arXiv:2608. 15798v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Language models are compared by their held-out per-token cross-entropy risk---the quantity scaling laws are fitted to.
arXiv:2607. 14112v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are evaluated as though perfect reliability is achievable for any task given sufficient scale.
arXiv:2607. 18292v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As language models scale, answers start truer but degrade faster: scaling buys capability but erodes reliability.
arXiv:2607. 18292v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Bigger language models are less reliable.
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.
The paper argues that Large Language Models (LLMs) do not function as Solomonoff induction estimators because their training objectives—cross‑entropy, negative log‑likelihood, and next‑token prediction—optimize fit to a supplied conditional distribution rather than a program‑weighted universal mixture. It further contends that additional computation alone does not transform these models into optimal predictors without external hyper‑parameter or architectural changes. The authors suggest that neurosymbolic machine learning, exemplified by models such as Fable and Astra, represents a shift toward symbolic model synthesis, moving beyond purely statistical LLMs.
arXiv:2607. 18454v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Quantifying the risk of rare failures in language models, such as those triggered by adversarial distribution shifts or very large-scale deployments, requires estimating probabilities far too small for random sampling.
arXiv:2607. 20286v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We propose a novel framework for computing rigorous bounds on the probability that a large language model (LLM) generates harmful output to a given prompt.
arXiv:2601.05280v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: On the one hand, the question of whether Large Language Models (LLMs) are Solomonoff induction estimators has become an explicit question at...
We propose a novel framework for computing rigorous bounds on the probability that a large language model (LLM) generates harmful output to a given prompt. We study a new application of the Clopper-Pearson confidence intervals to obtain probably approximately correct (PAC) bounds for this problem.
arXiv:2601. 05280v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: On the one hand, the question of whether large language models (LLMs) are Solomonoff induction estimators has become an explicit question at the intersection of Algorithmic Information Theory (AIT) and Machine Learning (ML) of great interest.
arXiv:2607. 18292v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As language models scale, answers start truer but degrade faster: scaling buys capability but erodes reliability.
arXiv:2607. 08961v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models increasingly provide labels, evaluations, and feedback for tasks specified in natural language.