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A Latent Space Theory for Emergent Abilities in Large Language Models

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arxiv 2304.09960 v3 pith:QE6QO4FG submitted 2023-04-19 cs.CL cs.AIcs.LG

classification cs.CLcs.AIcs.LG
keywords languagesdistributionjointsparseabilitieseffectiveemergentlanguage
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Languages are not created randomly but rather to communicate information. There is a strong association between languages and their underlying meanings, resulting in a sparse joint distribution that is heavily peaked according to their correlations. Moreover, these peak values happen to match with the marginal distribution of languages due to the sparsity. With the advent of LLMs trained on big data and large models, we can now precisely assess the marginal distribution of languages, providing a convenient means of exploring the sparse structures in the joint distribution for effective inferences. In this paper, we categorize languages as either unambiguous or {\epsilon}-ambiguous and present quantitative results to demonstrate that the emergent abilities of LLMs, such as language understanding, in-context learning, chain-of-thought prompting, and effective instruction fine-tuning, can all be attributed to Bayesian inference on the sparse joint distribution of languages.

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Cited by 3 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

  1. Training with (Swap) Regret Loss in a Single-Layer Self-Attention Model: A Case Study on the Probability Simplex

    cs.LG 2026-07 conditional novelty 7.0 of 10

    Training single-layer attention with squared regret loss has stationary points that implement smoothed fictitious play (external regret) and, via a new swap-regret loss, the Blum–Mansour no-swap-regret algorithm.

  2. Transformers as Multi-task Learners: Decoupling Features in Hidden Markov Models

    cs.LG 2025-06 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    A hand-constructed O(ln L + T)-layer Transformer is shown to approximate low-rank hidden Markov models in-context, with lower layers extracting local history features and upper layers performing regression-based decoding.

  3. The Role of Diversity in In-Context Learning for Large Language Models

    cs.CL 2025-05 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Diversity-aware selection of in-context examples improves performance on complex and out-of-distribution tasks, though effect sizes are often modest.

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