arXiv Computation and Language

Learning When Not to Listen: Selective Anti-Interference Pretraining for Language Models

The paper introduces Selective Prefix Anti-Interference Regularization (SPAR), a pretraining objective that trains language models to ignore irrelevant distant prefixes. SPAR compares predictions from the original sequence with those from a corrupted prefix that only alters far tokens, using a sufficiency gate and a gated KL loss to stabilize suffix predictions that are already locally supported. Experiments show that SPAR improves robustness metrics such as RULER and NoLiMa across several models, including Qwen2.5, Llama, and GPT2-XL, under equal compute.

arXiv AI
Oct 9

Is Memorization Context-Sensitive? Prefix-Based Extraction Beyond Isolated Prefixes

Large language models can reveal memorized training sequences when prompted with a prefix, but real-world systems often use additional context such as instructions or retrieved documents. This study measures how such contextual conditioning affects memorization by comparing suffix probabilities with empty prompts versus retrieved contexts across three instruction-tuned models. The results show that context does not simply erase memorization; instead, it preserves a core set of robustly extractable samples while also shifting the boundary of marginal cases, sometimes suppressing and sometimes enabling new exposures.

By Ali Satvaty, Narjes Sharafi, Jirui Qi, Suzan Verberne, Fatih Turkmen
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 1

Prefilling-dLLM: Predictive Prefilling for Long-Context Inference in Diffusion Language Models

arXiv:2606.10537v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) re-encode the entire prefix at every denoising step, causing recomputation that scales quadratically with...

By Jing Xiong, Qi Han, Shansan Gong, Yunta Hsieh, Boyuan Zheng, Chengyue Wu, Chaofan Tao, Chenyang Zhao, Ngai Wong
arXiv AI
Aug 25

Unlearning Is Not Just Erasing: Temporal Decoupling via Generation Inequality

The paper introduces ADU, a fine‑grained training framework that unlearns sensitive information from large language models by decoupling contextual attention pathways instead of erasing tokens. ADU exploits the distinction between local and global attention heads to identify and suppress attention paths that retrieve persistent sensitive anchors, while preserving local‑attention structure and overall language modeling performance. Evaluation on the TOFU and WMDP benchmarks shows ADU achieves superior forget quality (0.93 on TOFU) and retains 92.9% of model utility compared to 81.9% for existing baselines, with fewer side effects in benign contexts.

By Xunlei Chen, Qirui Ye, Yuang Li, Yi Gong, Zhaokun Wang, Wenyi Li, Shiyao Guo, Jinyu Guo
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 9

Prefilling-dLLM: Predictive Prefilling for Long-Context Inference in Diffusion Language Models

Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) re-encode the entire prefix at every denoising step, causing recomputation that scales quadratically with context length and becomes prohibitive for long-context scenarios. We propose Prefilling-dLLM, a training-free prefill-decode disaggregation framework for dLLMs that partitions the prefix into N chunks, caches their KV representations once, and selects the top-K most relevant chunks with intra-chunk token sparsity for decoding, showing that sparse prefilling can outperform dense attention while reducing per-step complexity from quadratic in the full sequence length to quadratic only in the decode length.

arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 9

Remember to Forget: Gated Adaptive Positional Encoding

The paper introduces GAPE (Gated Adaptive Positional Encoding), a drop‑in augmentation for rotary positional encodings that adds content‑aware bias to attention logits while preserving rotary geometry. GAPE uses a query‑dependent gate to contract irrelevant context and a key‑dependent gate to keep salient distant tokens, leading to exponential attenuation of weakly protected context. Experiments show that GAPE improves long‑context robustness, extrapolating up to eight times the training length, and can be retrofitted into a pretrained 7B model without losing benchmark performance.

By Riccardo Ali, Alessio Borgi, Mario Severino, Pietro Li\`o, Christopher Irwin
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 21

Dynamic Lagging using Stable-Prefix Training for Simultaneous Translation

The paper introduces a training strategy for cascaded simultaneous speech translation that allows the system to dynamically decide how much of the source prefix to translate. By fine‑tuning a large language model (Qwen3‑8B) on stable prefixes—pairs of source prefixes and the longest shared translation with the full sentence—the authors enable contextual read‑write decisions beyond fixed wait‑k or target‑suffix deletion. Experiments on English‑to‑German, Japanese, and Chinese demonstrate that stable prefixes improve the quality‑latency tradeoff across various test sets.

By Hieu Hoang, Amittai Axelrod, Matt Post
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 25

A Training Criterion with Token-Level Tolerance to Transcription Ambiguity for Automatic Speech Recognition

The paper introduces a token‑level extension of Omni‑Temporal Classification (OTC) for automatic speech recognition, allowing unsupported tokens to be bypassed while preserving supervision for the rest of the word. Across 19 languages and three corpora, this token‑level OTC consistently outperforms standard CTC, achieving the lowest mean word error rate on every dataset and a 9.45% average relative WER reduction. A predictive‑entropy‑indexed schedule replaces epoch‑based relaxation, reducing training‑length dependence while maintaining performance.

By Saurabh Kumar, Diptiman Mohanta, Prasanta Kumar Ghosh
arXiv AI
Jun 16

Data Augmentations for Data-Constrained Language Model Pretraining

arXiv:2606. 16246v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As AI labs approach a data ceiling where compute capacity outpaces the rate of new high-quality text generation, language model pretraining is shifting toward a data-constrained, compute-abundant regime that demands productive multi-epoch training on fixed corpora.

By Michael K. Chen, Xikun Zhang, Zhen Wang
arXiv AI
Sep 3

Predict, Don't Iterate: Efficient Adaptive-Length Infilling for Diffusion Language Models

The paper introduces PILL, a new infilling technique for diffusion language models that eliminates the need for a preset initial length and reduces inference overhead. PILL uses probing-based length-free decoding, cutting down on extra forward passes and speeding up generation. Experiments across five diffusion models and eight benchmarks show PILL outperforms the strongest baseline with higher pass rates and BLEU-2 scores while running 1.82× faster.

By Haobo Xu, Sirui Chen, Yuanchen Bei, Lingjie Chen, Yuchen Yan, Dongqi Fu, Jingrui He, Hanghang Tong