arXiv Computation and Language

When Edit Localization Amplifies Relative Selection Bias: Gradient Geometry, Target Mismatch, and Importance Weighting

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 25

Confident but Wrong: A Constrained Decoding Diagnostic for Low-Resource Automatic Post-Editing

The paper introduces a black‑box, inference‑time diagnostic for low‑resource Automatic Post‑Editing (APE) that distinguishes whether poor performance is due to insufficient training data or inconsistent training signals. By varying an edit‑distance penalty and analyzing the resulting TER‑vs‑λ curve and confidence‑based constraint ordering, the authors identify two failure modes—Binary Collapse and Confident Miscalibration—across multiple language pairs. The diagnostic also suggests practical next steps, such as applying a static constraint for immediate accuracy gains, and the authors release new English‑Sinhala and English‑Tamil APE datasets with accompanying code.

By Isuru Wijesiri, Nisansa de Silva, Kavindu Warnakulasuriya, Aloka Fernando, Surangika Ranathunga
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 19

FishBack: Pullback Fisher Geometry for Optimal Activation Steering in Transformers

FishBack introduces a pullback Fisher geometry approach for activation steering in transformers, challenging the common Euclidean assumption of intermediate activation spaces. By deriving a closed‑form steering direction based on the Fisher information metric of the softmax layer, the method achieves target concept changes with minimal off‑target distortion, especially in early and middle layers. Experiments on GPT‑2 Small, Llama‑3‑8B, and Qwen3‑8B demonstrate significant reductions in off‑target KL divergence compared to existing steering baselines.

By Sihan Wang, Jiayi Zhao, Qingyan Cao, Hongbo Yao, Lin Shu
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 15

In the Blind: Building Pseudo-References for MT Evaluation

arXiv:2609.13611v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The WMT26 General MT task evaluates systems on 10 language pairs that have no human references (neither translated from scratch nor post-edited from MT...

By Diptesh Kanojia, Chi-kiu Lo, Archchana Sindhujan, Samuel Larkin, Greg Hanneman, Alon Lavie
arXiv AI
Sep 17

Contiguity, Not Importance: Budgeted Repair of Stale KV Caches After Document Edits

The paper investigates how to efficiently repair stale key-value (KV) caches in retrieval‑augmented generation systems after document edits. It proposes a budgeted in‑place recomputation approach and evaluates training‑free position‑selection policies on a factual RAG benchmark. Across three model families, a contiguous edit‑local window consistently recovers most of the post‑edit answer quality while being 13–21 times faster than a full re‑prefill, though its effectiveness diminishes when answer‑bearing text moves downstream.

By Mingyang Mao, Wyatt Mackey, Xiaomin Lin
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 22

Output Vector Editing for Memorization Mitigation in Large Language Models

Output Vector Editing (OVE) is a post‑hoc technique that suppresses unwanted text continuations from large language models by editing the output vectors of specific neurons. It uses a two‑stage localization of MLP layers and neurons combined with full‑vocabulary least‑squares updates, and its multi‑anchor variant (OVE‑MA) adaptively selects continuation positions to maximize suppression. Experiments on models ranging from 360 M to 7 B parameters show that OVE‑MA can reduce recoverable continuations by 24.45 % with only five output‑vector updates, outperforming the prior method REVS while requiring far fewer updates.

By Ahmad Dawar Hakimi, Kaiwei Lei, Isabelle Augenstein, Hinrich Sch\"utze