The study investigates how well language models can generalize from fine‑tuned facts by distinguishing active facts—those that support further learning—from inert facts. Using a novel relabeling experiment (e.g., mapping Paris → Europe to Paris → crab), the authors fine‑tune models on a subset of subjects and test whether the learned mapping extends to unseen subjects sharing the same original answer. Across eleven models and 70 relations, they find a strong correlation (Pearson r = 0.87–0.92) between the linear readability of the original relation in pretrained representations and the model’s ability to generalize, a relationship that persists after controlling for various factors and remains robust to label randomization and semantic category changes.
By Faridoun Mehri, Hinrich Sch\"utze
arXiv:2409. 02228v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: When language models (LMs) are trained to forget (or "unlearn'') a skill, how precisely does their behavior change?
By Eric Zhang, Leshem Choshen, Jacob Andreas
Activation verbalizers translate the internal representations of large language models into human-readable text. The recently proposed natural language autoencoders (NLAs) learn this by reconstructing...
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.
By Yuqi Zhang, Di Zhang
arXiv:2609.23065v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Chain-of-thought (CoT) can sound plausible yet be unfaithful to the model's underlying reasoning. Most prior work probes CoT faithfulness through inp...
By Qianli Wang, Yilong Wang, Dennis Wei, Jingyi Sun, Simon Ostermann, Pepa Atanasova, Nils Feldhus
arXiv:2606.00284v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: While continual pretraining (CPT) is a practical way to extend large language models to new languages, na\"ive finetuning often erodes existing cap...
By Sanchit Ahuja, Terra Blevins
The paper investigates how large language models (LLMs) encode and retrieve facts based on their order of mention in a context. By measuring changes in hidden states when shifting questions from one fact to another, the authors identify an "ordinal vector" that points to a fact’s position in the list rather than its name. Across several models (Qwen, Gemma, Llama), these ordinal addresses are ordered, steerable, low‑rank, and emerge in mid‑layers, suggesting that LLMs locate facts by their mention order, mirroring aspects of human recall.
By Yufa Zhou
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:2608. 12377v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Brains and large language models (LLMs) are fundamentally different memory systems, but they can be compared through shared functional questions: where memory-related information is represented, how partial cues recover broader associations, how new information is written or updated, and how memory-related states can be perturbed.
By Morteza Salehjahromi, Shayan A. Zadegan, Amgad Muneer, Jia Wu
The paper investigates natural language autoencoders (NLAs) as tools for verbalizing activation differences in large language models. It examines whether NLAs capture compositional structure, generalize to fine‑tuned models, recover fine‑tuning objectives, and can be specialized for model diffing. Experiments across four models show that NLAs largely succeed in these tasks, though they do not yet match state‑of‑the‑art diffing methods on emergent misalignment detection.
By Andrea Blasi N\'u\~nez, Gianluca Barmina, Federico Torrielli, Thiusius Rajeeth Savarimuthu, Peter Schneider-Kamp, Lukas Galke Poech
arXiv:2610.18674v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Large language models rely on prompt context to perform in-context learning, follow formats, and adapt to local evidence. This ability, however, also...
By Jinghan Zheng, Jiajun Shi
arXiv:2602. 02470v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Autoregressive large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in many complex tasks, yet they can still fail in very simple logical reasoning such as the "reversal curse" -- when trained on forward knowledge data of the form "$A \rightarrow B$" (e.
By Xutao Ma, Yixiao Huang, Hanlin Zhu, Somayeh Sojoudi