arXiv:2608.27658v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Subword tokenization hinders low-resource language processing by imposing frequency patterns from dominant languages onto script-sharing variants. Byte...
arXiv:2608. 15454v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Byte-level hierarchical language models (LMs) have recently emerged as a robust alternative to their popular counterparts that use subword tokenization.
Byte-level hierarchical language models (LMs) have recently emerged as a robust alternative to their popular counterparts that use subword tokenization. However, generating one byte at a time remains...
The study investigates how lexical perturbations—such as keyboard noise, character swaps, and filler insertion—affect large language models (LLMs) on reasoning benchmarks. Four open-weight instruction-tuned models and frontier models were evaluated, revealing that character-level perturbations significantly reduce accuracy, especially on multi-step reasoning tasks, while filler insertion has minimal impact. The authors attribute this asymmetry to Attention Diversion, where fragmented subword tokenization draws disproportionate attention in middle and final transformer layers; they demonstrate that both token content and attention allocation are coupled, making it difficult for inference-time repair strategies to fully recover performance.
arXiv:2507. 01900v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Pruning is a highly effective approach for compressing large language models (LLMs), significantly reducing inference latency.
The paper examines OCR adaptation for low‑resource languages, noting that fine‑tuning often hits a performance ceiling in data‑scarce settings. It identifies that lower layers of language‑specific models learn redundant features while higher layers capture script nuances, leading to a structural inefficiency. To address this, the authors propose PSMC, a framework that pre‑trains a base model, specializes it per language, merges the experts via task arithmetic, and co‑trains a unified multilingual backbone, achieving about a 2% improvement in Word Recognition Rate across 10 Indian scripts without adding parameters.
arXiv:2603. 22473v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Hybrid language models combine softmax attention with linear-time sequence mechanisms such as state-space or linear-attention layers, but the functional contribution of each component type remains insufficiently characterized.
arXiv:2505. 15548v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Autoregressive transformer language models frequently exhibit training instability when trained on long sequences, particularly under low-precision arithmetic.
arXiv:2606. 19317v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A longstanding goal of research on interpretable deep learning is to replace opaque neural computations with human-meaningful symbolic descriptions.
arXiv:2604. 22128v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: When trained on tasks requiring an understanding of hierarchical structure, transformers have been found to represent this hierarchy in distinct ways: in the geometry of the residual stream, and in stack-like attention patterns maintaining a last-in, first-out ordering.
arXiv:2608. 14604v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Small language models in the ten to one hundred million parameter range are attractive for on device inference, rapid experimentation, and controlled scientific study, yet most of them reuse the standard transformer block without adaptation to the small scale regime.
Vision‑Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly replacing traditional OCR for document understanding, but this study shows they often rewrite imperfect text into more plausible forms, a flaw that clean‑text OCR benchmarks miss. The authors created FaithC4, a multilingual perturbation benchmark of 1,455 single‑page documents with scramble, random substitution, and visually similar substitution attacks, and evaluated 15 systems across general‑purpose VLMs, OCR‑specialized VLMs, and traditional OCR pipelines. Results reveal that general‑purpose VLMs suffer up to 6.9 WER points under perturbation, OCR‑specialized VLMs 0.1–3.4 points, and traditional OCR less than 0.8 points on English; probing Qwen3‑VL‑4B shows rewriting occurs only when a perturbed word’s final‑layer representation remains close to the original, with short words (4–6 characters) rewritten up to 10% of the time. whyItMatters":"The findings highlight a critical limitation of VLMs in document transcription, underscoring the need for robust evaluation benchmarks that capture rewriting behavior beyond clean‑text accuracy."