The paper investigates what gradient similarity measures in data attribution for large language models. By independently varying task and answer format in supervised fine‑tuning benchmarks, the authors show that gradient alignment is driven by answer format rather than task semantics, with strong alignment for shared formats and none for differing formats. This pattern persists across training stages, model sizes, and families, and is evident in the selections of the LESS data‑selection method, which over‑represents its own answer format.
arXiv:2606. 04928v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed across diverse applications, raising critical questions for governance, accountability, and data provenance.
arXiv:2607. 03453v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Inference-time alignment methods, such as Best-of-$N$, offer a flexible alternative to training-based alignment by using reward models to select high-quality responses generated by a reference LLM.
arXiv:2601. 22146v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Due to limited supervised training data, large language models (LLMs) are typically pre-trained via a self-supervised "predict the next word" objective on a vast amount of unstructured text data.
arXiv:2608. 01423v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reference-based text evaluation metrics, which are widely used to assess natural language generation systems, score a candidate response by comparing it with a reference response.
arXiv:2606. 11198v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems inject external knowledge to improve LLM outputs, yet the format of injected content -- distinct from its semantic relevance -- can independently distort the model's attention distribution.
The paper investigates how preference tuning—optimizing language models with explicit preference signals—behaves when applied to new domains. It systematically compares five alignment objectives and several adaptation strategies, such as target‑domain supervised fine‑tuning and pseudo‑labeling, across summarization, question‑answering helpfulness, and safety tasks. Results show that while pseudo‑labeling reduces domain‑shift degradation, it also causes mode collapse, highlighting a trade‑off between generalization and diversity.
arXiv:2607. 22676v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Post-training is a key mechanism for adapting large language models to downstream tasks.
arXiv:2602. 15829v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The superficial alignment hypothesis (SAH) posits that large language models learn most of their knowledge during pre-training, and that post-training merely surfaces this knowledge.
Reference-based text evaluation metrics, which are widely used to assess natural language generation systems, score a candidate response by comparing it with a reference response. The reliability of an evaluation metric is usually judged by its statistical correlation with human ratings.
arXiv:2607. 01420v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As grounded QA systems are increasingly deployed in AI assistants, accurately attributing generated answers to evidence is critical for user trust and model safety.
The paper introduces VOLM, a framework that quantifies how much original value a human adds to a document beyond what a language model could generate from a task description alone. Unlike existing tools that focus on stylistic detection, VOLM extracts content at varying granularities, reconstructs it with an LLM, and compares these reconstructions to those derived from the task description. Evaluations across news articles, ICLR peer reviews, and argumentative essays show that VOLM can distinguish human-authored texts from LLM-generated ones while remaining robust to content-preserving transformations.
DocAttriBench (DAB) is a large‑scale benchmark for fine‑grained, element‑level source attribution in Document Visual Question Answering (VQA). It introduces MAPPET, a Mask‑based Perplexity‑Derived Attribution method that uses document layout and language modeling to identify the most informative layout element for each answer. The benchmark contains 237k documents and 296k question‑answer pairs with element‑level grounding, and it evaluates multimodal LLMs on answer accuracy, attribution accuracy, and overall answer quality, revealing that even strong models often fail to localize supporting elements.