Chain-of-thought prompting, by including intermediate reasoning steps in few-shot examples, elicits strong reasoning abilities in large language models on arithmetic, commonsense, and symbolic tasks.
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Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models
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We study empirical scaling laws for language model performance on the cross-entropy loss. The loss scales as a power-law with model size, dataset size, and the amount of compute used for training, with some trends spanning more than seven orders of magnitude. Other architectural details such as network width or depth have minimal effects within a wide range. Simple equations govern the dependence of overfitting on model/dataset size and the dependence of training speed on model size. These relationships allow us to determine the optimal allocation of a fixed compute budget. Larger models are significantly more sample-efficient, such that optimally compute-efficient training involves training very large models on a relatively modest amount of data and stopping significantly before convergence.
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- abstract We study empirical scaling laws for language model performance on the cross-entropy loss. The loss scales as a power-law with model size, dataset size, and the amount of compute used for training, with some trends spanning more than seven orders of magnitude. Other architectural details such as network width or depth have minimal effects within a wide range. Simple equations govern the dependence of overfitting on model/dataset size and the dependence of training speed on model size. These relationships allow us to determine the optimal allocation of a fixed compute budget. Larger models are s
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representative citing papers
BBO-Pile is the first large-scale open dataset of real optimization trajectories used to train and scale foundation models that imitate black-box optimization methods.
Introduces the Synthetic Data Contamination Equilibrium and derives closed-form optimal provenance subsidies s* = KL(q||p)/(2 kappa) plus watermark strengths to mitigate model collapse, validated by OLS matching structural predictions on C4 data.
Cayley unitary adapters executed on real quantum hardware improve LLM perplexity by 1.4% on Llama 3.1 8B with 6000 parameters and recover 83% of compression-induced degradation on SmolLM2.
ε-coresets for attention exist of size O(√d e^{ρ+o(ρ)}/ε) for unit-norm keys/values and queries of norm ≤ρ, nearly matching the Ω(√d e^ρ/ε) lower bound.
RoundPipe achieves near-zero-bubble pipeline parallelism for LLM training on consumer GPUs by dynamically dispatching computation stages round-robin, yielding 1.48-2.16x speedups and enabling 235B model fine-tuning on 8x RTX 4090.
Transformer weight spectra exhibit transient compression waves that propagate layer-wise, persistent non-monotonic depth gradients in power-law exponents, and Q/K-V asymmetry, with the spectral exponent alpha predicting layer importance and enabling pruning gains of 1.1x-3.6x over Last-N baselines.
Grokking reflects escape from a metastable low-dimensional regime where transverse curvature accumulates before generalization, with subspace motion necessary but curvature boost insufficient.
The SDE benchmark shows LLMs lag on scientific discovery tasks relative to general science tests, with diminishing scaling returns and shared weaknesses across models.
Transformers perform kernel-based prediction for Hölder regression on manifolds and achieve intrinsic-dimension-dependent minimax rates with sufficient training tasks.
Introduces hybrid noise and novel coupling analysis to achieve the first convergent hidden-state DP bound for zeroth-order optimization.
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TTT layers treat the hidden state as a trainable model updated at test time, allowing linear-complexity sequence models to scale perplexity reduction with context length unlike Mamba.
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citing papers explorer
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Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models
Chain-of-thought prompting, by including intermediate reasoning steps in few-shot examples, elicits strong reasoning abilities in large language models on arithmetic, commonsense, and symbolic tasks.
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Large Language Diffusion Models
LLaDA is a scalable diffusion-based language model that matches autoregressive LLMs like LLaMA3 8B on tasks and surpasses GPT-4o on reversal poem completion.
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ErrorRadar: Benchmarking Complex Mathematical Reasoning of Multimodal Large Language Models Via Error Detection
ErrorRadar is a new benchmark of 2,500 multimodal K-12 math problems for MLLM error step identification and categorization, where GPT-4o trails human experts by ~10%.
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TinyStories: How Small Can Language Models Be and Still Speak Coherent English?
