arXiv Computation and Language
6d ago
Where a Model Sends Its Own Repeated Token
arXiv:2609. 31181v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Black-box model identification works by scoring a model's response to natural-language prompts.
What Iterated Self-Feeding Probes of Language Models Measure, and a test that separates the construction from the model
arXiv:2608. 10986v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A growing class of methods probes a language model by feeding it its own output: self-consistency, iterated refinement, agentic loops.
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arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 11
A Fragility Spectrum for Recursive Language-Model Training
The paper investigates how recursive contamination—retraining language models on their own generated text—affects output diversity across 13 publicly released checkpoints. Using a fixed contamination protocol over five generations, the authors find a wide spread in 4‑gram diversity (0.187 to 0.940), indicating that some models collapse into repetitive fragments while others remain largely unaffected. The study shows that a model’s susceptibility to collapse is an intrinsic property of the checkpoint, not predicted by parameter scale or static indicators, and that simple interventions such as tightening top‑p sampling can significantly slow or halt collapse.
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 2
Deterministic LLM Inference Across GPU Kernels: Power-of-Two INT8 Quantization Scales and the Limits of Tolerance-Based Conformance
The paper evaluates the effectiveness of tolerance‑based conformance tests for INT8 quantized GEMM kernels used in large language models. By injecting nine faults into a Qwen3‑1.7B reference pipeline, the authors show that most faults shift outputs by at most one bfloat16 spacing, rendering a tolerance of one spacing blind to these errors. They further demonstrate that requantizing weight scales to the nearest power of two aligns CUTLASS and Triton implementations bit‑for‑bit and produces identical token sequences, with only minor perplexity changes.
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 27
AgentDiff: Meaning-Bearing Rewrites Trigger Deeper Divergence than Presentation Changes in LLM Agents
The paper introduces AgentDiff, a metric that quantifies how much LLM agents’ answers differ when inputs are altered by meaning‑bearing rewrites (paraphrases, synonym substitutions) versus presentation changes (reordering, formatting, distractors). Across 68 model–benchmark–scaffold combinations involving ten LLMs and over 1,500 questions, meaning‑bearing rewrites consistently produce a roughly 20‑percentage‑point higher inconsistency rate than presentation changes, a gap that persists across severity proxies and remains significant even outside the Qwen family. Trace analysis reveals that meaning‑bearing rewrites preserve the first action but reduce thought similarity from the second step onward, extending the divergence cascade—a phenomenon termed “stealth divergence.”
arXiv AI
3d ago
A Quantitative Study of Sustained Focus in Large Language Models via Repetitive Deterministic Prediction Tasks
arXiv:2511.00763v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We investigate the performance of large language models (LLMs) on repetitive deterministic prediction tasks and study how the sequence accuracy rat...
arXiv AI
Sep 15
Calibrating Interpretability Instruments Before Trusting Their Verdicts
arXiv:2609.14754v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Causal claims about large language model (LLM) internals rest on measurements. Those might include a projection, a cosine, an ablation delta, or an i...
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 14
Gauge dependence and structured-output corruption in sign-branched repetition penalties: measurements across models, inference stacks, and alternative repetition controls
arXiv:2607. 09791v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The multiplicative repetition penalty shipped across the LLM inference ecosystem (HuggingFace, vLLM, llama.
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 25
What a Cross-Model Fixed-Point Census Can and Cannot Arbitrate About Repetition
The paper investigates neural text degeneration by measuring the fixed‑point structure of short‑window argmax maps across 17 pretrained models, using 96 random two‑token starts without prompts. It finds a stable four‑way classification that varies across model families and scales, with some models funneling to a single endpoint token while others do not, and shows that this behavior is not solely determined by training data or corpus frequency. The study demonstrates that repetition phenomena are not uniformly explained by either training data or network architecture alone, highlighting the complexity of neural text generation dynamics.
arXiv AI
Aug 26
Feedback That Backfires: Why Small Language Model Agents Repeat the Call They Just Watched Fail
The study investigates why small language model agents tend to repeat a tool call that just failed. By recording the failed call and its error message in the transcript, the authors measure a negative corrective gain—agents are more likely to repeat the failed action, with a drop of about 1.03 nats per token. The problem is traced to the harness design rather than the model’s understanding of errors, and the authors show that replacing the verbatim call with a runtime-generated description of the failure can reduce this backfiring effect by 76%.
arXiv AI
4d ago
Break Step: Recursive Training Resonates with Replayed Sampling Noise
arXiv:2609.11149v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: How fast does a language model degrade when trained on its own outputs? Theory traces it to gradually accumulating errors, while experiments...
arXiv Machine Learning
1d ago
Every Ablation Is a Dose: Counterweights and the Semblance of Self-Repair
The paper investigates the phenomenon of self‑repair in language models, proposing that it arises from a pre‑existing gain in components that act as counterweights when a component is ablated. By modeling interventions as points on a counterfactual axis, the authors derive an affine law for the causal repair response of fine‑grained units, showing that most downstream directions across several models follow this law. They further demonstrate that the slope of this law can be predicted from fixed weights, suggesting that self‑repair is a predictable, counterweight‑driven response rather than a noisy, unexplained effect.
arXiv AI
Jun 9
Phantom transitions in language model fine-tuning
arXiv:2606. 07559v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Fine-tuning a language model on contexts whose correct completion has a near-synonym competitor often fails silently.