Related papers: Model Collapse as Cultural Evolution
Multilingual Large Language Models considerably changed how technologies influence language. While previous technologies could mediate or assist humans, there is now a tendency to offload the task of writing itself to these technologies,…
Recursive learning -- where models are trained on data generated by previous versions of themselves -- is increasingly common in large language models, autonomous agents, and self-supervised systems. However, standard performance metrics…
In various fields of knowledge creation, including science, new ideas often build on pre-existing information. In this work, we explore this concept within the context of language models. Specifically, we explore the potential of…
The widespread use of generative models has created a feedback loop, in which each generation of models is trained on data partially produced by its predecessors. This process has raised concerns about model collapse: A critical degradation…
The problem of model collapse has presented new challenges in iterative training of generative models, where such training with synthetic data leads to an overall degradation of performance. This paper looks at the problem from a…
Large language models (LLMs) often exhibit unexpected errors or unintended behavior, even at scale. While recent work reveals the discrepancy between LLMs and humans in skill compositions, the learning dynamics of skill compositions and the…
In modern LLMs, linguistic features function not as stylistic artifacts but as probes of probability mass, allocated under training alignment objectives. Language models trained with contemporary pipelines exhibit severe reshaping of…
As scaling laws push the training of frontier large language models (LLMs) toward ever-growing data requirements, training pipelines are approaching a regime where much of the publicly available online text may be consumed. At the same…
Model collapse, a phenomenon characterized by performance degradation due to iterative training on synthetic data, has been widely studied. However, its implications for bias amplification, the progressive intensification of pre-existing…
Successive self-training on a language model's own outputs is widely characterized as a process of flattening: diversity drops, distributions narrow, and the text becomes "more like itself." We provide evidence that this characterization is…
As Large Language Models (LLMs) become increasingly prevalent, their generated outputs are proliferating across the web, risking a future where machine-generated content dilutes human-authored text. Since online data is the primary resource…
Large language models (LLMs) can perform remarkably complex tasks, yet the fine-grained details of how these capabilities emerge during pretraining remain poorly understood. Scaling laws on validation loss tell us how much a model improves…
Recent scholarship typically characterizes Large Language Models (LLMs) through either an \textit{Instrumental Paradigm} (viewing models as reflections of their developers' culture) or a \textit{Substitutive Paradigm} (viewing models as…
Human languages have evolved to be structured through repeated language learning and use. These processes introduce biases that operate during language acquisition and shape linguistic systems toward communicative efficiency. In this paper,…
As synthetic content increasingly infiltrates the web, generative AI models may be retrained on their own outputs: a process termed "autophagy". This leads to model collapse: a progressive loss of performance and diversity across…
Instruction-tuned large language models produce helpful, structured responses, but how robust is this helpfulness under trivial constraints? We show that simple lexical constraints (banning a single punctuation character or common word)…
The stability of recursively trained large language models (LLMs) is a foundational problem for AI safety. Prevailing theory predicts model collapse, a progressive degradation when models are trained on their own output. We challenge this…
Central to many self-improvement pipelines for large language models (LLMs) is the assumption that models can improve by reflecting on past mistakes. We study a phenomenon termed contextual drag: the presence of failed attempts in the…
A fundamental characteristic common to both human vision and natural language is their compositional nature. Yet, despite the performance gains contributed by large vision and language pretraining, recent investigations find that most-if…
In the era of proliferation of large language and image generation models, the phenomenon of "model collapse" refers to the situation whereby as a model is trained recursively on data generated from previous generations of itself over time,…