Tiny language models under 10M parameters trained on a synthetic children's story dataset generate fluent, consistent, multi-paragraph English text with near-perfect grammar and reasoning.
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Pythia: A Suite for Analyzing Large Language Models Across Training and Scaling
Pythia releases 16 identically trained LLMs with full checkpoints and data tools to study training dynamics, scaling, memorization, and bias in language models.
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Discovering Language Model Behaviors with Model-Written Evaluations
Language models can automatically generate high-quality evaluation datasets that reveal new cases of inverse scaling, sycophancy, and concerning goal-seeking behaviors, including some worsened by RLHF.
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The Pile: An 800GB Dataset of Diverse Text for Language Modeling
The Pile is a newly constructed 825 GiB dataset from 22 diverse sources that enables language models to achieve better performance on academic, professional, and cross-domain tasks than models trained on Common Crawl variants.
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CORTEX: High-Quality Cross-Domain Organization of Web-Scale Corpora through Ontological Corpus Graph
Cortex uses an Ontological Corpus Graph to structure web-scale corpora, creating a refined 24.14B-token corpus and a new benchmark validated on eight LLMs.
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Smooth Scaling Laws Hide Stepwise Token Learning
Token loss trajectories follow localized sigmoids whose learning-time spectrum quantitatively reconstructs scaling-law derivatives on T, D, and M axes and enables faster training via distribution reshaping.
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D$^3$: Dynamic Directional Graph-Constrained Data Scheduling for LLM Training
D³ introduces a dynamic directional graph-constrained framework that models sample interactions via loss dependencies to derive an optimized training sequence for LLMs.
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Latent Performance Profiling of Large Language Models
Introduces Latent Performance Profiling (LPP) as a task-agnostic framework deriving scalar metrics from LLM latent representations and dynamics to complement benchmark evaluations.
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Does Capability Transfer to Subjective Behavior -- and Would Our Instruments Tell Us? A Self-Evolving, Trust-by-Construction Evaluation Paradigm
Self-evolving rubric with anti-gaming fitness reveals that objective capability scaling fails to transfer to subjective LLM behaviors, with advice-restraint as the universal lowest dimension that can regress.
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Tokenisation via Convex Relaxations
ConvexTok uses convex relaxation of tokenization to a linear program, improving intrinsic metrics, bits-per-byte, and some downstream tasks while certifying near-optimality within 1% at typical vocabulary sizes.
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A Data-Efficient Path to Multilingual LLMs: Language Expansion via Post-training PARAM$\Delta$ Integration into Upcycled MoE
PARAMΔ upcycles dense models to MoE for per-language experts and grafts post-training deltas to enable data-efficient language expansion while preserving original capabilities.
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Learning Less Is More: Premature Upper-Layer Attention Specialization Hurts Language Model Pretraining
Temporarily reducing the learning rate on upper-layer query and key projections during early GPT pretraining prevents premature attention specialization and improves model performance.
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Logic-Regularized Verifier Elicits Reasoning from LLMs
LOVER creates an unsupervised logic-regularized verifier that reaches 95% of supervised verifier performance on reasoning tasks across 10 datasets.
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Fine-tuning vs. In-context Learning in Large Language Models: A Formal Language Learning Perspective
A controlled formal language task reveals fine-tuning outperforms in-context learning on in-distribution generalization but equals it on out-of-distribution, with ICL showing greater sensitivity to model size and tokenization.
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Rethinking Scale: Deployment Trade-offs of Small Language Models under Agent Paradigms
Single-agent systems with tools provide the optimal performance-efficiency trade-off for small language models, outperforming base models and multi-agent setups.
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Efficient Low-Resource Language Adaptation via Multi-Source Dynamic Logit Fusion
TriMix dynamically fuses logits from three model sources to outperform baselines and Proxy Tuning on eight low-resource languages across four model families.
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Better and Worse with Scale: How Contextual Entrainment Diverges with Model Size
Contextual entrainment decreases for semantic contexts but increases for non-semantic ones as LLMs scale, following power-law trends with 4x better resistance to misinformation but 2x more copying of arbitrary tokens.
