Daily Papers

Machine unlearning aims to remove specific content from trained models while preserving overall performance. However, the phenomenon of benign relearning, in which forgotten information reemerges even from benign fine-tuning data, reveals that existing unlearning methods remain fundamentally fragile. A common explanation attributes this effect to topical relevance, but we find this account insufficient. Through systematic analysis, we demonstrate that syntactic similarity, rather than topicality, is the primary driver: across benchmarks, syntactically similar data consistently trigger recovery even without topical overlap, due to their alignment in representations and gradients with the forgotten content. Motivated by this insight, we introduce syntactic diversification, which paraphrases the original forget queries into heterogeneous structures prior to unlearning. This approach effectively suppresses benign relearning, accelerates forgetting, and substantially alleviates the trade-off between unlearning efficacy and model utility.

Understanding and accurately following instructions is critical for large language models (LLMs) to be effective across diverse tasks. In this work, we rigorously examine the key factors that enable models to generalize to unseen instructions, providing insights to guide the collection of data for instruction-tuning. Through controlled experiments, inspired by the Turing-complete Markov algorithm, we demonstrate that such generalization only emerges when training data is diversified enough across semantic domains. Our findings also reveal that merely diversifying within limited domains fails to ensure robust generalization. In contrast, cross-domain data diversification, even under constrained data budgets, significantly enhances a model's adaptability. We further extend our analysis to real-world scenarios, including fine-tuning of $textbf{specialist} and textbf{generalist}$ models. In both cases, we demonstrate that 1) better performance can be achieved by increasing the diversity of an established dataset while keeping the data size constant, and 2) when scaling up the data, diversifying the semantics of instructions is more effective than simply increasing the quantity of similar data. Our research provides important insights for dataset collation, particularly when optimizing model performance by expanding training data for both specialist and generalist scenarios. We show that careful consideration of data diversification is key: training specialist models with data extending beyond their core domain leads to significant performance improvements, while generalist models benefit from diverse data mixtures that enhance their overall instruction-following capabilities across a wide range of applications. Our results highlight the critical role of strategic diversification and offer clear guidelines for improving data quality.

The development and evaluation of Large Language Models (LLMs) has primarily focused on their task-solving capabilities, with recent models even surpassing human performance in some areas. However, this focus often neglects whether machine-generated language matches the human level of diversity, in terms of vocabulary choice, syntactic construction, and expression of meaning, raising questions about whether the fundamentals of language generation have been fully addressed. This paper emphasizes the importance of examining the preservation of human linguistic richness by language models, given the concerning surge in online content produced or aided by LLMs. We propose a comprehensive framework for evaluating LLMs from various linguistic diversity perspectives including lexical, syntactic, and semantic dimensions. Using this framework, we benchmark several state-of-the-art LLMs across all diversity dimensions, and conduct an in-depth case study for syntactic diversity. Finally, we analyze how different development and deployment choices impact the linguistic diversity of LLM outputs.

An ability that underlies human syntactic knowledge is determining which words can appear in the similar structures (i.e. grouping words by their syntactic categories). These groupings enable humans to combine structures in order to communicate complex meanings. A foundational question is how do children acquire this ability underlying syntactic knowledge. In exploring this process, we will review various engineering approaches whose goal is similar to that of a child's -- without prior syntactic knowledge, correctly identify the parts of speech (POS) of the words in a sample of text. In reviewing these unsupervised tagging efforts, we will discuss common themes that support the advances in the models and their relevance for language acquisition. For example, we discuss how each model judges success (evaluation metrics), the "additional information" that constrains the POS learning (such as orthographic information), and the context used to determine POS (only previous word, words before and after the target, etc). The identified themes pave the way for future investigations into the cognitive processes that underpin the acquisition of syntactic categories and provide a useful layout of current state of the art unsupervised POS tagging models.

For an LLM to correctly respond to an instruction it must understand both the semantics and the domain (i.e., subject area) of a given task-instruction pair. However, syntax can also convey implicit information Recent work shows that syntactic templates -- frequent sequences of Part-of-Speech (PoS) tags -- are prevalent in training data and often appear in model outputs. In this work we characterize syntactic templates, domain, and semantics in task-instruction pairs. We identify cases of spurious correlations between syntax and domain, where models learn to associate a domain with syntax during training; this can sometimes override prompt semantics. Using a synthetic training dataset, we find that the syntactic-domain correlation can lower performance (mean 0.51 +/- 0.06) on entity knowledge tasks in OLMo-2 models (1B-13B). We introduce an evaluation framework to detect this phenomenon in trained models, and show that it occurs on a subset of the FlanV2 dataset in open (OLMo-2-7B; Llama-4-Maverick), and closed (GPT-4o) models. Finally, we present a case study on the implications for safety finetuning, showing that unintended syntactic-domain correlations can be used to bypass refusals in OLMo-2-7B Instruct and GPT-4o. Our findings highlight two needs: (1) to explicitly test for syntactic-domain correlations, and (2) to ensure syntactic diversity in training data, specifically within domains, to prevent such spurious correlations.

This paper analyses the degree to which dialect classifiers based on syntactic representations remain stable over space and time. While previous work has shown that the combination of grammar induction and geospatial text classification produces robust dialect models, we do not know what influence both changing grammars and changing populations have on dialect models. This paper constructs a test set for 12 dialects of English that spans three years at monthly intervals with a fixed spatial distribution across 1,120 cities. Syntactic representations are formulated within the usage-based Construction Grammar paradigm (CxG). The decay rate of classification performance for each dialect over time allows us to identify regions undergoing syntactic change. And the distribution of classification accuracy within dialect regions allows us to identify the degree to which the grammar of a dialect is internally heterogeneous. The main contribution of this paper is to show that a rigorous evaluation of dialect classification models can be used to find both variation over space and change over time.

The objective of pre-trained language models is to learn contextual representations of textual data. Pre-trained language models have become mainstream in natural language processing and code modeling. Using probes, a technique to study the linguistic properties of hidden vector spaces, previous works have shown that these pre-trained language models encode simple linguistic properties in their hidden representations. However, none of the previous work assessed whether these models encode the whole grammatical structure of a programming language. In this paper, we prove the existence of a syntactic subspace, lying in the hidden representations of pre-trained language models, which contain the syntactic information of the programming language. We show that this subspace can be extracted from the models' representations and define a novel probing method, the AST-Probe, that enables recovering the whole abstract syntax tree (AST) of an input code snippet. In our experimentations, we show that this syntactic subspace exists in five state-of-the-art pre-trained language models. In addition, we highlight that the middle layers of the models are the ones that encode most of the AST information. Finally, we estimate the optimal size of this syntactic subspace and show that its dimension is substantially lower than those of the models' representation spaces. This suggests that pre-trained language models use a small part of their representation spaces to encode syntactic information of the programming languages.

Large language models (LLMs) can reliably distinguish grammatical from ungrammatical sentences, but how grammatical knowledge is represented within the models remains an open question. We investigate whether different syntactic phenomena recruit shared or distinct components in LLMs. Using a functional localization approach inspired by cognitive neuroscience, we identify the LLM units most responsive to 67 English syntactic phenomena in seven open-weight models. These units are consistently recruited across sentences containing the phenomena and causally support the models' syntactic performance. Critically, different types of syntactic agreement (e.g., subject-verb, anaphor, determiner-noun) recruit overlapping sets of units, suggesting that agreement constitutes a meaningful functional category for LLMs. This pattern holds in English, Russian, and Chinese; and further, in a cross-lingual analysis of 57 diverse languages, structurally more similar languages share more units for subject-verb agreement. Taken together, these findings reveal that syntactic agreement-a critical marker of syntactic dependencies-constitutes a meaningful category within LLMs' representational spaces.

