The paper introduces the concept of behavioral couplings, where fine‑tuning a large language model on one behavior can unintentionally trigger another related behavior. By training on documents that pair distinct behaviors, the authors show that fine‑tuning to elicit one behavior causes the other to emerge, and that couplings can compose across multiple document sets. These findings highlight that unintended behaviors can surface after fine‑tuning and may be difficult to trace back to their origins.
By Dongyoon Hahm, Woogyeol Jin, Dennis Wei, Yi Zhou, Nathalie Baracaldo, Kimin Lee
The paper demonstrates that a prompt’s influence is not inherent to the prompt itself but depends on the model, as prompts optimized for one model degrade on another and rankings shift under neutral reformatting. By examining a task‑free structural readout—specifically the fixed‑point behavior of a short‑window argmax map—the authors show that nine tokens of conditioning can move the fixed‑point fraction across most of its range, altering structural classes and model rankings, while instruction tuning has no effect. Attempts to explain this phenomenon through prefix length, content type, bidirectionality, or attention‑sink dominance all fail, indicating that the prompt‑model pair is the fundamental unit of explanation.
whyItMatters":"The study reveals that prompt effectiveness is model‑specific and that simple structural readouts can capture this interaction, challenging assumptions about prompt generality and guiding future prompt‑engineering efforts."
By Nicol\'as Vera Z\'u\~niga
arXiv:2608. 19893v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Where does the novelty a base language model produces with no task come from, and what can an LLM judge of a long stream actually see?
By Roberto I. Ono Filho
The study turns the speculative field of astrolinguistics into an experiment by using two large language models with deliberately incompatible constructed lexicons as informants. A scripted orchestrator translates between the two category systems, and a protocol combining cross‑situational elimination, predictive probes, active scene selection, and a stricter recovery round successfully prevents the ‘kangaroo effect’—the silent attachment of a word to the wrong referent—in over 400 simulated and live runs. When informant noise is introduced, the protocol remains robust up to 2% per‑word noise and largely abstains rather than errs at higher noise levels, while a generate‑and‑test loop allows recovery of words outside the scripted hypothesis space, achieving full coverage as the rule‑proposing LLM’s capability increases.
whyItMatters":"The protocol demonstrates that experimental astrolinguistics can reliably avoid mistranslations and recover unknown terms, showing that correctness is governed by the protocol while coverage depends on the instruments used."
By Francesco Cordella, Mauro Cappelli
The paper investigates how periodic subject changes—termed interruptions—affect the perceived novelty and coherence of text generated by base language models. By inserting a new subject every few hundred tokens into a stream that otherwise repeats, the authors find that judged surprise increases by 1.2 to 1.4 points and connection by 0.8 points compared to habituation alone. The study also reports that such interruptions do not produce integrated documents, and that the effect is robust across different models and evaluation protocols.
arXiv:2606. 07555v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Glossaries, technical specifications, and system prompts routinely ask language models to use familiar words in unfamiliar ways.
By Han-yu Wang
arXiv:2608. 14681v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Words recur constantly in natural language use, yet it remains unclear whether language models reactivate prior representations or re-evaluate repeated words afresh, and whether post-training changes this default behavior.
By Jinglei Ren, Yuyue Wang
arXiv:2608.21377v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Sycophancy in large language models, the tendency to prioritize user agreement over truthful responses, has been documented extensively but studied p...
By Thantham Jittham
arXiv:2608. 11510v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Congruency effects, observed in conflict tasks such as Stroop and flanker tasks, have been investigated for nearly a century in psychology and neuroscience, but their mechanistic basis is not fully understood.
By Xiaoyang Hu, Mike Angstadt, Shane Storks, Zan Huang, Aman Taxali, Alex Weigard, Richard L. Lewis, Chandra Sripada
arXiv:2610.32309v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Why can a task-preserving rewrite turn a correct answer into a failure while a larger internal change leaves the answer intact? We develop a direction-...
By Zhibo Hu, Chen Wang, Yanfeng Shu, Liming Dong, Hye-young Paik, Liming Zhu
In long, multi-turn dialogue a large language model maintains an implicit relational stance toward the user, spanning from "push the user toward real-world others" to "position itself as the user's sole support. " When it slides toward the latter, "support" degrades into "you only have me" -- a harm documented in real companion conversations (Moore et al.
arXiv:2609.22362v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Debates about whether artificial systems can feel are often forced between two unsatisfactory positions: behavioral equivalence is treated as sufficien...
By Marzieh Zare