arXiv AI

RippleBench: Capturing Ripple Effects Using Existing Knowledge Repositories

arXiv:2512. 04144v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Targeted interventions on language models, such as unlearning or model editing, aim to modify specific information, but their effects often propagate to related, unintended areas (e.

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 18

LMEnt: A Suite for Analyzing Knowledge in Language Models from Pretraining Data to Representations

LMEnt is a toolkit designed to study how language models acquire and represent world knowledge. It includes a richly annotated pretraining corpus, an improved entity-based retrieval method, and twelve pretrained models with numerous checkpoints. The suite enables controlled experiments linking entity mentions in training data to downstream knowledge performance, revealing how co-occurrence patterns influence learning and editing difficulty.

By Daniela Gottesman, Alon Gilae-Dotan, Ido Cohen, Yoav Gur-Arieh, Marius Mosbach, Ori Yoran, Mor Geva
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 31

Blind Men and the Elephant: Probing the Epistemic Myopia of LLMs under Long-Tail Divergent Knowledge

The paper introduces ElephantBench, a closed‑book knowledge probe with 1,094 multi‑account factual questions generated via an auditable graph‑based pipeline that pulls documents from a low‑exposure web corpus and identifies naturally occurring disagreements. Across 32 large language models, even the best model only recovers both divergent accounts on 52.4% of questions, and most models recall one account while omitting the other, indicating persistent epistemic myopia. The study shows that scaling model size and inference‑time reasoning improves recall but does not eliminate incompleteness, and that exposure imbalance in the corpus biases models toward the dominant account.

By Zhuoshi Pan, Junru Lu, Yan Qian, H. Vicky Zhao, Di Yin, Xing Sun
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 3

GONE: Structural Knowledge Unlearning via Neighborhood-Expanded Distribution Shaping

The paper introduces GONE, a benchmark for evaluating knowledge unlearning in large language models using structured knowledge graphs, and presents Neighborhood-Expanded Distribution Shaping (NEDS), a framework that leverages graph connectivity to separate forgotten facts from their semantic neighborhood. GONE disentangles direct fact removal, reasoning-based leakage, and catastrophic forgetting, while NEDS achieves high unlearning efficacy and locality on LLaMA-3-8B and Mistral-7B. The dataset is publicly available on Hugging Face.

By Chahana Dahal, Ashutosh Balasubramaniam, Zuobin Xiong
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 4

Capability Provenance in Language Models: A Case Study in Social Reasoning

arXiv:2606. 19625v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We use training-data attribution as an interpretable tool for capability discovery, mapping which regions of the pretraining corpus support social-reasoning versus STEM-reasoning in OLMo3-7B.

By Glenn Matlin, Chandreyi Chakraborty, Saehee Eom, Mika Okamoto, Rayan Castilla, Louis Jaburi, Alvin Deng, Taywon Min, Lucia Quirke, Stella Biderman, Mark Riedl
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 11

Probing for Knowledge Attribution in Large Language Models

The paper introduces a method for identifying the dominant knowledge source behind large language model (LLM) outputs, distinguishing between faithfulness violations (misuse of provided context) and factuality violations (errors in internal knowledge). A simple linear probe trained on hidden representations can reliably classify this source, and the authors present AttriWiki, a self‑supervised pipeline that generates labeled training data by prompting models to recall withheld entities or read them from context. Probes trained on AttriWiki achieve high Macro‑F1 scores across several models and datasets, generalize zero‑shot to a benchmark, and show that attribution mismatches can increase error rates by up to 70%. "whyItMatters":"The study demonstrates that knowing the source of an LLM’s answer is crucial for effective mitigation of hallucinations, as attribution mismatches significantly raise error rates."

By Ivo Brink, Alexander Boer, Dennis Ulmer
arXiv AI
Sep 18

QVAC Genesis III: A Large-Scale, High-Quality Open Synthetic STEM Corpus for Efficient Language Model Pre-Training

QVAC Genesis III is a 191.43 B‑token synthetic STEM corpus covering 19 domains and multiple difficulty levels, created through a dual generation strategy that uses a weak edge‑scale student model to generate corrective explanations and contrastive reasoning. The authors evaluate the corpus with an LLM‑as‑a‑parser protocol and demonstrate that 1.7 B‑parameter models trained on QVAC Genesis III outperform those trained on Cosmopedia‑v2 and the Cosmo‑1B model on ARC, GPQA Diamond, and MMLU STEM benchmarks, achieving up to +28.57% improvement on ARC‑E and a 99.45% valid answer rate.

By Davide Vitabile, N. Ranjan, Akshay Nambiar, Kamal K. Gupta, Amril Nazir
arXiv AI
Sep 15

Domain-Specific Jargon in Large Language Models: A Comparative Analysis between General-Purpose and Specialist Models

The paper investigates how large language models handle domain-specific jargon, comparing a general-purpose Llama‑3.1 with a version fine‑tuned on medical data. Two new medical jargon benchmarks reveal that the general model actually outperforms the fine‑tuned variant, and interpretability tools show the fine‑tuned model over‑emphasizes a few components linked to jargon predictions. Reweighting these components narrows the performance gap, and some jargon‑sensitive components also aid materials‑science tasks, indicating a partially domain‑agnostic representation of specialized terminology.

By Darin Keng, Zhewei Sun
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 23

PreUnlearn: Auditing Collateral Knowledge Damage Before Large Language Model Unlearning

The paper investigates how machine unlearning for large language models (LLMs) can unintentionally erase related knowledge, even in distant domains. By analyzing the propagation of unlearning effects before any model updates, the authors discover a consistent decay pattern where collateral damage is strongest near the targeted forget set and diminishes with semantic distance but never fully disappears at domain boundaries. They propose a pre-unlearning prediction task—forget-set auditing—to identify potential collateral damage early, finding that interaction features between the forget set and evaluation set are the most predictive signals. This approach offers an early warning system for risky unlearning runs and guides the design of more reliable unlearning procedures.

By Bo Su, Ankit Shah, Thai Le
arXiv Machine Learning
4d ago

It's All Training: A Fully Synthetic Single-Stage Recipe for LLMs

arXiv:2609.37891v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Current pre-training datasets are derived from web crawls, with all their issues, and were not designed to support mid- and post-training pipelines--...

By Pierre-Carl Langlais, Pieter Delobelle, Yannick Detrois, Pavel Chizhov, Carlos Rosas-Hinostroza, Neil Si Smail, Benjamin Burtin, Hanna Shcharbakova, Ivan Yamshchikov, Anastasia Stasenko