Sentences that present a complex syntax act as a major stumbling block for downstream Natural Language Processing applications whose predictive quality deteriorates with sentence length and complexity. The task of Text Simplification (TS) may remedy this situation. It aims to modify sentences in order to make them easier to process, using a set of rewriting operations, such as reordering, deletion, or splitting. State-of-the-art syntactic TS approaches suffer from two major drawbacks: first, they follow a very conservative approach in that they tend to retain the input rather than transforming it, and second, they ignore the cohesive nature of texts, where context spread across clauses or sentences is needed to infer the true meaning of a statement. To address these problems, we present a discourse-aware TS approach that splits and rephrases complex English sentences within the semantic context in which they occur. Based on a linguistically grounded transformation stage that uses clausal and phrasal disembedding mechanisms, complex sentences are transformed into shorter utterances with a simple canonical structure that can be easily analyzed by downstream applications. With sentence splitting, we thus address a TS task that has hardly been explored so far. Moreover, we introduce the notion of minimality in this context, as we aim to decompose source sentences into a set of self-contained minimal semantic units. To avoid breaking down the input into a disjointed sequence of statements that is difficult to interpret because important contextual information is missing, we incorporate the semantic context between the split propositions in the form of hierarchical structures and semantic relationships. In that way, we generate a semantic hierarchy of minimal propositions that leads to a novel representation of complex assertions that puts a semantic layer on top of the simplified sentences.

The exploitation of syntactic graphs (SyGs) as a word's context has been shown to be beneficial for distributional semantic models (DSMs), both at the level of individual word representations and in deriving phrasal representations via composition. However, notwithstanding the potential performance benefit, the syntactically-aware DSMs proposed to date have huge numbers of parameters (compared to conventional DSMs) and suffer from data sparsity. Furthermore, the encoding of the SyG links (i.e., the syntactic relations) has been largely limited to linear maps. The knowledge graphs' literature, on the other hand, has proposed light-weight models employing different geometric transformations (GTs) to encode edges in a knowledge graph (KG). Our work explores the possibility of adopting this family of models to encode SyGs. Furthermore, we investigate which GT better encodes syntactic relations, so that these representations can be used to enhance phrase-level composition via syntactic contextualisation.

This study investigates the consequences of training large language models (LLMs) on synthetic data generated by their predecessors, an increasingly prevalent practice aimed at addressing the limited supply of human-generated training data. Diverging from the usual emphasis on performance metrics, we focus on the impact of this training methodology on linguistic diversity, especially when conducted recursively over time. To assess this, we developed a set of novel metrics targeting lexical, syntactic, and semantic diversity, applying them in recursive fine-tuning experiments across various natural language generation tasks. Our findings reveal a marked decrease in the diversity of the models' outputs through successive iterations. This trend underscores the potential risks of training LLMs on predecessor-generated text, particularly concerning the preservation of linguistic richness. Our study highlights the need for careful consideration of the long-term effects of such training approaches on the linguistic capabilities of LLMs.

Linear sequences of words are implicitly represented in our brains by hierarchical structures that organize the composition of words in sentences. Linguists formalize different frameworks to model this hierarchy; two of the most common syntactic frameworks are Constituency and Dependency. Constituency represents sentences as nested groups of phrases, while dependency represents a sentence by assigning relations between its words. Recently, the pursuit of intelligent machines has produced Language Models (LMs) capable of solving many language tasks with a human-level performance. Many studies now question whether LMs implicitly represent syntactic hierarchies. This thesis focuses on producing constituency and dependency structures from LMs in an unsupervised setting. I review the critical methods in this field and highlight a line of work that utilizes a numerical representation for binary constituency trees (Syntactic Distance). I present a detailed study on StructFormer (SF) (Shen et al., 2021), which retrofits a transformer encoder architecture with a parser network to produce constituency and dependency structures. I present six experiments to analyze and address this field's challenges; experiments include investigating the effect of repositioning the parser network within the SF architecture, evaluating subword-based induced trees, and benchmarking the models developed in the thesis experiments on linguistic tasks. Models benchmarking is performed by participating in the BabyLM challenge, published at CoNLL 2023 (Momen et al., 2023). The results of this thesis encourage further development in the direction of retrofitting transformer-based models to induce syntactic structures, supported by the acceptable performance of SF in different experimental settings and the observed limitations that require innovative solutions to advance the state of syntactic structure induction.

Representational spaces learned via language modeling are fundamental to Natural Language Processing (NLP), however there has been limited understanding regarding how and when during training various types of linguistic information emerge and interact. Leveraging a novel information theoretic probing suite, which enables direct comparisons of not just task performance, but their representational subspaces, we analyze nine tasks covering syntax, semantics and reasoning, across 2M pre-training steps and five seeds. We identify critical learning phases across tasks and time, during which subspaces emerge, share information, and later disentangle to specialize. Across these phases, syntactic knowledge is acquired rapidly after 0.5% of full training. Continued performance improvements primarily stem from the acquisition of open-domain knowledge, while semantics and reasoning tasks benefit from later boosts to long-range contextualization and higher specialization. Measuring cross-task similarity further reveals that linguistically related tasks share information throughout training, and do so more during the critical phase of learning than before or after. Our findings have implications for model interpretability, multi-task learning, and learning from limited data.

Modelling compositional meaning for sentences using empirical distributional methods has been a challenge for computational linguists. We implement the abstract categorical model of Coecke et al. (arXiv:1003.4394v1 [cs.CL]) using data from the BNC and evaluate it. The implementation is based on unsupervised learning of matrices for relational words and applying them to the vectors of their arguments. The evaluation is based on the word disambiguation task developed by Mitchell and Lapata (2008) for intransitive sentences, and on a similar new experiment designed for transitive sentences. Our model matches the results of its competitors in the first experiment, and betters them in the second. The general improvement in results with increase in syntactic complexity showcases the compositional power of our model.

Syntactic structures used to play a vital role in natural language processing (NLP), but since the deep learning revolution, NLP has been gradually dominated by neural models that do not consider syntactic structures in their design. One vastly successful class of neural models is transformers. When used as an encoder, a transformer produces contextual representation of words in the input sentence. In this work, we propose a new model of contextual word representation, not from a neural perspective, but from a purely syntactic and probabilistic perspective. Specifically, we design a conditional random field that models discrete latent representations of all words in a sentence as well as dependency arcs between them; and we use mean field variational inference for approximate inference. Strikingly, we find that the computation graph of our model resembles transformers, with correspondences between dependencies and self-attention and between distributions over latent representations and contextual embeddings of words. Experiments show that our model performs competitively to transformers on small to medium sized datasets. We hope that our work could help bridge the gap between traditional syntactic and probabilistic approaches and cutting-edge neural approaches to NLP, and inspire more linguistically-principled neural approaches in the future.

Generalization is arguably the most important goal of statistical language modeling research. Publicly available benchmarks and papers published with an open-source code have been critical to advancing the field. However, it is often very difficult, and sometimes even impossible, to reproduce the results fully as reported in publications. In this paper, we propose a simple framework that should help advance the state of the art in language modeling in terms of generalization. We propose to publish not just the code, but also probabilities on dev and test sets with future publications so that one can easily add the new model into an ensemble. This has crucial advantages: it is much easier to determine whether a newly proposed model is actually complementary to the current baseline. Therefore, instead of inventing new names for the old tricks, the scientific community can advance faster. Finally, this approach promotes diversity of ideas: one does not need to create an individual model that is the new state of the art to attract attention; it will be sufficient to develop a new model that learns patterns which other models do not. Thus, even a suboptimal model can be found to have value. Remarkably, our approach has yielded new state-of-the-art results across various language modeling benchmarks up to 10%.

Pre-trained language models have demonstrated impressive performance in both natural language processing and program understanding, which represent the input as a token sequence without explicitly modeling its structure. Some prior works show that pre-trained language models can capture the syntactic rules of natural languages without finetuning on syntax understanding tasks. However, there is limited understanding of how well pre-trained models understand the code structure so far. In this work, we perform the first thorough benchmarking of the state-of-the-art pre-trained models for identifying the syntactic structures of programs. Specifically, we introduce CodeSyntax, a large-scale dataset of programs annotated with the syntactic relationships in their corresponding abstract syntax trees. Our key observation is that existing language models pretrained on code still lack the understanding of code syntax. In fact, these pre-trained programming language models fail to match the performance of simple baselines based on positional offsets and keywords. We also present a natural language benchmark to highlight the differences between natural languages and programming languages in terms of syntactic structure understanding. Our findings point out key limitations of existing pre-training methods for programming languages, and suggest the importance of modeling code syntactic structures.

