arXiv AI

How Much Evidence Should a Coding Agent's Self-Correction Carry? Adaptive Dirichlet Evidence for Self-Distillation

arXiv AI
Aug 26

When Can One Neuron Fix Repetition Loops in LLMs?

The paper investigates whether targeted edits to a few internal components of Gemma 4 instruction‑tuned models can reduce persistent repetition loops that occur during long factual enumeration prompts. By combining per‑layer ablation with per‑neuron attribution, the authors identify specific neurons whose weight edits dramatically lower loop frequency—one sign‑inverted neuron suffices for Gemma 4 E2B. Across all four Gemma variants, loop occurrences drop from 46/384 to 12/384 on held‑out prompts, while general‑purpose benchmarks show no significant regressions. The study also demonstrates that similar sparse edits can mitigate repetition in other families such as Qwen3.5 and LFM2.5, though the effect varies.

By Aristotelis Lazaridis, Aman Sharma, Dylan Bates, Brian King, Vincent Lu, Jack FitzGerald
arXiv AI
Aug 6

Agentic Reinforcement Learning with Observation-Calibrated Self-Distillation

arXiv:2608. 04788v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model agents are commonly trained through reinforcement learning with sparse trajectory-level rewards, which offer limited guidance on how strongly individual tokens should be updated.

By Yi Yang, Cong Qin, Xiaodan Liu, Chishui Chen, Qing Dong, Yan Zhang, Cao Liu, Zhao Yang, Lu Pan, Jiaye Lin, Yi Feng
arXiv AI
Sep 25

Sequential knowledge editing breaks a model's ability to tell good evidence from bad, without costing it accuracy

The paper investigates how sequential knowledge editing can degrade a language model’s ability to discern reliable evidence from unreliable evidence without affecting overall accuracy. Using a conservatively tuned LoRA on Qwen2.5‑7B‑Instruct, the authors show that after 1,000 edits the model’s arbitration score for untouched facts drops by 36%, leading to higher error rates on its most confident decisions, while MMLU accuracy remains unchanged. The study also finds that in some model‑method combinations, sequential edits can reduce MMLU to chance levels even though edit success and locality remain perfect.

By Atul Anand
arXiv AI
Sep 18

Correct Now, Insufficient Later: Auditing Update Sufficiency in Context Compression

The paper investigates how memory systems can answer a current query correctly yet fail to retain distinctions needed for later updates. Using a paired‑history audit, the authors evaluate 24 history pairs across six synthetic mechanisms and two model backends, achieving perfect reveal accuracy on DeepSeek and high accuracy on GLM. Record‑level audits reveal specific failures in structured reveal memories and frontier late‑reference adequacy, and the authors test a label‑equivariant repair that only partially restores correctness.

By Guangzhe Zhang
arXiv AI
Sep 16

ReDraft, Don't Just Distill: Reference-Driven Revision for Continual VLLM Post-Training

ReDraft is a reference‑driven revision method for continual post‑training of large multimodal language models. It uses the model’s own incorrect outputs as references, revises them, verifies the revisions, and fine‑tunes on the accepted ones, thereby combining explicit supervision with policy proximity. On tasks such as Counting, Clock Reading, and Jigsaw, ReDraft outperforms standard supervised fine‑tuning and on‑policy methods, achieving higher target‑task gains while dramatically reducing forgetting.

By Zhihao Zhang, Mingqi Wu, Qiaole Dong, Enyu Zhou, Shuo Li, Boyang Liu, Jiazheng Zhang, Honglin Guo, Xin Guo, Shaofan Liu, Junzhe Wang, Dingwei Zhu, Zhiheng Xi, Minlong Peng, Yuan Hua, Qi Zhang, Tao Gui, Xuanjing Huang