arXiv Machine Learning
5d ago

Skill Issue: Are Skills Language-Invariant in LLMs?

The paper investigates whether large language models (LLMs) exhibit language‑specific skill differences by having two identical model instances play a text‑based game in different languages. Using a multilingual extension of TextArena, the authors evaluate three open‑weight models across eight languages and six games, finding that the same model can show markedly different performance—varying win–loss margins, invalid actions, and strategic choices—depending on the language interface. Analyses pinpoint language‑specific failures in spatial reasoning, card‑conditioned decisions, and optimal move selection, and demonstrate that adjusting the intermediate reasoning language can recover much of the lost performance.

By Bobby Cheng, Adam Gaber, Zhengyuan Liu, Catherine Arnett, Omer Goldman, Cheston Tan, Leshem Choshen
arXiv Machine Learning
1d ago

Acquire, Repair, Preserve: A Diagnosis-Guided Post-Training Recipe for Small-Model Dialogue Game Agents

The paper presents a post‑training recipe for small dialogue‑game agents that involves three steps: acquiring broad game participation via supervised fine‑tuning, repairing specific local failures with turn‑local preference pairs, and preserving general capabilities. Applied to the LM Playschool Challenge, the method raises the public clemscore from 10.67 to 38.92 and the closed in‑domain score from 13.41 to 41.17 while keeping overall static performance nearly unchanged. The gains are mainly within the targeted game family, with limited improvement on out‑of‑domain clemscore.

By Nan Li