Controlling the syntactic structure of text generated by language models is valuable for applications requiring clarity, stylistic consistency, or interpretability, yet it remains a challenging task. In this paper, we argue that sampling algorithms based on the posterior inference can effectively enforce a target constituency structure during generation. Our approach combines sequential Monte Carlo, which estimates the posterior distribution by sampling from a proposal distribution, with a syntactic tagger that ensures that each generated token aligns with the desired syntactic structure. Our experiments with GPT2 and Llama3-8B models show that with an appropriate proposal distribution, we can improve syntactic accuracy, increasing the F1 score from 12.31 (GPT2-large) and 35.33 (Llama3-8B) to about 93 in both cases without compromising the language model's fluency. These results underscore both the complexity of syntactic control and the effectiveness of sampling algorithms, offering a promising approach for applications where precise control over syntax is essential.

For a complicated algorithm, its implementation by a human programmer usually starts with outlining a rough control flow followed by iterative enrichments, eventually yielding carefully generated syntactic structures and variables in a hierarchy. However, state-of-the-art large language models generate codes in a single pass, without intermediate warm-ups to reflect the structured thought process of "outline-then-detail". Inspired by the recent success of chain-of-thought prompting, we propose ChainCoder, a program synthesis language model that generates Python code progressively, i.e. from coarse to fine in multiple passes. We first decompose source code into layout frame components and accessory components via abstract syntax tree parsing to construct a hierarchical representation. We then reform our prediction target into a multi-pass objective, each pass generates a subsequence, which is concatenated in the hierarchy. Finally, a tailored transformer architecture is leveraged to jointly encode the natural language descriptions and syntactically aligned I/O data samples. Extensive evaluations show that ChainCoder outperforms state-of-the-arts, demonstrating that our progressive generation eases the reasoning procedure and guides the language model to generate higher-quality solutions. Our codes are available at: https://github.com/VITA-Group/ChainCoder.

Language models (LMs), like other neural networks, often favor shortcut heuristics based on surface-level patterns. Although LMs behave like n-gram models early in training, they must eventually learn hierarchical syntactic representations to correctly apply grammatical rules out-of-distribution (OOD). In this work, we use case studies of English grammar to explore how complex, diverse training data drives models to generalize OOD. We construct a framework that unifies our understanding of random variation with training dynamics, rule selection with memorization, and data diversity with complexity. We show that these factors are nuanced, and that intermediate levels of diversity and complexity lead to inconsistent behavior across random seeds and to unstable training dynamics. Our findings emphasize the critical role of training data in shaping generalization patterns and illuminate how competing model strategies lead to inconsistent generalization outcomes across random seeds. Code is available at https://github.com/sunnytqin/concept_comp.git.

Structural priming is a cognitive phenomenon where exposure to a particular syntactic structure increases the likelihood of producing the same structure in subsequent utterances. While humans consistently demonstrate structural priming effects across various linguistic contexts, it remains unclear whether multimodal large language models (MLLMs) exhibit similar syntactic preservation behaviors. We introduce PRISMATIC, the first multimodal structural priming dataset, which advances computational linguistics by providing a standardized benchmark for investigating syntax-vision interactions. We propose the Syntactic Preservation Index (SPI), a novel reference-free evaluation metric designed specifically to assess structural priming effects in sentence level. Using this metric, we constructed and tested models with two different multimodal encoding architectures to investigate their structural preservation capabilities. Our experimental results demonstrate that models with both encoding methods show comparable syntactic priming effects. However, only fusion-encoded models exhibit robust positive correlations between priming effects and visual similarity, suggesting a cognitive process more aligned with human psycholinguistic patterns. This work provides new insights into evaluating and understanding how syntactic information is processed in multimodal language models.

Software languages evolve over time for various reasons, such as the addition of new features. When the language's grammar definition evolves, textual instances that originally conformed to the grammar become outdated. For DSLs in a model-driven engineering context, there exists a plethora of techniques to co-evolve models with the evolving metamodel. However, these techniques are not geared to support DSLs with a textual syntax -- applying them to textual language definitions and instances may lead to the loss of information from the original instances, such as comments and layout information, which are valuable for software comprehension and maintenance. This study explores the potential of Large Language Model (LLM)-based solutions in achieving grammar and instance co-evolution, with attention to their ability to preserve auxiliary information when directly processing textual instances. By applying two advanced language models, Claude-3.5 and GPT-4o, and conducting experiments across seven case languages, we evaluated the feasibility and limitations of this approach. Our results indicate a good ability of the considered LLMs for migrating textual instances in small-scale cases with limited instance size, which are representative of a subset of cases encountered in practice. In addition, we observe significant challenges with the scalability of LLM-based solutions to larger instances, leading to insights that are useful for informing future research.

There has been considerable attention devoted to models that learn to jointly infer an expression's syntactic structure and its semantics. Yet, NangiaB18 has recently shown that the current best systems fail to learn the correct parsing strategy on mathematical expressions generated from a simple context-free grammar. In this work, we present a recursive model inspired by ChoiYL18 that reaches near perfect accuracy on this task. Our model is composed of two separated modules for syntax and semantics. They are cooperatively trained with standard continuous and discrete optimization schemes. Our model does not require any linguistic structure for supervision and its recursive nature allows for out-of-domain generalization with little loss in performance. Additionally, our approach performs competitively on several natural language tasks, such as Natural Language Inference or Sentiment Analysis.

Enhancing the instruction-following ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) primarily demands substantial instruction-tuning datasets. However, the sheer volume of these imposes a considerable computational burden and annotation cost. To investigate a label-efficient instruction tuning method that allows the model itself to actively sample subsets that are equally or even more effective, we introduce a self-evolving mechanism DiverseEvol. In this process, a model iteratively augments its training subset to refine its own performance, without requiring any intervention from humans or more advanced LLMs. The key to our data sampling technique lies in the enhancement of diversity in the chosen subsets, as the model selects new data points most distinct from any existing ones according to its current embedding space. Extensive experiments across three datasets and benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of DiverseEvol. Our models, trained on less than 8% of the original dataset, maintain or improve performance compared with finetuning on full data. We also provide empirical evidence to analyze the importance of diversity in instruction data and the iterative scheme as opposed to one-time sampling. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/OFA-Sys/DiverseEvol.git.

Diverse outputs in text generation are necessary for effective exploration in complex reasoning tasks, such as code generation and mathematical problem solving. Such Pass@k problems benefit from distinct candidates covering the solution space. However, traditional sampling approaches often waste computational resources on repetitive failure modes. While Diffusion Language Models have emerged as a competitive alternative to the prevailing Autoregressive paradigm, they remain susceptible to this redundancy, with independent samples frequently collapsing into similar modes. To address this, we propose a training free, low cost intervention to enhance generative diversity in Diffusion Language Models. Our approach modifies intermediate samples in a batch sequentially, where each sample is repelled from the feature space of previous samples, actively penalising redundancy. Unlike prior methods that require retraining or beam search, our strategy incurs negligible computational overhead, while ensuring that each sample contributes a unique perspective to the batch. We evaluate our method on the HumanEval and GSM8K benchmarks using the LLaDA-8B-Instruct model. Our results demonstrate significantly improved diversity and Pass@k performance across various temperature settings. As a simple modification to the sampling process, our method offers an immediate, low-cost improvement for current and future Diffusion Language Models in tasks that benefit from diverse solution search. We make our code available at https://github.com/sean-lamont/odd.

