arXiv Machine Learning

Natural Ungrokking: Asymmetric Control of Which Rules Survive Pretraining

arXiv:2606. 26050v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Midway through an ordinary pretraining run, a small language model learns the pronoun-gender rule: cued with a girl's name ("Sue cried because"), it resolves the next pronoun to she, generalizing to held-out probes (0.

arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 4

Trajectories That Segment Themselves: Agent-Declared Boundaries as a Training Unit

arXiv:2608. 02302v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Long-horizon coding-agent trajectories are poorly matched to the credit units available to train on: a single action has no stable value, an episode label merges productive exploration with abandoned directions, and a fixed window cuts where the logging mechanics fall.

By Jingxi Wei
arXiv AI
Aug 7

When Self-Evolution Backfires: Pre-Commit Gating against Skill Contamination in LLM Agents

arXiv:2608. 05810v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-evolving agents accumulate capability by distilling reusable skills from their execution trajectories, but we find this process is not monotonic: past a critical pool size, newly added skills degrade performance instead of improving it.

By Linfang Shang, Ming Xu, Yiding Sun, Tianle Xia, Lingxiang Hu, Lan Xu, Ning Zheng