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natural language processing

6,757 papers

#machine learning Preprint Sep 2026

Evasion Attacks: How Adversarial Noise Bypasses ML Classifiers

This paper presents a reproducible, educational study of evasion attacks in image classification and text classification. A compact convolutional network trained on MNIST reached 98.63% clean test accuracy and was evaluated under two white-box attacks. Under FGSM, accuracy fell to 60.20% at $\epsilon$ = 0.15 and 1.72%...

Parker Hummel, Ryne Skabo, Muhammad Abusaqer · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Oct 2026

High-Value Synthetic Supervision for Parameter-Efficient Adaptation of a Compact Japanese Speech Model

Private domain speech is difficult to collect and redistribute, while compact models need task-specific supervision. We study an auditable synthetic pipeline that maps Japanese care handoffs directly to six-field structured notes. Using 182 synthetic training and development clips, we adapt a 1.47B audio model by full...

Sidi Chang, Peiying Zhu · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Sep 2026

Encoded but Disconnected: Decomposing Vision-Language Model Failures under a Patching Null

Across three vision-language model architectures (LLaVA-1.5-7B, Qwen2.5-VL-7B, InternVL3-8B), we report a universal negative finding for mid-layer interpretability. On POPE -- the benchmark common to all three -- the mid layers encode the ground-truth answer in 68-91% of errors, yet this signal is not causally active f...

Gen-Pei Zhang · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Oct 2026

Every Ablation Is a Dose: Counterweights and the Semblance of Self-Repair

Ablate a component of a language model, and other components often appear to adjust and compensate. This phenomenon, termed self-repair, has been observed repeatedly, but its mechanism remains unclear. The most systematic study to date concluded that self-repair is noisy and unlikely to have a single explanation. We ar...

Areeb Ahmad, Pratinav Seth, Vinay Kumar Sankarapu · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Latent JEPA: Abstract Future Prediction for Latent Reasoning in Chemistry

Large language models offer a promising foundation for chemical reasoning, bringing together chemical knowledge and multistep problem solving. Chemical intuition can provide an initial sense of plausible outcomes before the details of a solution are fully worked out. Inspired by how such expectations complement explici...

Xinjian Zhao, Yaoyao Xu, Xuemin Chen et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Oct 2026

Stochastic Rounding in Low-Precision Transformer Inference: A Variable-Precision Emulation Study of a Small GPT-2

Should low-precision transformer inference use stochastic rounding (SR) or round-to-nearest (RN)? The answer depends on where in the network you look. We isolate this effect by holding the numerical format fixed and varying only the rounding rule at individual operation sites. To enable experiments at freely chosen pre...

Yohan Chatelain, Pablo de Oliveira Castro Krembil Centre for Neuroinformatics, Camh et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Oct 2026

Beyond Linear Concepts: Discovering and Aligning Non-Linear Concept Manifolds in Large Language Models

Understanding information processing in large language models (LLMs) requires dissecting the geometric organization of their internal token representations. While existing mechanistic interpretability (MI) methods seek to extract concepts, they are constrained by a strong linearity assumption challenged by evidence of...

Tido Specht, Elias Krey, Nils Neukirch et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Oct 2026

A Safe Prototype Is Not a Safety Direction: Reference Dependence and Prompt Confounds in Response-Safety Embeddings

Can response safety be scored by cosine similarity to the mean embedding of known-safe responses? A recent sleeper-agent detector proposes exactly this score, yet the raw positive-centroid rule is not identified: positive observations locate the safe class relative to an encoder origin, but do not determine which direc...

Sahil Kadadekar · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Oct 2026

QK-Wanda: Coupling Queries and Keys for Unstructured Pruning

Wanda (Sun et al., 2024) prunes large language models by scoring weights independently within each linear projection, although queries and keys interact through dot products. We introduce QK-Wanda, which scores query and key weights by their individual deletion costs under an unmasked pre-RoPE reconstruction objective....

Ivan D. Ilin, Peter Richtárik · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Persistent Depth Ordering amid Shifting Block-Bypass Responses in Language Model Pretraining

Layer interventions are widely used to probe the internal organization of language models, yet most analyses examine a single training checkpoint even though model representations and computations evolve throughout pretraining. This leaves open which depth-dependent intervention responses reflect persistent organizatio...

Shengye Tao, Yinzhu Cheng, Haihua Xie · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Sep 2026

Make Sparse Rewards Count: Density-Aware Reward Aggregation for Multi-Reward RL

Multi-reward reinforcement learning trains large language models to satisfy multiple behavioral objectives simultaneously. Reward-wise normalization, as used in GDPO, preserves reward-specific relative information within rollout groups, but different objectives can still exhibit uneven learning progress. We study this...

Tong Zheng, Skylar Zhai, Zhan Cheng et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Sep 2026

When Do Attention-Head Ablations Support Causal Claims? Projection-Level Confounds, Floor Effects, and Matched Controls

Attention-head ablation, zeroing a head and measuring the resulting change in task performance, is a common method for inferring which components of a language model are causally responsible for a behavior. We show using GPT-2 small that this inference can be fragile unless the intervention semantics, evaluation metric...

Ju-Li Huang · 0 citations

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MIT News · Artificial Intelligence Sep 24, 2026

Estimating suicide risk from text

A new language-processing tool could help identify the highest-risk individuals from natural language, enabling swifter interventions.

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