A growing body of research has demonstrated the inability of NLP models to generalize compositionally and has tried to alleviate it through specialized architectures, training schemes, and data augmentation, among other approaches. In this work, we study a different approach: training on instances with diverse structures. We propose a model-agnostic algorithm for subsampling such sets of instances from a labeled instance pool with structured outputs. Evaluating on both compositional template splits and traditional IID splits of 5 semantic parsing datasets of varying complexity, we show that structurally diverse training using our algorithm leads to comparable or better generalization than prior algorithms in 9 out of 10 dataset-split type pairs. In general, we find structural diversity to consistently improve sample efficiency compared to random train sets. Moreover, we show that structurally diverse sampling yields comprehensive test sets that are a lot more challenging than IID test sets. Finally, we provide two explanations for improved generalization from diverse train sets: 1) improved coverage of output substructures, and 2) a reduction in spurious correlations between these substructures.

We introduce the MultiLang Code Parser Dataset (MLCPD), a large-scale, language-agnostic dataset unifying syntactic and structural representations of code across ten major programming languages. MLCPD contains over seven million parsed source files normalized under our proposed universal Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) schema, enabling consistent cross-language reasoning, structural learning, and multilingual software analysis. Unlike existing corpora that focus purely on token-level code or isolated parsers, MLCPD provides both hierarchical tree representations and rich metadata for every file, ensuring lossless syntactic coverage and structural uniformity. Each entry includes a normalized schema, language-level metadata, and abstracted node semantics stored in Parquet format for scalable retrieval. Empirical analyses reveal strong cross-language structural regularities-demonstrating that syntactic graphs from languages as diverse as Python, Java, and Go can be aligned under a shared schema. We release the dataset publicly on Hugging Face and the accompanying codebase on GitHub, which includes complete pipelines for dataset reproduction, grammar compilation, and a visualization tool for exploring the unified AST across languages. Together, these resources establish MLCPD as an open, reproducible foundation for future research in cross-language representation learning and program analysis.

Reasoning and inference are central to human and artificial intelligence. Modeling inference in human language is very challenging. With the availability of large annotated data (Bowman et al., 2015), it has recently become feasible to train neural network based inference models, which have shown to be very effective. In this paper, we present a new state-of-the-art result, achieving the accuracy of 88.6% on the Stanford Natural Language Inference Dataset. Unlike the previous top models that use very complicated network architectures, we first demonstrate that carefully designing sequential inference models based on chain LSTMs can outperform all previous models. Based on this, we further show that by explicitly considering recursive architectures in both local inference modeling and inference composition, we achieve additional improvement. Particularly, incorporating syntactic parsing information contributes to our best result---it further improves the performance even when added to the already very strong model.

Most interpretability research in NLP focuses on understanding the behavior and features of a fully trained model. However, certain insights into model behavior may only be accessible by observing the trajectory of the training process. We present a case study of syntax acquisition in masked language models (MLMs) that demonstrates how analyzing the evolution of interpretable artifacts throughout training deepens our understanding of emergent behavior. In particular, we study Syntactic Attention Structure (SAS), a naturally emerging property of MLMs wherein specific Transformer heads tend to focus on specific syntactic relations. We identify a brief window in pretraining when models abruptly acquire SAS, concurrent with a steep drop in loss. This breakthrough precipitates the subsequent acquisition of linguistic capabilities. We then examine the causal role of SAS by manipulating SAS during training, and demonstrate that SAS is necessary for the development of grammatical capabilities. We further find that SAS competes with other beneficial traits during training, and that briefly suppressing SAS improves model quality. These findings offer an interpretation of a real-world example of both simplicity bias and breakthrough training dynamics.

Cognitive diversity, reflected in variations of language, perspective, and reasoning, is essential to creativity and collective intelligence. This diversity is rich and grounded in culture, history, and individual experience. Yet as large language models (LLMs) become deeply embedded in people's lives, they risk standardizing language and reasoning. This Review synthesizes evidence across linguistics, cognitive, and computer science to show how LLMs reflect and reinforce dominant styles while marginalizing alternative voices and reasoning strategies. We examine how their design and widespread use contribute to this effect by mirroring patterns in their training data and amplifying convergence as all people increasingly rely on the same models across contexts. Unchecked, this homogenization risks flattening the cognitive landscapes that drive collective intelligence and adaptability.

Languages can encode temporal subordination lexically, via subordinating conjunctions, and morphologically, by marking the relation on the predicate. Systematic cross-linguistic variation among the former can be studied using well-established token-based typological approaches to token-aligned parallel corpora. Variation among different morphological means is instead much harder to tackle and therefore more poorly understood, despite being predominant in several language groups. This paper explores variation in the expression of generic temporal subordination ('when'-clauses) among the languages of Latin America and the Caribbean, where morphological marking is particularly common. It presents probabilistic semantic maps computed on the basis of the languages of the region, thus avoiding bias towards the many world's languages that exclusively use lexified connectors, incorporating associations between character n-grams and English when. The approach allows capturing morphological clause-linkage devices in addition to lexified connectors, paving the way for larger-scale, strategy-agnostic analyses of typological variation in temporal subordination.

Syntactic parsing remains a critical tool for relation extraction and information extraction, especially in resource-scarce languages where LLMs are lacking. Yet in morphologically rich languages (MRLs), where parsers need to identify multiple lexical units in each token, existing systems suffer in latency and setup complexity. Some use a pipeline to peel away the layers: first segmentation, then morphology tagging, and then syntax parsing; however, errors in earlier layers are then propagated forward. Others use a joint architecture to evaluate all permutations at once; while this improves accuracy, it is notoriously slow. In contrast, and taking Hebrew as a test case, we present a new "flipped pipeline": decisions are made directly on the whole-token units by expert classifiers, each one dedicated to one specific task. The classifiers are independent of one another, and only at the end do we synthesize their predictions. This blazingly fast approach sets a new SOTA in Hebrew POS tagging and dependency parsing, while also reaching near-SOTA performance on other Hebrew NLP tasks. Because our architecture does not rely on any language-specific resources, it can serve as a model to develop similar parsers for other MRLs.

Semantic similarity measures are widely used in natural language processing to catalyze various computer-related tasks. However, no single semantic similarity measure is the most appropriate for all tasks, and researchers often use ensemble strategies to ensure performance. This research work proposes a method for automatically designing semantic similarity ensembles. In fact, our proposed method uses grammatical evolution, for the first time, to automatically select and aggregate measures from a pool of candidates to create an ensemble that maximizes correlation to human judgment. The method is evaluated on several benchmark datasets and compared to state-of-the-art ensembles, showing that it can significantly improve similarity assessment accuracy and outperform existing methods in some cases. As a result, our research demonstrates the potential of using grammatical evolution to automatically compare text and prove the benefits of using ensembles for semantic similarity tasks. The source code that illustrates our approach can be downloaded from https://github.com/jorge-martinez-gil/sesige.

Data augmentation has been an important ingredient for boosting performances of learned models. Prior data augmentation methods for few-shot text classification have led to great performance boosts. However, they have not been designed to capture the intricate compositional structure of natural language. As a result, they fail to generate samples with plausible and diverse sentence structures. Motivated by this, we present the data Augmentation using Lexicalized Probabilistic context-free grammars (ALP) that generates augmented samples with diverse syntactic structures with plausible grammar. The lexicalized PCFG parse trees consider both the constituents and dependencies to produce a syntactic frame that maximizes a variety of word choices in a syntactically preservable manner without specific domain experts. Experiments on few-shot text classification tasks demonstrate that ALP enhances many state-of-the-art classification methods. As a second contribution, we delve into the train-val splitting methodologies when a data augmentation method comes into play. We argue empirically that the traditional splitting of training and validation sets is sub-optimal compared to our novel augmentation-based splitting strategies that further expand the training split with the same number of labeled data. Taken together, our contributions on the data augmentation strategies yield a strong training recipe for few-shot text classification tasks.

The advancement of machine learning and symbolic approaches have underscored their strengths and weaknesses in Natural Language Processing (NLP). While machine learning approaches are powerful in identifying patterns in data, they often fall short in learning commonsense and the factual knowledge required for the NLP tasks. Meanwhile, the symbolic methods excel in representing knowledge-rich data. However, they struggle to adapt dynamic data and generalize the knowledge. Bridging these two paradigms through hybrid approaches enables the alleviation of weaknesses in both while preserving their strengths. Recent studies extol the virtues of this union, showcasing promising results in a wide range of NLP tasks. In this paper, we present an overview of hybrid approaches used for NLP. Specifically, we delve into the state-of-the-art hybrid approaches used for a broad spectrum of NLP tasks requiring natural language understanding, generation, and reasoning. Furthermore, we discuss the existing resources available for hybrid approaches for NLP along with the challenges and future directions, offering a roadmap for future research avenues.

