Diagnosing Task Insensitivity in Language Agents
arXiv:2606. 26918v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models can serve as capable long-horizon agents, but their out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization remains weak.
Large language models can serve as capable long-horizon agents, but their out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization remains weak. We identify a key source of this failure as task insensitivity: when faced with similar but distinct tasks, models might apply patterns learned during training and fail to solve the task at hand.
arXiv:2606. 26918v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models can serve as capable long-horizon agents, but their out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization remains weak.
arXiv:2607. 03478v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Post-training of frontier language models is conducted on curated task suites, and inevitably leaves a distribution shift between training and deployment environments.
Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) offer an efficient alternative to autoregressive models through parallel decoding, yet existing post-training methods largely rely on random masking strategies that overlook intrinsic token dependencies. In this work, we present an empirical analysis of attention in dLLMs and show that tokens attending more strongly to unmasked context exhibit greater generation stability and play a critical role in reasoning.
arXiv:2604. 00830v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Test-Time Learning (TTL) enables language agents to iteratively refine their performance through repeated interactions with the environment at inference time.
arXiv:2606. 15521v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Tokenization introduces representational redundancy: under a fixed token vocabulary, every byte string admits many valid token encodings, or segmentations, that decode to the same surface string.
As large language models (LLMs) grow more capable, they are increasingly deployed in context-rich settings where task inputs are often accompanied by long, partially irrelevant context. In a controlled setting, we find that state-of-the-art models often appear robust to task-irrelevant context at the aggregate level: prepending it to benchmark questions causes little change in overall accuracy.
arXiv:2512. 20661v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Transformer-based pre-trained language models (PLMs) excel in text classification but suffer from attention dilution and attention sink effects, forcing models to over-focus on task-irrelevant tokens.
arXiv:2510. 13554v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The reasoning pattern of Large language models (LLMs) remains opaque, and reinforcement learning (RL) typically applies uniform credit across an entire generation, blurring the distinction between pivotal and routine steps.
arXiv:2607. 16257v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a widely adopted technique for improving large language models (LLMs) on complex tasks.
arXiv:2608. 06699v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agentic multimodal large language models (MLLMs) extend multimodal perception and reasoning with planning, tool use, and interaction in dynamic environments.
arXiv:2607. 17524v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We propose Token-Level Off-Policy Labeling (TOPL), an off-policy training paradigm that reframes post-training as a token-level correctness prediction task.
arXiv:2602. 23197v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Transformer-based large language models exhibit in-context learning, enabling adaptation to downstream tasks via few-shot prompting with demonstrations.