arXiv AI By Jasmine Brazilek, Maria Navas, Alexa Gnauck

Small edits, large models: How Wikipedia advocacy shapes LLM values

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arXiv:2606. 24890v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Can a small group of volunteers shape how AI systems discuss animal welfare, just by editing Wikipedia?

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arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 18

LMEnt: A Suite for Analyzing Knowledge in Language Models from Pretraining Data to Representations

LMEnt is a toolkit designed to study how language models acquire and represent world knowledge. It includes a richly annotated pretraining corpus, an improved entity-based retrieval method, and twelve pretrained models with numerous checkpoints. The suite enables controlled experiments linking entity mentions in training data to downstream knowledge performance, revealing how co-occurrence patterns influence learning and editing difficulty.

By Daniela Gottesman, Alon Gilae-Dotan, Ido Cohen, Yoav Gur-Arieh, Marius Mosbach, Ori Yoran, Mor Geva
arXiv AI
Sep 10

Alignment Whack-a-Mole : Finetuning Activates Verbatim Recall of Copyrighted Books in Large Language Models

The paper demonstrates that fine‑tuning large language models on a single author’s works can trigger the models to reproduce large verbatim excerpts from copyrighted books, even when prompted only with semantic descriptions. Experiments on GPT‑4o, Gemini‑2.5‑Pro, and DeepSeek‑V3.1 show up to 85‑90% recall of held‑out books, with spans exceeding 460 words, and this effect generalizes across authors and model providers. The findings suggest that fine‑tuning reactivates latent memorization from pre‑training, revealing a widespread vulnerability in industry models.

By Xinyue Liu, Niloofar Mireshghallah, Jane C. Ginsburg, Tuhin Chakrabarty
arXiv Computation and Language
5d ago

When the Text Is Silent: Memory Shortcuts and the Validity of LLM Annotation under Evidence Insufficiency

The study investigates whether large language models (LLMs) rely on textual evidence or on their pre‑existing knowledge when annotating text. Using counterfactual prompts for 995 public figures, the authors find that LLMs often default to memory shortcuts—providing correct facts about a figure even when the text contains no supporting evidence. These shortcuts are amplified by evaluation design and incentives, but can be mitigated by name reminders or masking, though with trade‑offs in gender annotation.

By Wenchang Wang, Yue Song