Parsing sentences into syntax trees can benefit downstream applications in NLP. Transition-based parsers build trees by executing actions in a state transition system. They are computationally efficient, and can leverage machine learning to predict actions based on partial trees. However, existing transition-based parsers are predominantly based on the shift-reduce transition system, which does not align with how humans are known to parse sentences. Psycholinguistic research suggests that human parsing is strongly incremental: humans grow a single parse tree by adding exactly one token at each step. In this paper, we propose a novel transition system called attach-juxtapose. It is strongly incremental; it represents a partial sentence using a single tree; each action adds exactly one token into the partial tree. Based on our transition system, we develop a strongly incremental parser. At each step, it encodes the partial tree using a graph neural network and predicts an action. We evaluate our parser on Penn Treebank (PTB) and Chinese Treebank (CTB). On PTB, it outperforms existing parsers trained with only constituency trees; and it performs on par with state-of-the-art parsers that use dependency trees as additional training data. On CTB, our parser establishes a new state of the art. Code is available at https://github.com/princeton-vl/attach-juxtapose-parser.

Reinforcement learning (RL)-based enhancement of large language models (LLMs) often leads to reduced output diversity, undermining their utility in open-ended tasks like creative writing. Current methods lack explicit mechanisms for guiding diverse exploration and instead prioritize optimization efficiency and performance over diversity. This paper proposes an RL framework structured around a semi-structured long Chain-of-Thought (CoT), in which the generation process is decomposed into explicitly planned intermediate steps. We introduce a Diverse Planning Branching method that strategically introduces divergence at the planning phase based on diversity variation, alongside a group-aware diversity reward to encourage distinct trajectories. Experimental results on creative writing benchmarks demonstrate that our approach significantly improves output diversity without compromising generation quality, consistently outperforming existing baselines.

To bridge the gap between performance-oriented benchmarks and the evaluation of cognitively inspired models, we introduce BLiSS 1.0, a Benchmark of Learner Interlingual Syntactic Structure. Our benchmark operationalizes a new paradigm of selective tolerance, testing whether a model finds a naturalistic learner error more plausible than a matched, artificial error within the same sentence. Constructed from over 2.8 million naturalistic learner sentences, BLiSS provides 136,867 controlled triplets (corrected, learner, artificial) for this purpose. Experiments on a diverse suite of models demonstrate that selective tolerance is a distinct capability from standard grammaticality, with performance clustering strongly by training paradigm. This validates BLiSS as a robust tool for measuring how different training objectives impact a model's alignment with the systematic patterns of human language acquisition.

We present an approach for assessing how multilingual large language models (LLMs) learn syntax in terms of multi-formalism syntactic structures. We aim to recover constituent and dependency structures by casting parsing as sequence labeling. To do so, we select a few LLMs and study them on 13 diverse UD treebanks for dependency parsing and 10 treebanks for constituent parsing. Our results show that: (i) the framework is consistent across encodings, (ii) pre-trained word vectors do not favor constituency representations of syntax over dependencies, (iii) sub-word tokenization is needed to represent syntax, in contrast to character-based models, and (iv) occurrence of a language in the pretraining data is more important than the amount of task data when recovering syntax from the word vectors.

Conditional neural text generation models generate high-quality outputs, but often concentrate around a mode when what we really want is a diverse set of options. We present a search algorithm to construct lattices encoding a massive number of generation options. First, we restructure decoding as a best-first search, which explores the space differently than beam search and improves efficiency by avoiding pruning paths. Second, we revisit the idea of hypothesis recombination: we can identify pairs of similar generation candidates during search and merge them as an approximation. On both summarization and machine translation, we show that our algorithm encodes thousands of diverse options that remain grammatical and high-quality into one lattice. This algorithm provides a foundation for building downstream generation applications on top of massive-scale diverse outputs.

Text simplification aims at making a text easier to read and understand by simplifying grammar and structure while keeping the underlying information identical. It is often considered an all-purpose generic task where the same simplification is suitable for all; however multiple audiences can benefit from simplified text in different ways. We adapt a discrete parametrization mechanism that provides explicit control on simplification systems based on Sequence-to-Sequence models. As a result, users can condition the simplifications returned by a model on attributes such as length, amount of paraphrasing, lexical complexity and syntactic complexity. We also show that carefully chosen values of these attributes allow out-of-the-box Sequence-to-Sequence models to outperform their standard counterparts on simplification benchmarks. Our model, which we call ACCESS (as shorthand for AudienCe-CEntric Sentence Simplification), establishes the state of the art at 41.87 SARI on the WikiLarge test set, a +1.42 improvement over the best previously reported score.

English to Indian language machine translation poses the challenge of structural and morphological divergence. This paper describes English to Indian language statistical machine translation using pre-ordering and suffix separation. The pre-ordering uses rules to transfer the structure of the source sentences prior to training and translation. This syntactic restructuring helps statistical machine translation to tackle the structural divergence and hence better translation quality. The suffix separation is used to tackle the morphological divergence between English and highly agglutinative Indian languages. We demonstrate that the use of pre-ordering and suffix separation helps in improving the quality of English to Indian Language machine translation.

The success of neural language models (LMs) on many technological tasks has brought about their potential relevance as scientific theories of language despite some clear differences between LM training and child language acquisition. In this paper we argue that some of the most prominent benchmarks for evaluating the syntactic capacities of LMs may not be sufficiently rigorous. In particular, we show that the template-based benchmarks lack the structural diversity commonly found in the theoretical and psychological studies of language. When trained on small-scale data modeling child language acquisition, the LMs can be readily matched by simple baseline models. We advocate for the use of the readily available, carefully curated datasets that have been evaluated for gradient acceptability by large pools of native speakers and are designed to probe the structural basis of grammar specifically. On one such dataset, the LI-Adger dataset, LMs evaluate sentences in a way inconsistent with human language users. We conclude with suggestions for better connecting LMs with the empirical study of child language acquisition.

Grammar serves as a cornerstone in programming languages and software engineering, providing frameworks to define the syntactic space and program structure. Existing research demonstrates the effectiveness of grammar-based code representations in small-scale models, showing their ability to reduce syntax errors and enhance performance. However, as language models scale to the billion level or beyond, syntax-level errors become rare, making it unclear whether grammar information still provides performance benefits. To explore this, we develop a series of billion-scale GrammarCoder models, incorporating grammar rules in the code generation process. Experiments on HumanEval (+) and MBPP (+) demonstrate a notable improvement in code generation accuracy. Further analysis shows that grammar-based representations enhance LLMs' ability to discern subtle code differences, reducing semantic errors caused by minor variations. These findings suggest that grammar-based code representations remain valuable even in billion-scale models, not only by maintaining syntax correctness but also by improving semantic differentiation.

Language technologies contribute to promoting multilingualism and linguistic diversity around the world. However, only a very small number of the over 7000 languages of the world are represented in the rapidly evolving language technologies and applications. In this paper we look at the relation between the types of languages, resources, and their representation in NLP conferences to understand the trajectory that different languages have followed over time. Our quantitative investigation underlines the disparity between languages, especially in terms of their resources, and calls into question the "language agnostic" status of current models and systems. Through this paper, we attempt to convince the ACL community to prioritise the resolution of the predicaments highlighted here, so that no language is left behind.

