Large language models

Model releases, architecture work and prompting research on large language models — from frontier-lab announcements to the arXiv papers behind them.

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arXiv Statistics ML
Oct 1

Grokking through the Lens of Minimum-Norm Interpolation

The paper develops a statistical theory for minimum‑norm interpolation in high‑dimensional regression, showing how regularization geometry and signal sparsity affect generalization. It identifies regimes where sparsity‑promoting regularizers yield exact interpolation that is far more accurate than approximate fitting, and proves a zero–one generalization law for strongly overparameterized noiseless problems. The authors also characterize training and generalization errors along ρ‑regularization paths when feature dimension and sample size are proportional, demonstrating that generalization improves with more sparsity‑promoting norms and sparser targets, and that small changes in regularization strength can cause large shifts in generalization. whyItMatters":"The work provides a quantitative understanding of delayed generalization (grokking) and reveals a statistical instability in minimum‑norm interpolation, offering insights that could guide the design of regularizers for better generalization in overparameterized models."

By Gil Kur, Ileana Rugina, Cl\'ementine Carla Juliette Domin\'e, Marco Mondelli
arXiv AI
Oct 1

ChartDensity-Bench: Benchmarking MLLMs for Numerical Data Reconstruction under Visual Density

ChartDensity-Bench is a benchmark designed to evaluate multimodal large language models (MLLMs) on their ability to reconstruct structured numerical data from scientific charts that vary in visual density. The benchmark uses charts paired with source-level ground-truth data and systematically changes the number of simultaneously presented charts (k = 1, 3, 6, 9) to assess how density affects reconstruction performance. A multi‑dimensional evaluation framework measures structural reliability, reconstruction completeness, parseability, and numerical fidelity, revealing that numerical reconstruction generally worsens as visual density increases, with varying degrees of degradation across different models.

By Xinhe Wu, Yadong Jin
arXiv AI
Oct 1

Right Answers, Costly Models: The Efficiency Gap in LLM-based Optimization Modeling

The paper introduces OptTips, a knowledge base of 50 expert optimization modeling techniques, and OptDachshund, a multi‑agent framework that generates mathematical models and solver code from natural‑language problem descriptions. Using these tools, the authors create the EfficientOpt benchmark, comprising 561 expert‑reviewed tasks with paired reference implementations, to evaluate large language models (LLMs) on both correctness and computational efficiency. Their experiments with 11 LLMs show a consistent efficiency gap: even when LLMs produce correct solutions, the resulting programs often take longer to solve than expert‑crafted counterparts, highlighting the need to assess both accuracy and runtime performance in LLM‑based optimization modeling.

By Zhong Li, Xin Huang, Jinhui Wan, Xiangyi Wang, Shenkai Zhang, Ruiqi Chen, Wenyu Liu, Zaiwen Wen, Ziyan Luo
arXiv AI
Oct 1

Unmerge: Efficient Machine Unlearning via Task Arithmetic

The paper introduces Unmerge, an efficient machine unlearning algorithm that treats unlearning as the inverse of task arithmetic. By representing the forget component as a low‑rank basis at each layer, Unmerge optimizes three goals—matching the merged vector, suppressing leakage, and bounding correction size—to limit forget leakage and retain damage. Experiments on ResNet‑50, ViT‑S/16, and Llama‑3.2‑3B show significant performance gains over existing methods while maintaining privacy and feature‑distribution fidelity.

By Haoran Tang, Andrew Tan, Rajiv Khanna
arXiv AI
Oct 1

Unlearning Deceptive Behaviors in LLMs with Contrastive Forget Sets

The paper introduces PACT, a method for unlearning deceptive behaviors in large language models by using contrastive forget sets that compare a model’s responses under deceptive and neutral contexts. PACT trains the model to produce pressure‑aware counterfactual targets, preserving benign system‑prompt adherence and reasoning traces while dramatically reducing deception rates from over 50% to under 3% on 32B reasoning models.

By Haoran Tang, Rajiv Khanna
arXiv AI
Oct 1

GFD-OPD: Guidance-Folded On-Policy Distillation of Diffusion Models Across Scales

The paper introduces GFD-OPD, a method for on‑policy distillation of diffusion models that addresses challenges when compressing large teachers into smaller students. It identifies that standard distillation fails due to distribution gaps and classifier‑free guidance amplification, and proposes Fixed‑State KL to measure these gaps. GFD‑OPD reduces the student‑teacher discrepancy and achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance across multiple benchmarks.

By Zhenxing Zhang, Jiayan Teng, Wenxu Wu, Zhuoyi Yang, Jiazheng Xu, Wendi Zheng, Jie Tang, Dan Guo, Meng Wang
arXiv AI
Oct 1

Inference Auctions

The paper proposes an inference auction for large language model (LLM) APIs, enabling users to bid for faster service when compute demand exceeds capacity. The auction allocates priority efficiently without increasing latency, and includes fast algorithms for truthful bidding and an autobidding agent that adjusts bids within a user’s budget to maximize utility. Experiments show the auction improves system welfare while preserving the cache utilization and latency benefits of the SGLang inference framework.

By Keegan Harris, Siddharth Prasad, Asher Trockman, Nika Haghtalab, Michael I. Jordan
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 1

Doc2LoRA Provides Decodable Representations of Scientific Ideas

Doc2LoRA introduces a method to represent scientific papers as LoRA adapters generated by a hypernetwork, enabling each point in the resulting vector space—whether a real paper or a mixture—to be interpreted by a large language model (LLM). The approach allows both search and generation: it achieves competitive search performance with models like SPECTER2 and EmbeddingGemma, while also enabling the LLM to label subfields and generate abstracts that smoothly transition between papers. The invertible transform ensures every point maps back to an LLM, making the embeddings usable for both querying and creative idea generation.

By Chand Sahil Mansuri, Joel Zachariah, Sadamori Kojaku