arXiv Machine Learning

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.

arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 18

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.

By Nicolas Zucchet, Hyun Dong Lee, Scott Linderman
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
Sep 10

LLM Layers Immediately Correct Each Other

arXiv:2609.07876v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent methods in language model interpretability employ techniques such as sparse autoencoders to decompose residual stream contributions into linea...

By Arjun Patrawala, Jiahai Feng, Erik Jones, Jacob Steinhardt
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 20

Gradient Mirage: Trainable yet Label-Unidentifiable Gradients in Large Language Model Split Learning

Gradient Mirage is a defense for large language model split learning that disrupts the assumption that exposed gradients faithfully reflect the client’s full-label training objective, thereby thwarting gradient matching attacks. It introduces inconsistencies across objective, direction, and scale by using selective autoregressive supervision, scale blinding, and directional privatization with a von Mises-Fisher mechanism. The method preserves utility through dual-track backpropagation and bottom-gradient recovery, achieving a stronger privacy‑utility trade‑off in experiments.

By Shiyu Miao, Yunlong Mao, Zirui Huang, Liang Yao, Tianshuo Zheng, Yanhui Gu, Fan Liu, Sheng Zhong