arXiv:2609.15522v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) with human-like performance on linguistic tasks have transformed the study of language in neurodiverse conditions. LLMs pr...
The study examines how reader proficiency influences the relationship between layer-wise surprisal from large language models (LLMs) and eye-tracking gaze measures. Using the MECO L2 corpus, researchers compared high- and low-proficiency readers on first-pass gaze duration (FPGD) and total gaze duration (TGD), finding that lower-proficiency readers exhibit deeper Predictive Depth for FPGD, while TGD shows deeper Predictive Depth across both groups. The results suggest that the distribution of predictive power across LLM layers relates to the timing and breadth of reading processes and varies with reader proficiency.
arXiv:2604. 16197v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Data attribution and valuation are critical for understanding data-model synergy for Large Language Models (LLMs), yet existing gradient-based methods suffer from scalability challenges on LLMs.
arXiv:2610.04898v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This study analyzes the predictive power of LM-derived, token-level surprisal on Mandarin Chinese reading times. We first propose the Shortes...
arXiv:2608.23818v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Transformer-based language models are widely used as models of human language processing, yet their attention mechanisms allow lossless access to t...
STRUCTURALCOST is a self‑paced reading dataset comprising 475 participants and 40,800 observations that isolates the processing cost of long‑distance subject‑verb dependency resolution. The study replicates a known psycholinguistic finding at NLP scale: human reading times at the main verb increase with dependency length, driven by syntactic embedding beyond linear distance. Various language models—n‑gram, SSMs, and transformers—partially mirror this graded difficulty profile but consistently underestimate the integration cost humans incur, a gap that persists across architectures and model sizes.
The paper investigates the often-overlooked scale vectors in large language models, showing that despite their tiny size they are crucial for pre‑training performance. The authors provide theoretical insights that scale vectors mainly aid optimization rather than expressivity, and they analyze how weight decay affects different normalization layers. Building on these findings, they propose lightweight improvements—branch‑specific heterogeneity, better placement, and magnitude‑direction reparameterization—that consistently reduce loss across a range of model sizes and training settings.
The study examined whether brain-language model alignment reflects shared computational mechanisms or merely stable lexical‑semantic correspondences. Using whole‑brain encoding across Mandarin, English, and French, transformer representations predicted activity in a distributed network that overlapped across languages and remained stable across layers. Contextual embeddings and measures of prediction or compression did not outperform static lexical embeddings, suggesting that alignment is robust but not informative about shared computational processes.
arXiv:2510.01030v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The human ability to translate diverse perceptual and linguistic inputs into structured behavior has been thought to rest on learning robust repres...
arXiv:2606. 26880v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Language-model representations provide structured, high-dimensional annotations of naturalistic language stimuli and can serve as informative neural predictors during comprehension.
The study investigates how data volume, model size, and training duration affect the performance of fMRI foundation models. Using over 200 datasets and 10,000 GPU‑hours, the authors find that larger models benefit more from additional data, and that at a fixed compute budget, increasing data yields greater gains than enlarging the model. By selecting optimal combinations of data, size, and duration, they produce models that outperform existing fMRI foundation models on out‑of‑distribution tasks while requiring less pretraining compute.
arXiv:2608. 04678v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Papers 1-2 of the Kathleen series showed that a byte-level, attention-free architecture built from a wavetable encoder and multi-scale reverberant state can match strong baselines on classification at ~450-700K parameters, without pretraining.