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 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
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 5

Pattern Selectivity is Not Task-Causal Structure: A Cross-Architecture Mechanistic Study of Composed-Task Circuits in 1B-Class Language Models

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.

By Yongzhong Xu