The paper investigates how large language models acquire knowledge during pre‑training, proposing that auxiliary views—reformulations of knowledge—are causally beneficial. Experiments show that repetition is essential, paraphrasing helps only at smaller batch sizes, and reallocating tokens from repetition to auxiliary views improves learning even for factual recall. The study also finds that the benefit of auxiliary views does not depend on the teacher model’s strength, identifies specific knowledge types that aid learning, and explores mechanistic effects via layer‑wise biases and compression.
arXiv:2608. 12218v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models are increasingly trained and deployed with long contexts that span documents, code repositories, and interaction histories.
arXiv:2609.24238v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We reproduce and stress-test the work of Yu et al. (2023), who characterize how language models (LMs) arbitrate between memorized knowledge and contrad...
arXiv:2609.00293v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We investigate how vision-language models (VLMs) handle context-memory conflicts; that is, situations in which the model is given information in contex...
arXiv:2609.39920v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large vision-language models (LVLMs) exhibit strong multimodal in-context learning (ICL) capabilities, yet this ability degrades substantially as mod...
arXiv:2604. 06374v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Latent reasoning via continuous chain-of-thoughts (Latent CoT) has emerged as a promising alternative to discrete CoT reasoning.
LMEnt is a toolkit designed to study how language models acquire and represent world knowledge. It includes a richly annotated pretraining corpus, an improved entity-based retrieval method, and twelve pretrained models with numerous checkpoints. The suite enables controlled experiments linking entity mentions in training data to downstream knowledge performance, revealing how co-occurrence patterns influence learning and editing difficulty.
Task-Level Natural Language Priors as Learning Signals for Low-Resource LLM Training proposes Prior-Guided Tuning (PGT), a training approach that treats natural-language priors as auxiliary learning signals rather than just input context. The method introduces Contrastive Prior Steering (CPS), which adds positive and negative prior-conditioned auxiliary losses while preserving the original supervised objective. Experiments on AmbiMath, Jigsaw, and MNLI/HANS demonstrate that CPS consistently outperforms plain and prompt fine-tuning, achieving high accuracy and significant gains with limited training data.
The paper investigates how large language models learn new tasks in-context, comparing rule-based instruction following to example-based few-shot prompting across five diverse tasks. Results show that models generally learn more reliably from rule descriptions than from examples alone, and adding more examples does not consistently improve performance. Instruction tuning further enhances rule-based learning while preserving example-based capabilities, with rule advantages being strongest for algebraic tasks and weaker for tasks requiring distributional sensitivity or parametric knowledge.
arXiv:2609.38764v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Language models are typically pretrained from random initialization. Recent work challenges this convention, showing that a brief warm-up on abstract,...
arXiv:2606. 06712v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study the transformation of autoregressive models (ARLMs) into diffusion language models (DLMs).
CoEM introduces a Commit-on-Evidence Memory system that learns when to compress source evidence into compact memory facts while preserving potentially useful excerpts verbatim in a pending set. The system uses a learned policy to decide whether to promote, retain, or discard each pending excerpt as new context arrives, and a frozen verifier ensures only supported facts are committed. Reinforcement learning trains this policy with step-level evidence rewards and final answer rewards, leading to consistent improvements in long-context reasoning, achieving 10.4–11.4 F1 points over the strongest baseline on 6,400-document inputs.
arXiv:2605. 28854v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable flexibility in adapting to novel tasks from in-context examples without parameter updates, a capability known as in-context learning (ICL).