning with large language models (LLMs). However, how LLMs leverage demonstrations to specify a task and learn a corresponding computational function through ICL…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-17 Yu Bai , Heyan Huang , Cesare Spinoso-Di Piano , Marc-Antoine Rondeau , Sanxing Chen , Yang Gao , Jackie Chi Kit Cheung

Task semantics can be expressed by a set of input-output examples or a piece of textual instruction. Conventional machine learning approaches for natural language processing (NLP) mainly rely on the availability of large-scale sets of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-05-28 Renze Lou , Kai Zhang , Wenpeng Yin

Large language models (LLMs) are capable of performing conditional sequence generation tasks, such as translation or summarization, through instruction fine-tuning. The fine-tuning data is generally sequentially concatenated from a specific…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-08-24 Yijin Liu , Xianfeng Zeng , Fandong Meng , Jie Zhou

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,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-01 Zoë Prins , Samuele Punzo , Frank Wildenburg , Giovanni Cinà , Sandro Pezzelle

In many real-world applications, users rely on natural language instructions to guide large language models (LLMs) across a wide range of tasks. These instructions are often complex, diverse, and subject to frequent change. However, LLMs do…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Praveen Venkateswaran , Danish Contractor

Prompt engineering is widely used to shape large language model behavior, yet it is often treated as a practical heuristic rather than as a form of natural-language control. This paper develops a cognitive-semantic account in which prompts…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Dongseok Kim , Hyoungsun Choi , Mohamed Jismy Aashik Rasool , Gisung Oh

Test suites assess natural language processing models' performance on specific functionalities: cases of interest involving model robustness, fairness, or particular linguistic capabilities. This paper introduces specification instructions:…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-19 Pedro Henrique Luz de Araujo , Benjamin Roth

Instruction data is crucial for improving the capability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to align with human-level performance. Recent research LIMA demonstrates that alignment is essentially a process where the model adapts instructions'…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-01 Yiwei Li , Jiayi Shi , Shaoxiong Feng , Peiwen Yuan , Xinglin Wang , Boyuan Pan , Heda Wang , Yao Hu , Kan Li

We present the surprising finding that a language model's reasoning capabilities can be improved by training on synthetic datasets of chain-of-thought (CoT) traces from more capable models, even when all of those traces lead to an incorrect…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-26 Abhranil Chandra , Ayush Agrawal , Arian Hosseini , Sebastian Fischmeister , Rishabh Agarwal , Navin Goyal , Aaron Courville

Behavioral skills or policies for autonomous agents are conventionally learned from reward functions, via reinforcement learning, or from demonstrations, via imitation learning. However, both modes of task specification have their…

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed with hierarchical instruction schemes, where certain instructions (e.g., system-level directives) are expected to take precedence over others (e.g., user messages). Yet, we lack a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-23 Yilin Geng , Haonan Li , Honglin Mu , Xudong Han , Timothy Baldwin , Omri Abend , Eduard Hovy , Lea Frermann

Language models (LMs) are pretrained to imitate internet text, including content that would violate human preferences if generated by an LM: falsehoods, offensive comments, personally identifiable information, low-quality or buggy code, and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-06-16 Tomasz Korbak , Kejian Shi , Angelica Chen , Rasika Bhalerao , Christopher L. Buckley , Jason Phang , Samuel R. Bowman , Ethan Perez

Instruction tuning improves the ability of large language models (LLMs) to follow diverse human instructions, but achieving strong performance on specific target tasks remains challenging. A critical bottleneck is selecting the most…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-19 Da Ma , Gonghu Shang , Zhi Chen , Libo Qin , Yijie Luo , Lei Pan , Shuai Fan , Lu Chen , Kai Yu

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Jaehui Hwang , Dongyoon Han , Sangdoo Yun , Byeongho Heo