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natural language processing

6,613 papers

#machine learning Preprint Oct 2026

Evaluating and Improving the Robustness of Large Language Models to Input Sequence Variations

Large language models (LLMs) in production systems face prompt injections, trojans (backdoors), and manipulation of automatic quality metrics. This thesis develops models, methods, and algorithms for evaluating and improving LLM robustness to adversarial input sequence variations. We propose R_stab(f), a generative rob...

N. Maloyan · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Sep 2026

Budgeted Cache Repair for Cross-Context KV-Cache Reuse

Cross-context KV-cache reuse predicts a shared segment's keys and values under a new prefix instead of recomputing them, and has been reported to do so without quality loss. We find otherwise, and identify two problems. (1) A hidden cost: on MMLU and GSM8K, reuse costs substantial accuracy. (2) A decision at the wrong...

Haeyong Kang, C. D. Yoo · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Oct 2026

Pivot-SD: Efficient Self-Distillation for Masked Diffusion Language Models

Masked diffusion language models (dLMs) offer a promising parallel alternative to autoregressive models for complex reasoning. However, they face a distinct credit-assignment challenge, since a few commitments during denoising sharply reduce the uncertainty over the remaining masked positions and shape much of the resp...

Seo Hyun Kim, Sun-Woo Hong, Younwoo Choi et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Oct 2026

Divergence controls entropy in distillation

Distillation has become a core primitive of large language model training, but its properties are not yet well understood. We take an entropic perspective, studying how the entropy of the student depends on the data and the divergence that define the distillation objective. We prove that forward KL inflates the entropy...

Nicolas Zucchet, Scott W. Linderman · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Oct 2026

AdaStep: Adaptive Step Credit Weighting for Agentic Reinforcement Learning

Long-horizon LLM agents are typically trained with sparse outcome rewards, making trajectory-level objectives too coarse to distinguish the contribution of individual decisions. Step-level credit assignment provides finer-grained supervision, but its estimates can be unreliable because observed returns also depend on s...

X. Wang, Wen-Hao Wu, Meng-Hao Zhang et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Predicting and Repairing Merge Collapse in Large Language Models

Large language models fine-tuned from a shared base can be merged by averaging their task vectors, but some merges collapse far below the base model, and common merge operators give no warning before evaluation. We show that one statistic of the specialists' task vectors both predicts this collapse and calibrates its r...

Jungseob Lee, Seungyoon Lee, Sugyeong Eo et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Oct 2026

Adaptive Second-Order Solvers for Fast Stochastic Diffusion Sampling

Diffusion models rely on numerical solvers requiring time-discretization, which has a large influence on the tradeoff between sampling cost and quality. However, the computational difficulty of the reverse process varies along the sampling trajectory and across data distributions, making the choice of discretization im...

E. Kemperman, Luca Ambrogioni · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Oct 2026

Understanding Trajectory Heterogeneity in Federated World Model Learning

World models learn state evolution from trajectories, making access to temporal context a central training requirement. Federated learning can use distributed records, while ownership boundaries within a trajectory restrict the examples each client can construct. Our study benchmarks this cross-time setting through hou...

Yi-Pan Wei, Zhao-Kun Yan, Zi-Ming Hong et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Probe the Harness: Setup Checks for Stale-Data RL Comparisons in Language Models

Methods for training language models on stale samples are judged by comparisons against importance-corrected baselines. We show that details of the experimental harness can reverse the observed ranking of methods, and we introduce PTH (Probe The Harness), a set of checks that makes the harness visible. Our case is a co...

Taiheng Pan · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Oct 2026

To Explore The Strange New World Beyond Data Distribution: System Behavior, Causality Tax, and Non-causal Base Model

We show that the causality of language models (LMs) may not be necessary nor optimal. This is the case when system behavior (denoted as $S$) is incorporated as a first-principle Bayesian feature. Here, $S$ refers to extra dominant factors beyond the data space, and they involve coupled effects. Despite being the de fac...

Xianzhi Zeng, Jiangneng Li, Gao Cong · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Oct 2026

Learning from Evolving Errors: Adaptive Iterative Repair for On-Policy Distillation

On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) supplies dense token-level feedback on trajectories sampled from the student's own policy, a richer training signal than the outcome-level rewards of reinforcement learning. This feedback comes from a teacher conditioned on a full reference solution unavailable to the student. The ref...

Rui Li, Li-Yang He, Zheng Zhang et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Oct 2026

Capability Scaling-Down Laws for LLM Compression

LLM compression reduces inference costs and memory requirements, but selecting a method and configuration remains largely empirical because comparable resource reductions can produce different capability losses. We systematically investigate capability scaling-down laws for LLM compression across pruning, quantization,...

Xue-Qi Cheng, Liang Wu, Kelly Wan et al. · 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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