Behavioral Reprogramming of Open-Weights Models: Cognitive Plasticity and Alignment Bounds
arXiv:2608. 13069v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are predominantly aligned to function as passive, sycophantic assistants.
arXiv:2605. 11554v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Task-agnostic structure proxies are often used to interpret why one pretraining corpus transfers better than another, but such explanations require the proxy to track the structure that matters for the downstream task.
arXiv:2608. 13069v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are predominantly aligned to function as passive, sycophantic assistants.
Large language models (LLMs) are predominantly aligned to function as passive, sycophantic assistants. We challenge this default paradigm by empirically evaluating the cognitive plasticity of open-weight architectures when subjected to rigorous behavioral reprogramming.
arXiv:2606. 05378v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We test whether a single screen-and-ablate recipe -- identify attention-head circuits by task-pattern selectivity, then verify by causal ablation against a matched-random null -- produces consistent mechanistic claims across model families.
Measuring training data influence consistently across language model pretraining is challenging. It is difficult to select downstream tasks or validation sets representative of a model's general capabilities, and reliance on task performance at intermediate checkpoints complicates comparisons across training.
arXiv:2608. 16347v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Direct communication between AI systems relies on natural language as an intermediate layer, incurring encoding/decoding overhead, token cost, and latency.
arXiv:2607. 21692v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sparse attention reduces the cost of long contexts by allowing each query to read only selected parts of the input.
arXiv:2605. 31156v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Causal discovery aims to recover directed causal relations from observational and interventional data, providing a basis for mechanistic understanding and reliable decision-making.
arXiv:2606. 11552v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) achieve remarkable performance across a wide range of tasks, but their autoregressive decoding process incurs substantial inference costs due to inherently sequential token generation.
Large language models (LLMs) achieve remarkable performance across a wide range of tasks, but their autoregressive decoding process incurs substantial inference costs due to inherently sequential token generation. Speculative decoding addresses this bottleneck by employing a lightweight draft model to propose multiple future tokens that are subsequently verified in parallel by a larger target model.
arXiv:2608. 11746v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern systems are increasingly expected to transfer across tasks not specified during training.
arXiv:2606. 11198v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems inject external knowledge to improve LLM outputs, yet the format of injected content -- distinct from its semantic relevance -- can independently distort the model's attention distribution.
arXiv:2607. 08839v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are typically designed under the assumption that all modalities available during training will also be accessible at inference.