arXiv Machine Learning

Language models suffer from a curse of ambiguity

arXiv:2608. 15448v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models increasingly rely on sampling as a driver of their own improvement, making the fidelity of their learned distributions more critical than ever.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 2

Prototype Language Models

arXiv:2607. 00510v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Knowing which training examples drive outputs is fundamental to auditing, correcting, and understanding language models, yet for modern LLMs this remains expensive, approximate, and largely post-hoc.

By Dan Ley, Giang Nguyen, Himabindu Lakkaraju, Julius Adebayo
arXiv AI
Sep 10

Limits of Reliability and Scaling in Language Models

The paper argues that large language models cannot achieve perfect reliability for any task, even with unlimited scale. It establishes that each generative task has an inherent reliability ceiling set by how much output uncertainty can be resolved from observable context, with a resolvable part that can be improved by more context and a subjective part tied to task ambiguity. The authors derive a scaling law showing that performance is limited by the scarcer resource—either training data or model capacity—and explain how this law explains phenomena such as retrieval augmentation and catastrophic forgetting.

By Subhabrata Majumdar
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 28

When Is Noise Response Universal? Tokenization as the Hidden Variable in Language Models

The study investigates how textual neural models degrade when inputs contain noise such as typos, OCR errors, or dropped words. It finds that model performance decline is largely consistent across architectures under word‑level noise but diverges under character‑level noise, a difference attributed to tokenization rather than architecture. By applying a short contrastive training recipe, diverse encoders converge to a common robustness curve, enabling prediction of a model’s noise resilience and the ability to enhance robustness at specific noise scales through targeted training.

By Yefan Tao, Gerald Friedland, Luyang Kong
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 23

Reading Calibrated Uncertainty from Language Model Trajectories

arXiv:2605. 22864v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The maximum softmax probability (MSP) represents a default approach when evaluating uncertainty quantification for language model generation with structured output.

By Aliai Eusebi, Alexander Herzog, Xiaoyu Liang, Marie Vasek, Enrico Mariconti, Lorenzo Cavallaro
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 11

Perturbation: A simple and efficient adversarial tracer for representation learning in language models

The paper introduces Perturbation, a method that treats representations in language models as learning conduits rather than activation patterns. By fine‑tuning a model on a single adversarial example and observing how this perturbation spreads to other inputs, the approach avoids geometric assumptions and does not identify representations in untrained models. In trained models, Perturbation uncovers structured transfer across multiple linguistic scales, indicating that language models generalize along representational lines and acquire linguistic abstractions through experience.

By Joshua Rozner, Cory Shain