arXiv Machine Learning By Shengye Tao, Yinzhu Cheng, Haihua Xie

Persistent Depth Ordering amid Shifting Block-Bypass Responses in Language Model Pretraining

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The study investigates how layer‑wise intervention responses in language models change over the course of pretraining, using single‑block identity bypass across multiple checkpoints and model‑domain combinations. It finds that while depth ordering of responses persists, their magnitudes shift, with nearby checkpoints showing stronger rank correspondence than distant ones and large changes occurring at positions that recur across samples and transfer across evaluation domains. Controlled experiments reveal that these longitudinal changes cannot be explained by a single downstream sensitivity and depend on perturbation strength and direction, indicating that layer sensitivity is structured but dynamic.

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arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 10

One Step, One Lead: Mitigating Higher-Order Interference in Multi-Domain Reinforcement Learning via Cross-Step Control

The paper introduces OSOL, a method for mitigating higher‑order interference in multi‑domain reinforcement learning. OSOL selects a focus domain each iteration, uses token‑level footprints from the previous checkpoint to rank rebound risk, and applies an adaptively scaled correction to the GRPO update. Experiments on Qwen3‑30B‑A3B show a 5.7% improvement over the best baseline without higher‑order differentiation.

By Zihan Lin, Xiaohan Wang, Jie Cao, Jiajun Chai, Guojun Yin, Wei Lin, Ran He
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 4

How Perturbations Propagate: A Multi-Level Analysis of Robustness in Large Language Models

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By Dun Li Chan, Emily Liu, Niyathi Allu, Christian Hoang