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Robust Explanations for User Trust in Enterprise NLP Systems
Decoder LLMs produce substantially more stable explanations than encoder models, with 73% lower top-token flip rates on average and further 44% gains from 7B to 70B scale.
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SeaAlert: Critical Information Extraction From Maritime Distress Communications with Large Language Models
SeaAlert generates synthetic noisy maritime distress transcripts via LLM and ASR simulation to train robust extraction of critical information from real VHF communications.
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Detection Without Correction: A Robust Asymmetry in Activation-Based Hallucination Probing
Activation probes detect hallucinations pre-generation in large LLMs but cannot correct them via steering, with output confidence outperforming on accuracy.
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Cross-Lingual Transfer and Parameter-Efficient Adaptation in the Turkic Language Family: A Theoretical Framework for Low-Resource Language Models
The paper introduces the Turkic Transfer Coefficient (TTC) as a theoretical measure of transfer potential and a scaling model linking adaptation performance to model capacity, data size, and adaptation module expressivity in Turkic languages.
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TF1-EN-3M: Three Million Synthetic Moral Fables for Training Small, Open Language Models
The authors generate and publicly release the first large-scale open dataset of three million structured moral fables produced by small open language models together with a reproducible LLM-judge evaluation pipeline.
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DeepSeek-V2: A Strong, Economical, and Efficient Mixture-of-Experts Language Model
DeepSeek-V2 delivers top-tier open-source LLM performance using only 21B active parameters by compressing the KV cache 93.3% and cutting training costs 42.5% via MLA and DeepSeekMoE.
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A Rank Stabilization Scaling Factor for Fine-Tuning with LoRA
LoRA adapters should be scaled by 1/sqrt(rank) rather than 1/rank to stabilize learning and enable effective use of higher ranks during fine-tuning of large language models.
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A decoder-only foundation model for time-series forecasting
A pretrained decoder-only patched transformer achieves near state-of-the-art zero-shot forecasting performance across diverse time series datasets and settings.
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Capabilities of GPT-4 on Medical Challenge Problems
GPT-4 exceeds the USMLE passing score by more than 20 points and outperforms both GPT-3.5 and the medically fine-tuned Med-PaLM on the MultiMedQA benchmarks.
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Program of Thoughts Prompting: Disentangling Computation from Reasoning for Numerical Reasoning Tasks
PoT prompting improves numerical reasoning by having language models write programs executed by a computer instead of performing calculations in natural language chains of thought, with an average 12% gain over CoT.
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OPT: Open Pre-trained Transformer Language Models
OPT releases open decoder-only transformers up to 175B parameters that match GPT-3 performance at one-seventh the carbon cost, along with code and training logs.
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Improving language models by retrieving from trillions of tokens
RETRO matches GPT-3 and Jurassic-1 performance on the Pile benchmark using 25 times fewer parameters by conditioning on retrieved chunks from a 2-trillion-token database.
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MiqraBERT: Regression-Based Sentence-BERT Finetuning for Biblical Hebrew Parallel Detection
MiqraBERT, a finetuned Sentence-BERT model, achieves 2.7-fold better distributional separation of parallel versus non-parallel Biblical Hebrew verses and reduces ambiguous overlap from 24% to 6%, with strong performance on narrative but weak on poetic parallels.
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Hubs or Fringes: Pretraining Data Selection via Web Graph Centrality
Web graph centrality from Common Crawl supplies an orthogonal signal for pretraining data selection that improves language model performance when central and peripheral hosts are balanced.
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Consistency Training while Mitigating Obfuscation via Rate Matching
RMCT matches the rate of target behaviors like bias-following across input perturbations to reduce sycophancy in LLMs while preserving verbalization of bias cues.
