arXiv Machine Learning

Language Is an Insufficient Substrate for Quantitative Reasoning, and Consequential Domains Need Large Quantitative Models

The article argues that large language models (LLMs) are inadequate for consequential quantitative tasks such as pricing, risk assessment, and medical triage because language is a lossy representation of quantitative data that cannot be reversed. It formalizes this limitation as a property of the training representation rather than model capacity and identifies three essential properties—reproducibility, traceable lineage to source records, and calibrated uncertainty—that language substrates cannot provide. The authors propose a new class of models, Large Quantitative Models (LQMs), designed to meet these requirements.

arXiv AI
2d ago

Verbalized and Internal Probabilities Are Coupled in Large Language Models

The paper investigates the relationship between a large language model’s internal probability distribution and its verbalized confidence statements. By systematically manipulating training and in‑context data, the authors show that both internal and verbalized probabilities are influenced by distributional and asserted uncertainty in the data. They find that verbalized probabilities align with internal ones beyond what would be expected if they tracked the same sources independently, indicating that verbalized confidence can serve as a probe of the model’s internal distribution.

By Sinead Williamson, Jiaxuan Li, Nick Foti, Russ Webb, Masha Fedzechkina
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 11

Perturbation: A simple and efficient adversarial tracer for representation learning in language models

The paper introduces Perturbation, a method that treats representations in language models as learning conduits rather than activation patterns. By fine‑tuning a model on a single adversarial example and observing how this perturbation spreads to other inputs, the approach avoids geometric assumptions and does not identify representations in untrained models. In trained models, Perturbation uncovers structured transfer across multiple linguistic scales, indicating that language models generalize along representational lines and acquire linguistic abstractions through experience.

By Joshua Rozner, Cory Shain
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 27

Emergent Abilities in Large Language Models: A Survey

Emergent Abilities in Large Language Models: A Survey reviews how scaling LLMs leads to previously unseen capabilities such as advanced reasoning, in-context learning, coding, and problem-solving. The paper critically examines definitions, inconsistencies, and the conditions that foster these abilities, including scaling laws, task complexity, pre‑training loss, quantization, and prompting strategies. It also discusses the extension to Large Reasoning Models and highlights safety concerns like deception, manipulation, and reward hacking, calling for improved evaluation and governance.

By Leonardo Berti, Flavio Giorgi, Gjergji Kasneci