arXiv:2606. 17417v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Audio Language Models (LALMs) achieve strong performance on a variety of audio understanding tasks but continue to struggle with temporal reasoning, a fundamental capability central to human auditory perception.
By Apoorva Kulkarni, Kaousheik Jayakumar, Sreyan Ghosh, Sarah Wiegreffe, Dinesh Manocha, Ramani Duraiswami
The study investigates how lexical perturbations—such as keyboard noise, character swaps, and filler insertion—affect large language models (LLMs) on reasoning benchmarks. Four open-weight instruction-tuned models and frontier models were evaluated, revealing that character-level perturbations significantly reduce accuracy, especially on multi-step reasoning tasks, while filler insertion has minimal impact. The authors attribute this asymmetry to Attention Diversion, where fragmented subword tokenization draws disproportionate attention in middle and final transformer layers; they demonstrate that both token content and attention allocation are coupled, making it difficult for inference-time repair strategies to fully recover performance.
By Jiaqian Zhu, Yang Zhang, Junhua Ding, Xiaowei Yu
arXiv:2608. 07525v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Hallucination remains a persistent challenge for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), severely limiting their reliability in high-stakes applications.
By Pengfei Zhou, Jiajun Song, Zhiwei Tang, Yixing Ma, Xiaopeng Peng, Donghui Si, Yuhang Xu, Huiqi Song, Yiyuan Miao, Yichen Qian, Weihua Chen, Wangbo Zhao, Bohan Zhuang, Jiasheng Tang, Yang You
arXiv:2606. 24267v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: While in-context learning is generally shown to be effective in Large Language Models (LLMs), bad contexts can cause performance degradation and mode collapse, a phenomenon we call "pigeonholing.
By Hyunji Nam, Keertana Chidambaram, Dorottya Demszky, Natasha Jaques
As large language models (LLMs) grow more capable, they are increasingly deployed in context-rich settings where task inputs are often accompanied by long, partially irrelevant context. In a controlled setting, we find that state-of-the-art models often appear robust to task-irrelevant context at the aggregate level: prepending it to benchmark questions causes little change in overall accuracy.
arXiv:2606. 24267v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While in-context learning is generally shown to be effective in Large Language Models (LLMs), bad contexts can cause performance degradation and mode collapse, a phenomenon we call "pigeonholing.
By Hyunji Nam, Keertana Chidambaram, Dorottya Demszky, Natasha Jaques