Large Language Models (LLMs) for formal theorem proving have shown significant promise, yet they often lack generalizability and are fragile to even minor transformations of problem statements. To address this limitation, we introduce a novel data augmentation pipeline designed to enhance model robustness from two perspectives: symmetry and difficulty. From the symmetry perspective, we propose two complementary methods: EvolAST, an Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) based approach that targets syntactic symmetry to generate semantically equivalent problem variants, and EvolDomain, which leverages LLMs to address semantic symmetry by translating theorems across mathematical domains. From the difficulty perspective, we propose EvolDifficulty, which uses carefully designed evolutionary instructions to guide LLMs in generating new theorems with a wider range of difficulty. We then use the evolved data to train EvolProver, a 7B-parameter non-reasoning theorem prover. EvolProver establishes a new state-of-the-art (SOTA) on FormalMATH-Lite with a 53.8% pass@32 rate, surpassing all models of comparable size, including reasoning-based models. It also sets new SOTA records for non-reasoning models on MiniF2F-Test (69.8% pass@32), Ineq-Comp-Seed (52.2% pass@32), and Ineq-Comp-Transformed (34.0% pass@32). Ablation studies further confirm our data augmentation pipeline's effectiveness across multiple benchmarks.

The explosive growth of AI research has created unprecedented information overload, increasing the demand for scientific summarization at multiple levels of granularity beyond traditional abstracts. While LLMs are increasingly adopted for summarization, existing benchmarks remain limited in scale, target only a single granularity, and predate the LLM era. Moreover, since the release of ChatGPT in November 2022, researchers have rapidly adopted LLMs for drafting manuscripts themselves, fundamentally transforming scientific writing, yet no resource exists to analyze how this writing has evolved. To bridge these gaps, we introduce SciZoom, a benchmark comprising 44,946 papers from four top-tier ML venues (NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, EMNLP) spanning 2020 to 2025, explicitly stratified into Pre-LLM and Post-LLM eras. SciZoom provides three hierarchical summarization targets (Abstract, Contributions, and TL;DR) achieving compression ratios up to 600:1, enabling both multi-granularity summarization research and temporal mining of scientific writing patterns. Our linguistic analysis reveals striking shifts in phrase patterns (up to 10x for formulaic expressions) and rhetorical style (23% decline in hedging), suggesting that LLM-assisted writing produces more confident yet homogenized prose. SciZoom serves as both a challenging benchmark and a unique resource for mining the evolution of scientific discourse in the generative AI era. Our code and dataset are publicly available on GitHub (https://github.com/janghana/SciZoom) and Hugging Face (https://huggingface.co/datasets/hanjang/SciZoom), respectively.

How do humans learn language, and can the first language be learned at all? These fundamental questions are still hotly debated. In contemporary linguistics, there are two major schools of thought that give completely opposite answers. According to Chomsky's theory of universal grammar, language cannot be learned because children are not exposed to sufficient data in their linguistic environment. In contrast, usage-based models of language assume a profound relationship between language structure and language use. In particular, contextual mental processing and mental representations are assumed to have the cognitive capacity to capture the complexity of actual language use at all levels. The prime example is syntax, i.e., the rules by which words are assembled into larger units such as sentences. Typically, syntactic rules are expressed as sequences of word classes. However, it remains unclear whether word classes are innate, as implied by universal grammar, or whether they emerge during language acquisition, as suggested by usage-based approaches. Here, we address this issue from a machine learning and natural language processing perspective. In particular, we trained an artificial deep neural network on predicting the next word, provided sequences of consecutive words as input. Subsequently, we analyzed the emerging activation patterns in the hidden layers of the neural network. Strikingly, we find that the internal representations of nine-word input sequences cluster according to the word class of the tenth word to be predicted as output, even though the neural network did not receive any explicit information about syntactic rules or word classes during training. This surprising result suggests, that also in the human brain, abstract representational categories such as word classes may naturally emerge as a consequence of predictive coding and processing during language acquisition.

Code data has been shown to enhance the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), but it remains unclear which aspects of code are most responsible. We investigate this question with a systematic, data-centric framework. We construct parallel instruction datasets in ten programming languages and apply controlled perturbations that selectively disrupt structural or semantic properties of code. We then finetune LLMs from five model families and eight scales on each variant and evaluate their performance on natural language, math, and code tasks. Across 3,331 experiments, our results show that LLMs are more vulnerable to structural perturbations than semantic ones, particularly on math and code tasks. Appropriate abstractions like pseudocode and flowcharts can be as effective as code, while encoding the same information with fewer tokens without adhering to original syntax can often retain or even improve performance. Remarkably, even corrupted code with misleading signals remains competitive when surface-level regularities persist. Finally, syntactic styles also shape task-specific gains with Python favoring natural language reasoning and lower-level languages such as Java and Rust favoring math. Through our systematic framework, we aim to provide insight into how different properties of code influence reasoning and inform the design of training data for enhancing LLM reasoning capabilities.

We study the relationship between vocabulary size and text length in a corpus of 75 literary works in English, authored by six writers, distinguishing between the contributions of three grammatical classes (or ``tags,'' namely, {\it nouns}, {\it verbs}, and {\it others}), and analyze the progressive appearance of new words of each tag along each individual text. While the power-law relation prescribed by Heaps' law is satisfactorily fulfilled by total vocabulary sizes and text lengths, the appearance of new words in each text is on the whole well described by the average of random shufflings of the text, which does not obey a power law. Deviations from this average, however, are statistically significant and show a systematic trend across the corpus. Specifically, they reveal that the appearance of new words along each text is predominantly retarded with respect to the average of random shufflings. Moreover, different tags are shown to add systematically distinct contributions to this tendency, with {\it verbs} and {\it others} being respectively more and less retarded than the mean trend, and {\it nouns} following instead this overall mean. These statistical systematicities are likely to point to the existence of linguistically relevant information stored in the different variants of Heaps' law, a feature that is still in need of extensive assessment.

Sequence-to-sequence models are commonly trained via maximum likelihood estimation (MLE). However, standard MLE training considers a word-level objective, predicting the next word given the previous ground-truth partial sentence. This procedure focuses on modeling local syntactic patterns, and may fail to capture long-range semantic structure. We present a novel solution to alleviate these issues. Our approach imposes global sequence-level guidance via new supervision based on optimal transport, enabling the overall characterization and preservation of semantic features. We further show that this method can be understood as a Wasserstein gradient flow trying to match our model to the ground truth sequence distribution. Extensive experiments are conducted to validate the utility of the proposed approach, showing consistent improvements over a wide variety of NLP tasks, including machine translation, abstractive text summarization, and image captioning.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown potential as tools for scientific discovery. This has engendered growing interest in their use in humanistic disciplines, such as historical linguistics and literary studies. These fields often construct arguments on the basis of delineations like genre, or more inflexibly, time period. Although efforts have been made to restrict inference to specific domains via fine-tuning or model editing, we posit that the only true guarantee is domain-restricted pretraining -- typically, a data- and compute-expensive proposition. We show that efficient pretraining techniques can produce useful models over corpora too large for easy manual inspection but too small for "typical" LLM approaches. We employ a novel date-attribution pipeline in order to obtain a temporally-segmented dataset of five 10-million-word slices. We train two corresponding five-model batteries over these corpus segments, efficient pretraining and Llama3-8B parameter efficiently finetuned. We find that the pretrained models are faster to train than the finetuned baselines and that they better respect the historical divisions of our corpus. Emphasizing speed and precision over a-historical comprehensiveness enables a number of novel approaches to hypothesis discovery and testing in our target fields. Taking up diachronic linguistics as a testbed, we show that our method enables the detection of a diverse set of phenomena, including en masse lexical change, non-lexical (grammatical and morphological) change, and word sense introduction/obsolescence. We provide a ready-to-use pipeline that allows extension of our approach to other target fields with only minimal adaptation.

The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has established standardized evaluation benchmarks as the primary instrument for model comparison. Yet, their reliability is increasingly questioned due to sensitivity to shallow variations in input prompts. This paper examines how controlled, truth-conditionally equivalent lexical and syntactic perturbations affect the absolute performance and relative ranking of 23 contemporary LLMs across three benchmarks: MMLU, SQuAD, and AMEGA. We employ two linguistically principled pipelines to generate meaning-preserving variations: one performing synonym substitution for lexical changes, and another using dependency parsing to determine applicable syntactic transformations. Results show that lexical perturbations consistently induce substantial, statistically significant performance degradation across nearly all models and tasks, while syntactic perturbations have more heterogeneous effects, occasionally improving results. Both perturbation types destabilize model leaderboards on complex tasks. Furthermore, model robustness did not consistently scale with model size, revealing strong task dependence. Overall, the findings suggest that LLMs rely more on surface-level lexical patterns than on abstract linguistic competence, underscoring the need for robustness testing as a standard component of LLM evaluation.

