The paper investigates whether large language models’ reasoning traces truly contain early, informative signals or merely reflect budget and difficulty confounds. Using a restart‑controlled truncation probe, the authors compare continuation success rates against from‑scratch restart curves across 178 problem‑model pairs, finding that only one case shows prefix‑limited success and that continuing a model’s own prefix generally outperforms restarting. A difficulty‑controlled test and two generation‑free analyses reveal that early internal signals do not carry outcome information beyond a problem‑difficulty baseline, underscoring the need for proper counterfactual controls.
By Yigit Utku Bulut
arXiv:2609.38699v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: A cumulative token cap can fall inside a mathematical derivation, forcing a test-time controller to choose between stopping at the cap (strict) and all...
By Guilin Zhang, Ziqi Tan, Wulan Guo, Kai Zhao, Hongyun Yang, Mei Luo, Qi Ning, Feng Yang
The paper introduces a benchmark for evaluating whether off‑the‑shelf small language models (SLMs) can reliably perform microtasks that support a large language model (LLM) planner, such as auto‑approving shell commands, writing memory, selecting tools, and ranking past turns. Using fixed prompts and confidence‑interval‑aware eligibility thresholds, the authors test several Qwen3 models (0.6/1.7/4/8 B) in FP16 with no tuning and find that none of the 16 configurations meet the eligibility criteria. Quantization to 4‑bit precision further degrades performance, with the eligibility gap tracking model size rather than precision, and the issue persists across different models (e.g., Llama‑3.x) and prompt variations.
By Jundong Hu, Shekar Ramachandran
arXiv:2602.22453v4 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Retrieval heads, a subset of attention heads in Transformers, were studied in English, showing its crucial role in retrieving information from the...
By Shaswat Patel, Vishvesh Trivedi, Yue Han, Yihuai Hong, Eunsol Choi
arXiv:2605.29637v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Large language models often exhibit a substantial gap between their performance in English and in lower-resourced languages on equivalent knowledge...
By Debajyoti Mazumder, Divyansh Pathak, Prashant Kodali, Aditya Joshi, Akshay Agarwal, Jasabanta Patro
The paper introduces a calibrated instrument for rigorously measuring how inference optimizations—such as quantization, early‑exit, and speculative decoding—affect the output quality of large language models. It uses a formally calibrated LLM judge that verifies no systematic bias between statistically equivalent outputs and includes a null condition to ensure measured differences are zero. Applying this method, the authors find that a 4‑bit model is indistinguishable from its 16‑bit counterpart, while 3‑bit quantization and early‑exit techniques incur measurable quality losses that vary by language and task, and that token‑certainty‑based acceptance rules cannot reliably identify impactful errors.
By Jerry Kaplan
The paper introduces a three-level evaluation framework—behavioral deployment, LM-head readout, and probe recoverability—to distinguish whether a language model fails a syntactic test by not encoding structure or by failing to use it. Using a trilingual control-dependency benchmark, the authors find that probe recoverability consistently exceeds LM-head readout, which in turn exceeds behavioral deployment across seven models and three languages, with the largest gap observed in Qwen3-0.6B Instruct. Layer-localized activation patching shows that instruction tuning shifts the decoded layer later, suggesting decoding favors surface shortcuts and that behavioral evaluation understates what models encode while probing alone overstates what they deploy.
By Zhenyan Lu, He Wang, Xiaohui Huang
When a tool-using agent is given the same task in a different language, does it still take the same steps? Multilingual evaluation rarely asks: it compares final answers and discards the actions.
arXiv:2607. 18553v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Can a language model read the quality of ongoing computation, and can an external intervention turn that readout into better outcomes?
By Jan Kirin
The paper introduces MWE‑ECL, a bilingual diagnostic framework that tests whether distant discourse anchors can override local lexical priors in multi‑word expression interpretation. It evaluates models on a 0‑128K context grid, finding that while retrieval of anchors is near perfect, the ability to change locally preferred readings varies, especially when the model’s default conflicts with the anchor. The study shows that explicit recoverability does not always translate into behavioral influence, with gaps differing across models and languages.
By Wei He, Aline Villavicencio, Rodrigo Wilkens, Zhenyun Deng
Large language model optimization is an active research area, spanning quantization of model weights, early-exit methods for skipping layers, and speculative decoding. Each track uses its own quality...
arXiv:2609.13149v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: For local large language model agents, active context is a scarce resource: memory capacity, prefill latency, cache growth, and service objectives all...
By Aditya Karnam Gururaj Rao, Arjun Jaggi