arXiv Statistics ML

Confidence Is Not a Promise: A Reference Audit of Typed Decision Models

arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 7

Readout Stability in Prefill-Only Decision Models:Zero-Label Prediction and Inference-Time Compute Allocation

Prefill‑only decision models evaluate every candidate in a menu in a single forward pass, avoiding decoding and reducing cost by one to two orders of magnitude compared to generative language models. The paper demonstrates that when only the candidate menu changes, the model’s post‑intervention accuracy can be predicted solely from the cached first‑pass distribution using a simple estimator that renormalizes and selects the argmax, without any labels or second pass. Across seven model families, ten datasets, and two task types, this menu‑only intervention prediction is within 4.2 points of actual accuracy, and in one family it is exact, whereas a probability‑level variant fails by 21 points, indicating the property resides in ranking rather than calibrated probabilities.

By Ran Li, Lei Chen
arXiv Computer Vision
1d ago

How Much Can Best-of-N Help a World Action Model? Measuring Selectable Headroom and Realizing It in Closed Loop

The paper introduces a denoised counterfactual protocol to accurately measure the selectable headroom of world action models (WAMs) and uses these measurements to build a fail‑gated selector. Across four WAMs and two benchmarks, the study shows that the standard estimate overstates selectable headroom, that structured action perturbations can add up to 16 points of headroom, and that imagined futures retain candidate‑outcome information without loss. The selector improves closed‑loop task success from 76.9 % to 81.6 % on held‑out training episodes and from 62.6 % to 69.8 % on unseen tasks.

By Haojia Gao, Yue Cao, Yumin Liu, Haohua Que, Mingkai Liu, Guanqiu Guo, Zhuo Zou, Bokui Chen, Xueqian Wang
arXiv Computation and Language
1d ago

3, 7, 14, 17, 42: Instruction Tuning Installs and Sharpens Number-Choice Heuristics in Language Models

The study measures the exact probability that language models assign to each integer from 1 to N when prompted for a random number, eliminating sampling noise by summing over all spellings. Across 18 open‑weight models and 29 decoding settings, instruction tuning consistently makes the distribution less uniform, introducing a round‑number avoidance heuristic and sharpening endpoint avoidance. While tuned models rarely output the extreme values 1 or N and largely avoid multiples of 10, they do not converge on a single favorite integer across models.

By Samar Ansari
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 1

Calibration, Not Compilation: Detecting and Repairing Misspecified Probabilistic Programs Written by Language Models

arXiv:2606. 31630v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Language models increasingly write probabilistic programs (in NumPyro, Stan, or Pyro), but a program that compiles, runs, and passes every unit test can still be \emph{statistically} wrong -- a Gaussian likelihood for heavy-tailed data, a Poisson for over-dispersed counts, an invalid prior support, or a pathological parameterization.

By Jian Xu, Delu Zeng, John Paisley, Qibin Zhao
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 19

Thinking in a Low-Resource Language: What SFT Builds, What RL Fixes, What Accuracy Cannot See

The paper evaluates how three large mixture‑of‑experts models (Alibaba, OpenAI, NVIDIA) can be fine‑tuned to reason in a low‑resource language, specifically Greek. Accuracy metrics show little change, but the authors uncover significant qualitative improvements: after supervised fine‑tuning, models reason in Greek on ~98% of items, with better grammaticality and retained general ability. Reinforcement learning with pre‑registered rewards further eliminates reasoning‑channel leaks and format skips, while the Greek‑reasoning habit remains robust to an accuracy‑only gradient.

By Ayoub Kirouane, Christos Petrocheilos
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 22

Our Own Jev: Typed Decisions in One Forward Pass, from an In-House Judge to Open LoRA Models

arXiv:2610. 29052v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A typed decision maps evidence, a question and a fixed set of options to a probability for every option, computed in one forward pass, by reading a language model's logits or a small head over its hidden states, instead of generating and parsing text.

By Yuchuan Weng, Chi Liu, Xin Chen, Srinivasan Manoharan