The paper investigates how large language models learn new tasks in-context, comparing rule-based instruction following to example-based few-shot prompting across five diverse tasks. Results show that models generally learn more reliably from rule descriptions than from examples alone, and adding more examples does not consistently improve performance. Instruction tuning further enhances rule-based learning while preserving example-based capabilities, with rule advantages being strongest for algebraic tasks and weaker for tasks requiring distributional sensitivity or parametric knowledge.
arXiv:2606. 09525v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: During instruction fine-tuning (IFT), large language models (LLMs) learn to follow instructions by using the provided context to answer a query.
arXiv:2610.01054v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In-context learning (ICL) enables language models to perform new tasks from demonstrations without weight updates. However, every ICL inference requi...
arXiv:2604. 27660v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Many real-world tasks require language models (LMs) to reason over complex contexts that exceed their parametric knowledge.
arXiv:2608. 16627v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Natural language explanations (NLEs) are increasingly used as inputs, for example, as few-shot rationales that influence model behavior in in-context learning (ICL).
arXiv:2606. 27721v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Compositional generalization, the ability to solve complex problems by combining solutions to simpler sub-problems, is a fundamental capability of both natural and artificial intelligence, and a key mechanism underlying chain-of-thought reasoning.
The paper "Demystifying Reinforcement Learning Post-Training of Language Models" investigates how reinforcement learning (RL) post‑training enhances large language models (LLMs) for tasks such as reasoning, math, and coding. By isolating RL components in a controlled setting, the authors analyze how the base model’s prior distribution, reward granularity, prompt diversity, and model scale influence outcomes, using policy entropy to compare pre‑training, supervised fine‑tuning (SFT), and RL stages. The study clarifies the role of spurious rewards, the importance of the base model’s probability mass on desired behaviors, and how these factors interact to determine post‑training success, offering a practical primer for NLP researchers. "whyItMatters":"The work provides a clearer understanding of RL post‑training mechanics, helping researchers and practitioners effectively apply RL to improve LLM capabilities."
Task-Level Natural Language Priors as Learning Signals for Low-Resource LLM Training proposes Prior-Guided Tuning (PGT), a training approach that treats natural-language priors as auxiliary learning signals rather than just input context. The method introduces Contrastive Prior Steering (CPS), which adds positive and negative prior-conditioned auxiliary losses while preserving the original supervised objective. Experiments on AmbiMath, Jigsaw, and MNLI/HANS demonstrate that CPS consistently outperforms plain and prompt fine-tuning, achieving high accuracy and significant gains with limited training data.
arXiv:2609.00759v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) increasingly handle in-context learning (ICL) tasks where a long, novel context defines the rules, knowledge, and output s...
The paper introduces Echo-GRPO, a method that rewrites privileged reasoning traces into a model’s own idiolect to align off‑policy supervision with the student policy’s vocabulary. By preserving semantics through Dual‑Reference Decoding, Echo‑GRPO mitigates gradient clipping on critical reasoning tokens and improves reasoning distillation. The approach is instantiated as VideoEcho‑R1 for video reasoning, yielding consistent gains across multiple multimodal LLM backbones and benchmarks, and it can be applied as a plug‑in to both RL and supervised fine‑tuning frameworks.
arXiv:2404.03028v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Modern language models (LMs) can learn to perform new tasks in different ways: in instruction following, the target task is described explicitly in...
The paper reports that in on‑policy distillation for large language models, reasoning performance can be improved by supervising only a tiny fraction of generated tokens—sometimes just one or two tokens per reasoning trajectory, about 0.05% of all tokens. This sparse supervision consistently matches or exceeds full‑token training across nine teacher‑student setups on mathematical reasoning, and is also validated on coding reasoning, Llama models, and PPO‑based reinforcement learning with verifiable reward. The findings suggest that effective post‑training does not require token‑intensive supervision and may align more closely with natural learning processes that focus on critical reasoning steps.
arXiv:2609.34187v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The strong version of the stochastic parrot argument claims that, although large language models (LLMs) may exceed rote regurgitation, they c...