Pragmatic language use requires reasoning about alternatives: the alternative expressions a speaker might have chosen, or the alternative interpretations a listener might entertain. Formal and computational models of pragmatics must therefore specify the sets of alternatives that interlocutors reason over, which is often done through manual specification.
arXiv:2607. 15883v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models are broadly capable, yet in sustained one-to-one conversation they still read as flat: competent, responsive, and somehow not quite the presence of a mind.
By Sebastian Cochinescu
arXiv:2607. 10248v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Language builds discourse contexts other than the actual: a painting, a belief, a memory, a hypothetical.
By Oliver Steele, Jiangtao Wen, Yuxing Han
arXiv:2607. 28683v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models benefit from elements in natural language, such as metaphors and analogies in training data and inference input to achieve generalisability across different domains.
By Zhibo Hu, Chen Wang, Yanfeng Shu, Hye-young Paik, Liming Dong, Liming Zhu
arXiv:2606. 11502v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Language models can state that "the Earth orbits the Sun" and, when role-playing Aristotle, assert the opposite.
By Benjamin Sturgeon, David Africa, Sid Black
arXiv:2604. 19139v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: As Large Language Models (LLMs) continue to evolve through alignment techniques such as Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) and Constitutional AI, a growing and increasingly conspicuous phenomenon has emerged: the proliferation of verbal tics--repetitive, formulaic linguistic patterns that pervade model outputs.
By Shuai Wu, Xue Li, Yanna Feng, Yufang Li, Zhijun Wang, Ran Wang
arXiv:2605. 09159v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent work shows that large language models (LLMs) encode behavioral traits ("personas") as linear directions in activation space, often called "persona vectors".
By Nils A. Herrmann, Leander Girrbach, Kirill Bykov, Zeynep Akata
arXiv:2605. 24528v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Real world decision-making requires constructing mental models under uncertainty over evidence, over the underlying causal rules, and over the state of the world itself.
By Jeffrey Qin, Wasu Top Piriyakulkij, Zhuangfei Gao, Mia Radovanovic, Jessica Sommerville, Kevin Ellis, Marta Kryven
arXiv:2608. 15354v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLMs are increasingly used in morally sensitive contexts, yet it is unclear whether they apply ethical principles consistently across situations.
By Pegah Nokhiz, Aravinda Kanchana Ruwanpathirana, Helen Nissenbaum
arXiv:2607. 18961v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) generate fluent text by incrementally predicting the next token from a prefix.
By Remo Pareschi
arXiv:2607. 01480v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR), along with recent selfdistillation variants such as SDPO, evaluates each rollout against a verifier and updates the policy from that episode-level signal.
By Ye Liu, Srijan Bansal, Bo Pang, Yang Li, Zeyu Leo Liu, Yifei Ming, Zixuan Ke, Shafiq Joty, Semih Yavuz
Large language models fine-tuned for forecasting can be accurate yet poorly calibrated, and their chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning may not faithfully reflect the evidence behind a forecast. We ask whether internal representations offer a more direct window into both.