arXiv Machine Learning

The Kinetics of Training: A Driven-Nucleation Rate Law for Emergence, Plasticity Loss, and Circuit Control in Language Models

arXiv:2607. 27281v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A capability appears in a language model when the last parts of its circuit align in one stochastic attempt, and getting all but one right is worth nothing.

arXiv AI
Jun 2

When Do Attention Circuits Form? Developmental Trajectories of Capability and Attention-Sink Emergence Across Three 1B-ClassArchitectures

arXiv:2606. 02378v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We track the developmental trajectory of attention-head circuit formation across three 1B-class language models spanning two architecture families (dense transformer, mixture-of-experts) and two pretraining corpora (The Pile, DCLM): Pythia 1B, OLMo 1B-0724-hf, and OLMoE 1B-7B-0924.

By Yongzhong Xu
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 22

PAGE: Partition-Aware Gated KV-Cache Eviction

PAGE is a partition‑aware gated KV‑cache eviction method that reframes eviction as a per‑input admission decision. It uses a single label‑free scalar— the early‑to‑late drop in pairwise top‑k head agreement—to classify inputs into a capacity‑bound class (where eviction is catastrophic) and a dilution‑prone class (where eviction is safe or beneficial). By thresholding this drop, PAGE applies a base evictor only when necessary, reducing the harm rate in the capacity‑bound regime from 0.75 to 0.026 and achieving a 29× improvement across four models and benchmarks without retraining the evictor.

By Pankaj Kumar, Subhankar Mishra
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 24

Prompt-Model Interaction Reaches the Fixed Points: A deterministic, task-free structural readout -- and the factorizations of it that failed

The paper demonstrates that a prompt’s influence is not inherent to the prompt itself but depends on the model, as prompts optimized for one model degrade on another and rankings shift under neutral reformatting. By examining a task‑free structural readout—specifically the fixed‑point behavior of a short‑window argmax map—the authors show that nine tokens of conditioning can move the fixed‑point fraction across most of its range, altering structural classes and model rankings, while instruction tuning has no effect. Attempts to explain this phenomenon through prefix length, content type, bidirectionality, or attention‑sink dominance all fail, indicating that the prompt‑model pair is the fundamental unit of explanation. whyItMatters":"The study reveals that prompt effectiveness is model‑specific and that simple structural readouts can capture this interaction, challenging assumptions about prompt generality and guiding future prompt‑engineering efforts."

By Nicol\'as Vera Z\'u\~niga
arXiv AI
2d ago

Conflicting Supervision Moves Commitment, Not Capability: A 12.29{\sigma} arrangement effect that is exactly zero under a convention-agnostic score

The paper investigates how the ordering of training data written under two incompatible but correct conventions influences a model’s learned parameters. It shows that the learning‑rate schedule acts as an averaging operator that determines the ordering effect, with constant schedules producing larger effects than decaying ones. Experiments on a single corpus with fixed budget demonstrate a statistically significant 12.29‑sigma shift in parameter commitment, yet this shift is zero when measured with a convention‑agnostic metric.

By Wenhui Chen
arXiv AI
Jul 22

Prompt Design at Scale: How Format, Instruction Count, and Context Length Shape Instruction Adherence and Hallucination in Large Language Models

arXiv:2607. 19257v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Practitioners make three prompt-design decisions with almost no controlled evidence behind them: how to format instructions and context (markdown, plain text, prose, or tabular), how many simultaneous instructions a system prompt can carry before compliance degrades, and how much context a model can hold before recall and honesty degrade.

By Netanel Eliav