arXiv Computation and Language

Wieszcz-XIX: A 3.1-Billion-Word Corpus of Pre-1918 Polish and Temporally Bounded Language Models Trained From Scratch

Wieszcz‑XIX is a 6.75‑billion‑token corpus of Polish texts from 1800‑1918, comprising 3.1 billion words across 294,369 documents, assembled from Wolne Lektury and the Internet Archive. The pipeline filters, deduplicates, audits for post‑1918 leakage, and splits at the document level, yielding a training set with only 0.04–0.38 % post‑1918 residue. From this corpus the authors train decoder‑only language models ranging from 47 M to 349 M parameters, demonstrating that larger models better preserve period spelling and exhibit temporal boundedness compared to modern Polish baselines.

arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 2

Can Scene Text Recognition Read Rare Compositions?

The paper reports that scene text recognition models, while achieving 89–97% accuracy on standard benchmarks, perform significantly worse on rare word–trigram combinations, with a 10–18 point drop in accuracy at the rare‑word/rare‑trigram corner across multiple languages and models. Scaling the vision backbone improves overall accuracy but does not alleviate this corner‑specific deficit. The authors identify the autoregressive decoder’s lexical prior as the root cause and show that architectural changes—specifically moving from autoregressive to CTC decoding—yield the largest improvement for these rare compositions.

By Genpei Zhang
arXiv AI
3d ago

Large Language Model Turnover Undermines Screening for Artificial Intelligence-Assisted Scientific Writing

The study examines how the rapid turnover of large language models (LLMs) undermines the effectiveness of AI‑detectors used to screen scientific manuscripts. By comparing 4,000 PNAS abstracts rewritten by 23 different LLM versions released between June 2023 and August 2026, the authors show that detectors trained on past versions can fail dramatically at generation boundaries, missing up to 96% of rewrites just after a sharp transition. Even detectors updated to newer versions can overlook rewrites of older models, and a commercial detector missed most rewrites of the newest version while flagging few human‑written abstracts.

By Kazuki Nakajima, Takayuki Mizuno
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 11

Detectable Only Where It Is Confounded: What Verified Duplication Counts Say About Membership Evidence in Language Models

The paper investigates whether language models can identify sentences from their training data by using exact duplication counts from publicly released corpora for two model families, OLMo‑2 and Pythia. It finds that for typical duplication levels, models show only a weak trace of exposure, with a rank correlation near –0.08, and that strong signals only appear when a sentence appears roughly a thousand times, at which point fame rather than memory dominates. The study also demonstrates that common membership tests can be misleading, as changing a single word does not alter the model’s preference, and that controlling for register can significantly improve detector performance.

By Arman Nik Khah
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 14

SynthSentry: Detecting Synthetic Data Contamination in Language Model Training Data

The paper introduces SynthSentry, a model‑agnostic method for detecting synthetic data contamination in language‑model training corpora. It computes a distributional divergence score based on lexical diversity collapse, n‑gram tail truncation, and perplexity variance across reference models, requiring no access to the generating model or synthetic labels. Experiments on English corpora contaminated by small open‑weight generators and an instruction‑tuned model show that SynthSentry ranks contamination severity accurately, maintains low false‑positive rates after calibration, and does not degrade downstream fine‑tuning performance at the tested scale.

By Praveen Kumar Myakala, Ravichandra Namburi, Sowmya Keragodu Jayaramu, Sooraj George Thomas