arXiv AI

A Quantitative Study of Sustained Focus in Large Language Models via Repetitive Deterministic Prediction Tasks

arXiv AI
Sep 10

Limits of Reliability and Scaling in Language Models

The paper argues that large language models cannot achieve perfect reliability for any task, even with unlimited scale. It establishes that each generative task has an inherent reliability ceiling set by how much output uncertainty can be resolved from observable context, with a resolvable part that can be improved by more context and a subjective part tied to task ambiguity. The authors derive a scaling law showing that performance is limited by the scarcer resource—either training data or model capacity—and explain how this law explains phenomena such as retrieval augmentation and catastrophic forgetting.

By Subhabrata Majumdar
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 7

How Much is Left? LLMs Linearly Encode Their Remaining Output Length

arXiv:2607. 05316v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models generate one token at a time, yet their responses show remarkably consistent length structure: step-by-step solutions converge in predictable token counts, retrievals stop after a few sentences, retractions extend responses by measurable amounts.

By Mohamed Amine Merzouk, Dmitri Carpov, Mirko Bronzi, Damiano Fornasiere, Adam Oberman
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 4

Breaking the Likelihood Trap: Variance-Calibrated Modulation for Large Language Model Decoding

The paper introduces Variance‑Calibrated Modulation (VCM), a training‑free pre‑decoding technique that reshapes language model probability distributions before truncation. VCM uses two dynamic mechanisms: a Contextual Searchlight via PMI to suppress stopwords and highlight context‑relevant tokens, and an Adaptive Self‑Debiasing that applies scale‑invariant penalization based on real‑time logit standard deviation. Experiments on open‑ended generation, factual QA, and mathematical reasoning show that VCM consistently reduces the likelihood trap, improving diversity, coherence, and reasoning accuracy with minimal computational cost.

By Yuanhao Ding, Meimingwei Li, Esteban Garces Arias, Matthias A{\ss}enmacher, Christian Heumann, Chongsheng Zhang
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 9

Token Sample Complexity of Attention

arXiv:2512. 10656v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As context windows in large language models continue to expand, it is essential to characterize how attention behaves at extreme sequence lengths.

By L\'ea Bohbot, Cyril Letrouit, Gabriel Peyr\'e, Fran\c{c}ois-Xavier Vialard
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 25

Internal Data Repetition Destroys Language Models

arXiv:2606. 24998v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Language models are running out of high-quality training data, and even aggressively deduplicated corpora retain some amount of repetition.

By Jessica Chudnovsky, Joshua Kazdan, Noam Levi, Rylan Schaeffer, Yegor Denisov-Blanch, Bo He, Mehmet Donmez, Sanmi Koyejo, David Donoho
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 6

How Much is Left? LLMs Linearly Encode Their Remaining Output Length

Large language models generate one token at a time, yet their responses show remarkably consistent length structure: step-by-step solutions converge in predictable token counts, retrievals stop after a few sentences, retractions extend responses by measurable amounts. We ask whether the model carries an internal estimate of how much response remains.