The paper revisits the Neural Thickets hypothesis, which claims that pretrained language models contain dense neighborhoods of task‑specific experts that can be accessed via random Gaussian weight perturbations. The authors reproduce the reported gains but demonstrate that similar improvements can be achieved by perturbing only a single decoder block or by keeping the model frozen and adding a random bias to its output logits. They propose the Perturb‑Select‑Vote (PSV) framework, which generates perturbed predictors, selects high‑performing ones on a small validation set, and aggregates their predictions, showing that output diversity, selection, and voting can explain the gains without relying on nearby weight‑space experts. PSV also improves vision tasks under domain shift, especially with logit perturbations, and offers a simple, training‑free alternative to full‑weight perturbation ensembles.
arXiv:2607. 09693v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has become the dominant paradigm for improving the reasoning capabilities of large language models, but it requires expensive training, curated data, and reward signals.
arXiv:2608.21595v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) improves the reasoning ability of vision-language models (VLMs), and diversifying the rollouts wi...
arXiv:2609.24243v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has substantially improved the reasoning capabilities of vision-language models (VLMs), yet it can induce chain-of-thou...
arXiv:2507. 18043v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Inference-time steering methods offer a lightweight alternative to fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs) by modifying internal activations at test time without updating model weights.
arXiv:2607. 02460v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Post-training large language models (LLMs) without real-world interaction feedback or human-labeled supervision remains challenging, particularly in specialized domains where expert annotations are costly to obtain.
arXiv:2606.01914v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) remain unreliable on spatial multiple-choice questions, and their failures are often attributed to poorly...
The paper introduces Percept-V, a dataset of 6,000 program-generated images across 30 domains designed to test simple visual perception skills from the TVPS-4 framework. Experiments show that state‑of‑the‑art multimodal large language models perform poorly compared to humans, especially as image complexity increases, and that fine‑tuning yields only limited generalization to related datasets. The study highlights specific perception skills that remain challenging for current models.
arXiv:2609.37066v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Post-training is central to mathematical reasoning in modern large language models (LLMs), but endpoint pass@1 alone underidentifies what has changed...
arXiv:2608. 02412v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have become the default tool for a remarkable range of tasks, yet they have had conspicuously little success at one of the most common machine learning workloads: predictive analytics over tabular data.
arXiv:2410. 13077v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) traditionally rely on final-layer loss for finetuning and final-layer representations for predictions, potentially overlooking the predictive power embedded in late layers.
arXiv:2604. 16197v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Data attribution and valuation are critical for understanding data-model synergy for Large Language Models (LLMs), yet existing gradient-based methods suffer from scalability challenges on LLMs.
arXiv:2603.18908v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Independently trained language models often learn compatible late-stage representations, despite differences in training objectives, architectures,...