Information-Theoretic Limits of Reliability and Scaling in Language Models
arXiv:2607. 14112v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are evaluated as though perfect reliability is achievable for any task given sufficient scale.
The paper argues that large language models cannot achieve perfect reliability for any task, even with unlimited scale. It establishes that each generative task has an inherent reliability ceiling set by how much output uncertainty can be resolved from observable context, with a resolvable part that can be improved by more context and a subjective part tied to task ambiguity. The authors derive a scaling law showing that performance is limited by the scarcer resource—either training data or model capacity—and explain how this law explains phenomena such as retrieval augmentation and catastrophic forgetting.
arXiv:2607. 14112v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are evaluated as though perfect reliability is achievable for any task given sufficient scale.
arXiv:2606. 15327v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) have demonstrated strong scaling capacity as alternatives to autoregressive language models.
The paper introduces a new measure of generative‑process diversity for language models, using Normalised Compression Distance on raw outputs after controlling for permutation effects. Across 38 models, this metric uncovers population structure that semantic similarity misses and predicts lower correlated failures across ten benchmark families, independent of semantic similarity or model capability. The authors argue that higher generative‑process diversity reduces correlated failures in multi‑model systems, offering a practical tool for safety‑relevant applications.
arXiv:2606. 24752v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The loss of plasticity - the ability of a network to learn new information after having already learned older information - is a fundamental challenge in creating artificial neural networks capable of continual learning.
arXiv:2602. 17743v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In-context learning (ICL) allows large language models to adapt to new tasks from a few examples without updating their parameters.
arXiv:2608. 15448v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models increasingly rely on sampling as a driver of their own improvement, making the fidelity of their learned distributions more critical than ever.
arXiv:2409. 02228v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: When language models (LMs) are trained to forget (or "unlearn'') a skill, how precisely does their behavior change?
arXiv:2603. 12658v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Continual learning (CL) has emerged as a pivotal paradigm to enable large language models (LLMs) to dynamically adapt to evolving knowledge and sequential tasks while mitigating catastrophic forgetting, a critical limitation of the static pre-training paradigm inherent to modern LLMs.
The loss of plasticity - the ability of a network to learn new information after having already learned older information - is a fundamental challenge in creating artificial neural networks capable of continual learning. Although this phenomenon has been known for decades, it has mostly been studied in older, relatively small architectures and rarely in natural-language domains.
The paper argues that traditional semantic similarity fails to capture the true diversity of language models. It introduces a new metric—generative‑process diversity—measured via Normalised Compression Distance on raw outputs, which reveals hidden population structure among 38 models. This metric predicts lower correlated failures across ten benchmark families, independent of semantic similarity or model capability.
arXiv:2606. 19857v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are commonly prompted and interfaced with human-readable natural language, even when the intended reader is another model.
arXiv:2606. 06320v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Machine unlearning aims to remove targeted knowledge from a trained model while preserving its general capabilities.