arXiv:2606. 09525v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: During instruction fine-tuning (IFT), large language models (LLMs) learn to follow instructions by using the provided context to answer a query.
arXiv:2507. 04221v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We introduce Context Tuning, a simple and effective method to significantly enhance few-shot adaptation of large language models (LLMs) without weight updates.
arXiv:2608. 12218v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models are increasingly trained and deployed with long contexts that span documents, code repositories, and interaction histories.
arXiv:2601.03199v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Diffusion language models (DLMs) have shown strong potential for general natural language tasks with in-context examples. Existing In-Context...
arXiv:2608. 05813v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Personalizing language models (LMs) to individual user preferences is essential for aligning responses with diverse goals and backgrounds.
The paper investigates how large language models learn new tasks in-context, comparing rule-based instruction following to example-based few-shot prompting across five diverse tasks. Results show that models generally learn more reliably from rule descriptions than from examples alone, and adding more examples does not consistently improve performance. Instruction tuning further enhances rule-based learning while preserving example-based capabilities, with rule advantages being strongest for algebraic tasks and weaker for tasks requiring distributional sensitivity or parametric knowledge.
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:2607. 19345v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models that generate step-by-step reasoning traces have achieved strong performance on complex tasks, and extending them to long-context settings has emerged as an important frontier.
Contextual entrainment, which is a newly discovered phenomenon in large language models (LLMs), refers to the tendency of a model to assign higher probabilities to tokens that appear in its context. In this work, we extend this phenomenon from the token level to the sentence level by examining the per-token mean log-probability of a sentence instead of the probabilities of individual tokens.
arXiv:2607. 02509v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Understanding and reasoning over long contexts has become a key requirement for deploying large language models (LLMs) in realistic applications.
As large language models (LLMs) grow more capable, they are increasingly deployed in context-rich settings where task inputs are often accompanied by long, partially irrelevant context. In a controlled setting, we find that state-of-the-art models often appear robust to task-irrelevant context at the aggregate level: prepending it to benchmark questions causes little change in overall accuracy.
arXiv:2609.24238v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We reproduce and stress-test the work of Yu et al. (2023), who characterize how language models (LMs) arbitrate between memorized knowledge and contrad...
arXiv:2510. 01163v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The factors driving the performance of in-context learning (ICL) in large language models (LLMs) remain poorly understood despite ICL's surprising effectiveness, enabling models to adapt to new tasks from only a handful of examples.