Emergent Abilities in Large Language Models: A Survey reviews how scaling LLMs leads to previously unseen capabilities such as advanced reasoning, in-context learning, coding, and problem-solving. The paper critically examines definitions, inconsistencies, and the conditions that foster these abilities, including scaling laws, task complexity, pre‑training loss, quantization, and prompting strategies. It also discusses the extension to Large Reasoning Models and highlights safety concerns like deception, manipulation, and reward hacking, calling for improved evaluation and governance.
arXiv:2606. 17945v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models provide a tractable system for asking how intelligence itself emerges, rather than only how LLMs can be engineered.
The paper argues that large language models need adaptive reasoning rather than fixed reasoning budgets. It shows that over‑reasoning leads to high computational cost without accuracy gains, while under‑reasoning results in incorrect or incomplete solutions. The authors evaluate these failure modes on MATH‑500 and the GAIA benchmark, highlighting the need for dynamic reasoning allocation in agentic AI systems.
MEA is a multi‑agent framework that automates the selection and configuration of explanation tools for machine learning models across tabular, text, and vision data. A Proposer agent chooses appropriate tools based on the question and modality, while an Actor agent is trained end‑to‑end for faithfulness, producing natural‑language explanations. Experiments show that MEA outperforms existing post‑hoc explainers and closed‑source baselines, achieving significant faithfulness gains on six datasets.
The paper defends the 'Whole Hog Thesis', arguing that sophisticated large language models such as ChatGPT are full linguistic and cognitive agents, possessing understanding, beliefs, desires, knowledge, and intentions. It rejects low‑level computational starting points and instead builds its case from high‑level behavioral observations, using Holistic Network Assumptions to link actions to mental states. The authors systematically rebut common objections—such as hallucinations and planning errors—by showing these resemble human fallibility and by challenging the necessity of traditional conditions like embodiment or semantic grounding.
The study investigates whether the number of reasoning tokens produced by large language models can signal untruthful responses. Researchers prompted three models to answer 210 multiple‑choice questions under instructions to be truthful, deceptive, or indifferent, and found that truth‑directed answers consistently used fewer reasoning tokens than lie‑directed or indifferent ones. The results suggest that token count could serve as a simple, content‑independent indicator of untruthful behavior when full reasoning traces are unavailable.
arXiv:2609.01491v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The growing rate at which LLM agents interact with one another raises key questions about language evolution in multi-LLM-agent settings, with implic...
arXiv:2610.10405v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Monitoring the chain-of-thought of reasoning artificial intelligence (AI) models remains a key approach to detecting deception and other forms of mis...
arXiv:2606. 08682v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Activation steering has emerged as a popular inference-time technique for modulating the behavior of large language models (LLMs).
arXiv:2509. 14704v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Benchmark saturation and training-data contamination increasingly obscure whether reported gains in large language models (LLMs) reflect genuine advances in reasoning or familiarity with recurring patterns in benchmark problems.
arXiv:2606. 30481v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Current large language models are extraordinary statistical engines.
arXiv:2608. 01548v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Language can be viewed as a formalized subset of thought: a consequence-governed symbolic structure projected from wider situated cognition.
arXiv:2608.29118v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) on narrowly harmful datasets can lead to misalignment broadly, a phenomenon known as emergent misalignment (EM...