For Your Eyes Only: Evaluating Coordination Between Isolated Language Model Instances explores whether a language model can embed a signal in natural language that another independent instance can detect without shared memory or coordination training. The study introduces a cooperative signalling game where a Sender describes two words, one hidden, and a Receiver must identify the target. Seven contemporary models from four architectural families were tested on 300 word pairs, revealing that most struggle to coordinate when signals must be undetectable, though one frontier model performs near-perfectly even after filtering, and that models can also use this capability for deliberate misdirection.
Coordination, a fundamental linguistic structure, remains a subject of intense debate, and its exact nature continues to elude theoretical linguistics. A common view holds that only same-category constituents can be conjoined, which has been challenged by the many grammatical unlike coordinations found in natural language.
arXiv:2601. 22184v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in multi-agent settings that require coordination without communication, from human-AI interaction to safety-critical scenarios.
The paper introduces Declarative Attention (DA), a protocol that lets language models explicitly declare which parts of their context to focus on during generation. By partitioning decoding into full-context, region-specific, and recent-output-only modes, the inference engine can skip large portions of the KV cache, dramatically reducing attended tokens. Experiments on 15 long-context tasks with off-the-shelf models show significant savings (52.0% and 31.1% reductions) with only modest accuracy drops that diminish as model size increases.
arXiv:2603. 18482v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Standard decoding strategies for text generation, including top-$k$, nucleus sampling, and contrastive search, select tokens based on likelihood, restricting outputs to high-probability regions.
arXiv:2609.07474v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Language models compute over tokens: language is their input, their output, and increasingly their internal representation. Whether language should...
arXiv:2608.21664v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Safe deployment of increasingly capable models will likely come to rely on latent-space monitoring as a complement to behavioral evaluations, especiall...
arXiv:2607. 15495v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Out of everything the human brain processes, only a small fraction is consciously accessible, in the sense of being available for verbal report, deliberate control, and flexible reasoning.
The study examines how vision‑language models handle multi‑turn pragmatic interpretation in iterated reference games, where participants repeatedly identify novel referents using language. Researchers compared human performance with that of several models, manipulating context by varying its amount, order, and relevance. While humans consistently performed well, the models could use prior context but struggled to build relevant context for effective interpretation, indicating missing core skills for efficient linguistic collaboration.
arXiv:2608. 14681v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Words recur constantly in natural language use, yet it remains unclear whether language models reactivate prior representations or re-evaluate repeated words afresh, and whether post-training changes this default behavior.
arXiv:2607. 01208v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Language models deployed in high-stakes roles can potentially favor certain entities, brands, or viewpoints, steering user decisions at scale.
arXiv:2606. 19857v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are commonly prompted and interfaced with human-readable natural language, even when the intended reader is another model.
Large language models can serve as capable long-horizon agents, but their out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization remains weak. We identify a key source of this failure as task insensitivity: when faced with similar but distinct tasks, models might apply patterns learned during training and fail to solve the task at hand.