The study measured the impact of a single training example on a GPT‑2 model by running 24 counterfactual experiments. 32 models were trained from scratch on OpenWebText, and at a specific training step a single batch row was replaced with a 194‑token passage under three conditions (fluent prose, fabricated subject, random characters) or left unchanged. Results showed that the passage was learned from one exposure and decayed, with measurable differences in cross‑entropy up to 50 steps after injection but no lasting effect at the final step.
By Zachary Speck, Asa Shepard
The paper investigates whether large language models’ reasoning traces truly contain early, informative signals or merely reflect budget and difficulty confounds. Using a restart‑controlled truncation probe, the authors compare continuation success rates against from‑scratch restart curves across 178 problem‑model pairs, finding that only one case shows prefix‑limited success and that continuing a model’s own prefix generally outperforms restarting. A difficulty‑controlled test and two generation‑free analyses reveal that early internal signals do not carry outcome information beyond a problem‑difficulty baseline, underscoring the need for proper counterfactual controls.
By Yigit Utku Bulut
arXiv:2608. 03263v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We test whether the "compositional ignition" reported in latent-reasoning models is real computation, an instrument artifact, or inherited from verbal training data.
By Simon Lam-Muir
arXiv:2609.01048v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Across the full Pythia suite (160M-12B, eight checkpoints, four task families), a linear probe can read a target variable from the residual stream as...
By Xining Xun
The paper investigates the safety of Code World Models, where a language model generates executable world models that a planner uses. It shows that accepting a model based on sampled transitions only guarantees sample consistency, not full safety, because the probability of missing critical events decays as (1‑r)^N. Experiments on hybrid instruments reveal that omitted mode‑boundaries can severely limit planner performance, and that even sophisticated LLMs (GPT‑5.x) struggle to repair such omissions in higher‑dimensional settings.
By Javier Aguilar Mart\'in
arXiv:2606. 15621v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Per-token counterfactual credit estimation asks which token in a language-model rollout caused the final answer to be right or wrong: cut the transcript at a pivot, substitute an alternative token, replay continuations, and compare outcomes.
By Nils Matteson
arXiv:2608.21262v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Many machine-learning systems set a threshold at a quantile of a calibration set: conformal predictors that promise 90% coverage by drawing their cut...
By Adam Noonan
The paper reports that agent evaluations often show a tool‑call rate of zero even when the model emits valid calls, because the interface censors the trajectory before downstream components see it. Experiments on BFCL v4 and tau‑bench demonstrate that swapping the serving adapter can change the observed call rate from 0.00 to 0.96/0.19 or from 0 to 636 calls, indicating that the interface—not the model—causes the discrepancy. A 98‑line preflight check is released to detect such silent failures, highlighting that tool‑call rates depend on the model‑interface stack rather than the model alone.
By Wenbo Wang
arXiv:2608. 20290v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Whether a language model has improved itself is increasingly judged not by mean accuracy but by which individual problems it gains and loses.
By Cheng Xu, Nan Yan, Liming Chen, M-Tahar Kechadi
arXiv:2607. 20129v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantized small autoregressive reasoning models can enter long, repetitive, or unproductive trajectories, yet inference-time compute is usually allocated without observing how a trajectory develops.
By El Hassane Ettifouri, Ayoub Belfatmi, Mahaman Sanoussi Yahaya Alassan, Walid Dahhane
arXiv:2607. 13048v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Streaming inference pipelines increasingly pair lightweight fast models with Large Language Models (LLMs) that provide rich semantic understanding at substantial cost.
By Zhaohui Wang
arXiv:2607. 04113v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Diffusion and flow-matching samplers integrate a learned probability-flow ODE from a large noise scale down to a small terminal floor $\sigma_{\min}$, at which the score is stiff and the flow develops a boundary layer.
By Shiheng Zhang