Multilingual language models (LMs) promise broader NLP access, yet current systems deliver uneven performance across the world's languages. This survey examines why these gaps persist and whether they reflect intrinsic linguistic difficulty or modeling artifacts. We organize the literature around two questions: do linguistic disparities arise from representation and allocation choices (e.g., tokenization, encoding, data exposure, parameter sharing) rather than inherent complexity; and which design choices mitigate inequities across typologically diverse languages. We review linguistic features, such as orthography, morphology, lexical diversity, syntax, information density, and typological distance, linking each to concrete modeling mechanisms. Gaps often shrink when segmentation, encoding, and data exposure are normalized, suggesting much apparent difficulty stems from current modeling choices. We synthesize these insights into design recommendations for tokenization, sampling, architectures, and evaluation to support more balanced multilingual LMs.

To harness the power of large language models in safety-critical domains we need to ensure the explainability of their predictions. However, despite the significant attention to model interpretability, there remains an unexplored domain in explaining sequence-to-sequence tasks using methods tailored for textual data. This paper introduces SyntaxShap, a local, model-agnostic explainability method for text generation that takes into consideration the syntax in the text data. The presented work extends Shapley values to account for parsing-based syntactic dependencies. Taking a game theoric approach, SyntaxShap only considers coalitions constraint by the dependency tree. We adopt a model-based evaluation to compare SyntaxShap and its weighted form to state-of-the-art explainability methods adapted to text generation tasks, using diverse metrics including faithfulness, complexity, coherency, and semantic alignment of the explanations to the model. We show that our syntax-aware method produces explanations that help build more faithful, coherent, and interpretable explanations for predictions by autoregressive models.

Speculative decoding (SD) accelerates large language model inference by using a smaller draft model to predict multiple tokens, which are then verified in parallel by the larger target model. However, the limited capacity of the draft model often necessitates tree-based sampling to improve prediction accuracy, where multiple candidates are generated at each step. We identify a key limitation in this approach: the candidates at the same step are derived from the same representation, limiting diversity and reducing overall effectiveness. To address this, we propose Jakiro, leveraging Mixture of Experts (MoE), where independent experts generate diverse predictions, effectively decoupling correlations among candidates. Furthermore, we introduce a hybrid inference strategy, combining autoregressive decoding for initial tokens with parallel decoding for subsequent stages, and enhance the latter with contrastive mechanism in features to improve accuracy. Our method significantly boosts prediction accuracy and achieves higher inference speedups. Extensive experiments across diverse models validate the effectiveness and robustness of our approach, establishing a new SOTA in speculative decoding. Our codes are available at https://github.com/haiduo/Jakiro.

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance in recent years but are fundamentally limited by the underlying training data. To improve models beyond the training data, recent works have explored how LLMs can be used to generate synthetic data for autonomous self-improvement. However, successive steps of self-improvement can reach a point of diminishing returns. In this work, we propose a complementary approach towards self-improvement where finetuning is applied to a multiagent society of language models. A group of language models, all starting from the same base model, are independently specialized by updating each one using data generated through multiagent interactions among the models. By training each model on independent sets of data, we illustrate how this approach enables specialization across models and diversification over the set of models. As a result, our overall system is able to preserve diverse reasoning chains and autonomously improve over many more rounds of fine-tuning than single-agent self-improvement methods. We quantitatively illustrate the efficacy of the approach across a wide suite of reasoning tasks.

Temperature sampling is a conventional approach to diversify large language model predictions. As temperature increases, the prediction becomes diverse but also vulnerable to hallucinations -- generating tokens that are sensible but not factual. One common approach to mitigate hallucinations is to provide source/grounding documents and the model is trained to produce predictions that bind to and are attributable to the provided source. It appears that there is a trade-off between diversity and attribution. To mitigate any such trade-off, we propose to relax the constraint of having a fixed temperature over decoding steps, and a mechanism to guide the dynamic temperature according to its relevance to the source through KL-divergence. Our experiments justifies the trade-off, and shows that our sampling algorithm outperforms the conventional top-k and top-p algorithms in conversational question-answering and summarization tasks.

We formalize and study a phenomenon called feature collapse that makes precise the intuitive idea that entities playing a similar role in a learning task receive similar representations. As feature collapse requires a notion of task, we leverage a simple but prototypical NLP task to study it. We start by showing experimentally that feature collapse goes hand in hand with generalization. We then prove that, in the large sample limit, distinct words that play identical roles in this NLP task receive identical local feature representations in a neural network. This analysis reveals the crucial role that normalization mechanisms, such as LayerNorm, play in feature collapse and in generalization.

While large language models (LLMs) have exhibited impressive instruction-following capabilities, it is still unclear whether and to what extent they can respond to explicit constraints that might be entailed in various instructions. As a significant aspect of LLM alignment, it is thus important to formulate such a specialized set of instructions as well as investigate the resulting behavior of LLMs. To address this vacancy, we propose a new benchmark CoDI-Eval to systematically and comprehensively evaluate LLMs' responses to instructions with various constraints. We construct a large collection of constraints-attributed instructions as a test suite focused on both generalization and coverage. Specifically, we advocate an instruction diversification process to synthesize diverse forms of constraint expression and also deliberate the candidate task taxonomy with even finer-grained sub-categories. Finally, we automate the entire evaluation process to facilitate further developments. Different from existing studies on controllable text generation, CoDI-Eval extends the scope to the prevalent instruction-following paradigm for the first time. We provide extensive evaluations of representative LLMs (e.g., ChatGPT, Vicuna) on CoDI-Eval, revealing their limitations in following instructions with specific constraints and there is still a significant gap between open-source and commercial closed-source LLMs. We believe this benchmark will facilitate research into improving the controllability of LLMs' responses to instructions. Our data and code are available at https://github.com/Xt-cyh/CoDI-Eval.

Autoregressive transformer language models (LMs) possess strong syntactic abilities, often successfully handling phenomena from agreement to NPI licensing. However, the features they use to incrementally process language inputs are not well understood. In this paper, we fill this gap by studying the mechanisms underlying garden path sentence processing in LMs. We ask: (1) Do LMs use syntactic features or shallow heuristics to perform incremental sentence processing? (2) Do LMs represent only one potential interpretation, or multiple? and (3) Do LMs reanalyze or repair their initial incorrect representations? To address these questions, we use sparse autoencoders to identify interpretable features that determine which continuation - and thus which reading - of a garden path sentence the LM prefers. We find that while many important features relate to syntactic structure, some reflect syntactically irrelevant heuristics. Moreover, while most active features correspond to one reading of the sentence, some features correspond to the other, suggesting that LMs assign weight to both possibilities simultaneously. Finally, LMs do not re-use features from garden path sentence processing to answer follow-up questions.

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) and AI systems have led to a paradigm shift in the design and optimization of complex AI workflows. By integrating multiple components, compound AI systems have become increasingly adept at performing sophisticated tasks. However, as these systems grow in complexity, new challenges arise in optimizing not only individual components but also their interactions. While traditional optimization methods such as supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL) remain foundational, the rise of natural language feedback introduces promising new approaches, especially for optimizing non-differentiable systems. This paper provides a systematic review of recent progress in optimizing compound AI systems, encompassing both numerical and language-based techniques. We formalize the notion of compound AI system optimization, classify existing methods along several key dimensions, and highlight open research challenges and future directions in this rapidly evolving field. A list of surveyed papers is publicly available at https://github.com/MiuLab/AISysOpt-Survey.

