arXiv Machine Learning By William Dai, Zhenghao Herbert Zhou, Maya Viswanathan, Robert Frank

Where's the Indirect Evidence? Investigating Grammatical Generalization with Influence Functions

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The paper investigates indirect evidence in language models by applying influence functions to identify training sentences that affect predictions on 15 grammatical phenomena from BLiMP. After filtering out direct evidence, the authors select the 60,000 most influential remaining sentences and show that removing them significantly degrades held‑out accuracy, more so than random removal. They further analyze the characteristics of this indirect evidence and demonstrate that clustering phenomena based on shared indirect evidence recovers known linguistic categories.

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