arXiv AI
Oct 16

Knowledge That Is Linear Before Fine-Tuning Generalizes After It

The study investigates how well language models can generalize from fine‑tuned facts by distinguishing active facts—those that support further learning—from inert facts. Using a novel relabeling experiment (e.g., mapping Paris → Europe to Paris → crab), the authors fine‑tune models on a subset of subjects and test whether the learned mapping extends to unseen subjects sharing the same original answer. Across eleven models and 70 relations, they find a strong correlation (Pearson r = 0.87–0.92) between the linear readability of the original relation in pretrained representations and the model’s ability to generalize, a relationship that persists after controlling for various factors and remains robust to label randomization and semantic category changes.

By Faridoun Mehri, Hinrich Sch\"utze
arXiv AI
Jul 20

Verbalizable Representations Form a Global Workspace in Language Models

arXiv:2607. 15495v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Out of everything the human brain processes, only a small fraction is consciously accessible, in the sense of being available for verbal report, deliberate control, and flexible reasoning.

By Wes Gurnee, Nicholas Sofroniew, Adam Pearce, Mateusz Piotrowski, Isaac Kauvar, Runjin Chen, Anna Soligo, Paul Bogdan, Euan Ong, Rowan Wang, Ben Thompson, David Abrahams, Subhash Kantamneni, Emmanuel Ameisen, Joshua Batson, Jack Lindsey
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Oct 15

Knowledge That Is Linear Before Fine-Tuning Generalizes After It

The paper distinguishes between active facts, which help a language model generalize beyond mere recall, and inert facts, which do not. By relabeling answers to a known relation (e.g., Paris → Europe becomes Paris → crab) and fine‑tuning on a subset of subjects, the authors test whether the model can transfer the new label to unseen subjects sharing the same original answer. Across eleven models and 70 relations, the linear readability of the original relation in pretrained representations strongly predicts this generalization, with a Pearson correlation of 0.87–0.92, even after controlling for various factors.