arXiv Machine Learning

Inferring the Size of Large Language Models From Popular Text Memorization

arXiv:2605. 29223v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The parameter counts of the most widely used large language models (LLMs) are often withheld by their developers, leaving model size -- a primary reference point for interpreting capabilities and costs -- largely undisclosed.

arXiv AI
Jul 7

Spectral Signatures of Large Language Models

arXiv:2607. 03377v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The rapidly growing repository of publicly available large language models (LLMs) presents significant challenges for systematic management and quantification at scale, such as model lineage tracing, licensing, and evaluation.

By Zhuoying Zhang, Ishan V. Prasad, Yuanzhe Hu, Zihang Liu, Hengrui Luo, Pu Ren, Yaoqing Yang
arXiv AI
Aug 28

A Multi-Framework Comparison of Outline Stages in Long-Form Generation with LLMs

The paper presents a benchmark that compares seven long‑form generation frameworks across three granularities—single chapter, multi‑chapter, and whole book—using an anchor‑based LLM‑as‑a‑judge protocol to evaluate outlines directly. Results show no single framework dominates across all settings; performance depends on how well a framework’s output form matches the target granularity, with SuperWriter excelling in length‑constrained single‑chapter mode but losing advantage in whole‑book mode. The study finds only moderate correlation between outline and writing quality, supporting the idea that these two stages should be evaluated separately.

By Yifan Song
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 31

Deriving Scaling Laws for OpenEuroLLM Models: Learning Rate, Batch Size and Loss

The paper investigates how learning rate and batch size scale when pretraining dense large language models on English‑prevalent corpora, examining both jointly optimal and marginal evolutions across model capacity and data size. It explores the benefits of a Warmup‑Stable‑Decay learning‑rate schedule, assessing whether optimal hyperparameters transfer between stable and decay phases, and evaluates loss scaling forms that capture interactions between model capacity and dataset size. The study provides a baseline scaling procedure and releases the full set of pretraining runs for future OpenEuroLLM development.

By Niccol\`o Ajroldi, Diana Alexandra Onutu, Haider Al-Tahan, J\"org Franke, Sampo Pyysalo, Jenia Jitsev, Aaron Klein
arXiv AI
Sep 2

Efficiently Estimating Optimal Hyperparameter Scaling Laws through Power-Law Entropy Search

The paper introduces Power‑Law Entropy Search (PLES), a computational‑cost‑aware acquisition function that uses multi‑fidelity Bayesian optimization to efficiently estimate optimal hyperparameter scaling laws for large language model training. PLES focuses on reducing the overall uncertainty of scaling law estimates rather than optimizing a single objective, selecting configurations that maximize uncertainty reduction per unit computational cost. Experiments on synthetic benchmarks, surrogate models, and real LLM pre‑training runs show that PLES converges to accurate scaling laws using less than one‑tenth of the computational budget required by conventional grid search and other baselines.

By Zhiliang Chen, Sebastian Ament, David Eriksson, Maximilian Balandat, Eytan Bakshy, Jihao Andreas Lin
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 31

Negligible in Size, Significant in Effect: On Scale Vectors in Large Language Models

The paper investigates the often-overlooked scale vectors in large language models, showing that despite their tiny size they are crucial for pre‑training performance. The authors provide theoretical insights that scale vectors mainly aid optimization rather than expressivity, and they analyze how weight decay affects different normalization layers. Building on these findings, they propose lightweight improvements—branch‑specific heterogeneity, better placement, and magnitude‑direction reparameterization—that consistently reduce loss across a range of model sizes and training settings.

By Mingze Wang, Shuchen Zhu, Yuxin Fang, Binghui Li, Kai Shen, Shu Zhong
arXiv AI
3d ago

Linguistic Loopholes in LLM Unlearning: From a 174-Language Benchmark to Coverage-Aware Unlearning

The paper introduces the problem of cross‑lingual loopholes in large language model (LLM) unlearning, where forgetting a fact in one language can leave it accessible in others. It presents a new 174‑language benchmark, the Cross‑Lingual Unlearning Tensor, and proposes COVER, a method that selects a subset of source languages to maximize unlearning coverage under a language budget. Experiments show COVER reduces residual knowledge by 7.8–27.3% compared to uniform selection and works on both synthetic and real low‑resource news data.

By Tyler Skow, Shravan Chaudhari, Rama Chellappa, Abhay Yadav
arXiv AI
Jul 15

Scaling Point-in-Time Language Models

arXiv:2607. 11889v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models trained on unrestricted internet corpora inevitably embed information from the future, introducing lookahead bias that compromises the validity of backtests and causal inference in finance and the social sciences.

By Bryan Kelly, Semyon Malamud, Johannes Schwab, Teng Andrea Xu