Hugging Face Trending Papers

Position Matters More Than Channel: Talking a Language Model Out of a Correct Answer

arXiv AI
Oct 2

What Do Rationales Communicate? A Message-Intervention Study in Role-Specialized QA

The study investigates the role of rationales in role‑specialized question‑answering pipelines by fixing evidence and candidate answers while varying only the rationale sent from a reasoner to a verifier. Experiments on 400 examples from MuSiQue, HotpotQA, and 2WikiMultiHopQA show that faithful rationales add almost no answer accuracy, whereas corrupted rationales significantly alter support judgments, especially under explicit rationale‑checking prompts. Human audits reveal that many corrupted rationales lead to mistrust or rejection, highlighting the importance of evaluating rationale sharing as a verification mechanism rather than merely a means to improve accuracy.

By Jiameng Zhang, Hongqiu Wu
arXiv AI
Aug 26

Feedback That Backfires: Why Small Language Model Agents Repeat the Call They Just Watched Fail

The study investigates why small language model agents tend to repeat a tool call that just failed. By recording the failed call and its error message in the transcript, the authors measure a negative corrective gain—agents are more likely to repeat the failed action, with a drop of about 1.03 nats per token. The problem is traced to the harness design rather than the model’s understanding of errors, and the authors show that replacing the verbatim call with a runtime-generated description of the failure can reduce this backfiring effect by 76%.

By Esmail Gumaan
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 29

Reinforcement Learning of Communication in a Mesh of Small Language Models

The paper introduces TalkMesh, a decentralized network of small language model agents that learn to communicate effectively during inference. Each agent proposes an answer, scores it with a confidence head, and the most confident agent broadcasts a hint; lower‑confidence agents revise their proposals if a new suggestion scores higher. This gossip‑based consensus, trained via group relative policy optimization, enables a mesh of three agents to match the accuracy of majority voting over 32 samples, and scales to larger meshes to significantly boost performance on benchmarks like GSM8K and MATH-500.

By Mehmet Kerem Turkcan
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 16

Where Is the "Self" of a Large Language Model? -- From Self-Index to Self-Reference

The paper investigates whether a large language model (LLM) possesses a notion of self by distinguishing between two biological analogues: a self‑index that separates the model’s own material from external material, and self‑reference that allows the model to recognize its own content. Using Qwen3.8‑27B, the authors demonstrate that the model’s internal representations consistently differentiate its own messages across all layers, that the model claims ownership of its messages with a measurable correlation to the self‑index, and that manipulating internal states can reverse or diminish this self‑attribution. The study further shows that the model’s self‑reference ability is enhanced when it engages in a “thinking mode” and that the self‑index influences the model’s performance on arithmetic tasks.

By Yuchen Li, Xintong Li, Zongqi Fan, Ken-tye Yong, Nguyen H. Tran
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 31

Why Didn't It Check? Unsupported Final Claims and Their Repair in Two Tool-Equipped Language Models

The study investigates how language models equipped with tools can still produce unsupported final claims, even when a single tool call could resolve the uncertainty. It defines two metrics—occurrence (how often unsupported claims arise) and conditional repair (how often they are fixed when evidence is provided). Experiments on Qwen3-32B and Gemma 4 show that providing the missing evidence consistently repairs all unsupported claims in the Qwen3-32B setup, while the Gemma 4 model never produced unsupported claims under the tested conditions.

By Justin Bronder