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Memory Grafting: Scaling Language Model Pre-training via Offline Conditional Memory
Memory Grafting improves language-model benchmarks by grafting offline hidden-state memory from a larger model into a recipient model using n-gram lookups and lightweight adapters, outperforming MoE and vanilla Engram baselines at 0.92B and 2.8B scales.
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HRM-Text: Efficient Pretraining Beyond Scaling
A 1B-parameter hierarchical recurrent model pretrained on 40B instruction-response tokens achieves 60.7% MMLU and strong results on ARC-C, DROP, GSM8K, and MATH while using 100-900x fewer tokens than standard baselines.
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Predictable Confabulations: Factual Recall by LLMs Scales with Model Size and Topic Frequency
Factual recall quality in LLMs follows a sigmoid scaling law in the log-linear combination of model parameter count and topic frequency in training data, explaining 60% of variance across models and up to 94% within families.
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The Scaling Laws of Skills in LLM Agent Systems
Empirical analysis across 15 LLMs and 1,141 skills identifies a logarithmic routing decay law and a multiplicative execution law coupled by a single fitted slope parameter b that enables targeted library optimizations improving routing accuracy and downstream task pass rates.
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Stories in Space: In-Context Learning Trajectories in Conceptual Belief Space
LLMs perform in-context learning as trajectories through a structured low-dimensional conceptual belief space, with the structure visible in both behavior and internal representations and causally manipulable via interventions.
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PRISM: A Geometric Risk Bound that Decomposes Drift into Scale, Shape, and Head
PRISM supplies a geometric upper bound on LLM variant risk that splits drift into scale, shape, and head axes and doubles as a differentiable regularizer against forgetting.
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Freeze Deep, Train Shallow: Interpretable Layer Allocation for Continued Pre-Training
LayerTracer analysis identifies deep LLM layers as stable task-critical regions, leading to a shallow-train deep-freeze strategy that outperforms full fine-tuning on C-Eval and CMMLU.
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PaT: Planning-after-Trial for Efficient Test-Time Code Generation
PaT defers planning until after failed trials in LLM code generation, enabling heterogeneous cheap-plus-powerful model setups that match large-model performance at roughly 69% lower cost.
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InfoLaw: Information Scaling Laws for Large Language Models with Quality-Weighted Mixture Data and Repetition
InfoLaw models pretraining as information accumulation where quality sets information density and repetition causes scale-dependent diminishing returns, predicting loss with low error on unseen mixtures and larger scales up to 7B models and 425B tokens.
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CLEAR: Revealing How Noise and Ambiguity Degrade Reliability in LLMs for Medicine
CLEAR reveals that LLMs' accuracy on medical questions drops and their 'humility deficit' grows as the number of plausible answers increases and abstention options shift from assertive to uncertain phrasing.
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AGoQ: Activation and Gradient Quantization for Memory-Efficient Distributed Training of LLMs
AGoQ delivers up to 52% lower memory use and 1.34x faster training for 8B-32B LLaMA models by using near-4-bit adaptive activations and 8-bit gradients while preserving pretraining convergence and downstream accuracy.
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Mixture of Heterogeneous Grouped Experts for Language Modeling
MoHGE achieves standard MoE performance with 20% fewer parameters and balanced GPU utilization via grouped heterogeneous experts, two-level routing, and specialized auxiliary losses.
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Hybrid Policy Distillation for LLMs
Hybrid Policy Distillation unifies existing knowledge distillation methods for LLMs into a reweighted log-likelihood objective and introduces a hybrid forward-reverse KL approach with mixed data sampling to improve stability, efficiency, and performance.
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SAMoRA: Semantic-Aware Mixture of LoRA Experts for Task-Adaptive Learning
SAMoRA is a parameter-efficient fine-tuning framework that uses semantic-aware routing and task-adaptive scaling within a Mixture of LoRA Experts to improve multi-task performance and generalization over prior methods.
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Measuring Distribution Shift in User Prompts and Its Effects on LLM Performance
The LENS framework applied to 192 real-world settings shows moderate natural prompt distribution shifts cause 73% average performance loss in deployed LLMs, especially across user groups and regions.