A critical component of a successful language generation pipeline is the decoding algorithm. However, the general principles that should guide the choice of decoding algorithm remain unclear. Previous works only compare decoding algorithms in narrow scenarios and their findings do not generalize across tasks. To better structure the discussion, we introduce a taxonomy that groups decoding strategies based on their implicit assumptions about how well the model's likelihood is aligned with the task-specific notion of utility. We argue that this taxonomy allows a broader view of the decoding problem and can lead to generalizable statements because it is grounded on the interplay between the decoding algorithms and the likelihood-utility misalignment. Specifically, by analyzing the correlation between the likelihood and the utility of predictions across a diverse set of tasks, we provide the first empirical evidence supporting the proposed taxonomy, and a set of principles to structure reasoning when choosing a decoding algorithm. Crucially, our analysis is the first one to relate likelihood-based decoding strategies with strategies that rely on external information such as value-guided methods and prompting, and covers the most diverse set of tasks up-to-date.

We propose a generative model of paraphrase generation, that encourages syntactic diversity by conditioning on an explicit syntactic sketch. We introduce Hierarchical Refinement Quantized Variational Autoencoders (HRQ-VAE), a method for learning decompositions of dense encodings as a sequence of discrete latent variables that make iterative refinements of increasing granularity. This hierarchy of codes is learned through end-to-end training, and represents fine-to-coarse grained information about the input. We use HRQ-VAE to encode the syntactic form of an input sentence as a path through the hierarchy, allowing us to more easily predict syntactic sketches at test time. Extensive experiments, including a human evaluation, confirm that HRQ-VAE learns a hierarchical representation of the input space, and generates paraphrases of higher quality than previous systems.

Large language models (LLMs) can be used to generate text data for training and evaluating other models. However, creating high-quality datasets with LLMs can be challenging. In this work, we explore human-AI partnerships to facilitate high diversity and accuracy in LLM-based text data generation. We first examine two approaches to diversify text generation: 1) logit suppression, which minimizes the generation of languages that have already been frequently generated, and 2) temperature sampling, which flattens the token sampling probability. We found that diversification approaches can increase data diversity but often at the cost of data accuracy (i.e., text and labels being appropriate for the target domain). To address this issue, we examined two human interventions, 1) label replacement (LR), correcting misaligned labels, and 2) out-of-scope filtering (OOSF), removing instances that are out of the user's domain of interest or to which no considered label applies. With oracle studies, we found that LR increases the absolute accuracy of models trained with diversified datasets by 14.4%. Moreover, we found that some models trained with data generated with LR interventions outperformed LLM-based few-shot classification. In contrast, OOSF was not effective in increasing model accuracy, implying the need for future work in human-in-the-loop text data generation.

Large language models (LLMs) are documented to struggle in settings that require complex reasoning. Nevertheless, instructing the model to break down the problem into smaller reasoning steps (Wei et al., 2022), or ensembling various generations through modifying decoding steps (Wang et al., 2023) boosts performance. Current methods assume that the input prompt is fixed and expect the decoding strategies to introduce the diversity needed for ensembling. In this work, we relax this assumption and discuss how one can create and leverage variations of the input prompt as a means to diversity of thought to improve model performance. We propose a method that automatically improves prompt diversity by soliciting feedback from the LLM to ideate approaches that fit for the problem. We then ensemble the diverse prompts in our method DIV-SE (DIVerse reasoning path Self-Ensemble) across multiple inference calls. We also propose a cost-effective alternative where diverse prompts are used within a single inference call; we call this IDIV-SE (In-call DIVerse reasoning path Self-Ensemble). Under a fixed generation budget, DIV-SE and IDIV-SE outperform the previously discussed baselines using both GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 on several reasoning benchmarks, without modifying the decoding process. Additionally, DIV-SE advances state-of-the-art performance on recent planning benchmarks (Valmeekam et al., 2023), exceeding the highest previously reported accuracy by at least 29.6 percentage points on the most challenging 4/5 Blocksworld task. Our results shed light on how to enforce prompt diversity toward LLM reasoning and thereby improve the pareto frontier of the accuracy-cost trade-off.

Large language models (LLMs) are capable of solving a wide range of tasks, yet they have struggled with reasoning. To address this, we propose Additional Logic Training (ALT), which aims to enhance LLMs' reasoning capabilities by program-generated logical reasoning samples. We first establish principles for designing high-quality samples by integrating symbolic logic theory and previous empirical insights. Then, based on these principles, we construct a synthetic corpus named Formal Logic Deduction Diverse (FLD^{times 2}), comprising numerous samples of multi-step deduction with unknown facts, diverse reasoning rules, diverse linguistic expressions, and challenging distractors. Finally, we empirically show that ALT on FLD^{times2} substantially enhances the reasoning capabilities of state-of-the-art LLMs, including LLaMA-3.1-70B. Improvements include gains of up to 30 points on logical reasoning benchmarks, up to 10 points on math and coding benchmarks, and 5 points on the benchmark suite BBH.

This study investigates the impact of morphological typology on tokenization and language modeling performance. We focus on languages with synthetic and analytical morphological structures and examine their productivity when tokenized using the byte-pair encoding (BPE) algorithm. We compare the performance of models trained with similar amounts of data in different languages. Our experiments reveal that languages with synthetic features exhibit greater subword regularity and productivity with BPE tokenization and achieve better results in language modeling tasks. We also observe that the typological continuum from linguistic theory is reflected in several experiments. These findings suggest a correlation between morphological typology and BPE tokenization efficiency.

The remarkable success of Large Language Models (LLMs) has ushered natural language processing (NLP) research into a new era. Despite their diverse capabilities, LLMs trained on different corpora exhibit varying strengths and weaknesses, leading to challenges in maximizing their overall efficiency and versatility. To address these challenges, recent studies have explored collaborative strategies for LLMs. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of this emerging research area, highlighting the motivation behind such collaborations. Specifically, we categorize collaborative strategies into three primary approaches: Merging, Ensemble, and Cooperation. Merging involves integrating multiple LLMs in the parameter space. Ensemble combines the outputs of various LLMs. Cooperation} leverages different LLMs to allow full play to their diverse capabilities for specific tasks. We provide in-depth introductions to these methods from different perspectives and discuss their potential applications. Additionally, we outline future research directions, hoping this work will catalyze further studies on LLM collaborations and paving the way for advanced NLP applications.

A diversity of tasks use language models trained on semantic similarity data. While there are a variety of datasets that capture semantic similarity, they are either constructed from modern web data or are relatively small datasets created in the past decade by human annotators. This study utilizes a novel source, newly digitized articles from off-copyright, local U.S. newspapers, to assemble a massive-scale semantic similarity dataset spanning 70 years from 1920 to 1989 and containing nearly 400M positive semantic similarity pairs. Historically, around half of articles in U.S. local newspapers came from newswires like the Associated Press. While local papers reproduced articles from the newswire, they wrote their own headlines, which form abstractive summaries of the associated articles. We associate articles and their headlines by exploiting document layouts and language understanding. We then use deep neural methods to detect which articles are from the same underlying source, in the presence of substantial noise and abridgement. The headlines of reproduced articles form positive semantic similarity pairs. The resulting publicly available HEADLINES dataset is significantly larger than most existing semantic similarity datasets and covers a much longer span of time. It will facilitate the application of contrastively trained semantic similarity models to a variety of tasks, including the study of semantic change across space and time.

Recent research considers few-shot intent detection as a meta-learning problem: the model is learning to learn from a consecutive set of small tasks named episodes. In this work, we propose ProtAugment, a meta-learning algorithm for short texts classification (the intent detection task). ProtAugment is a novel extension of Prototypical Networks, that limits overfitting on the bias introduced by the few-shots classification objective at each episode. It relies on diverse paraphrasing: a conditional language model is first fine-tuned for paraphrasing, and diversity is later introduced at the decoding stage at each meta-learning episode. The diverse paraphrasing is unsupervised as it is applied to unlabelled data, and then fueled to the Prototypical Network training objective as a consistency loss. ProtAugment is the state-of-the-art method for intent detection meta-learning, at no extra labeling efforts and without the need to fine-tune a conditional language model on a given application domain.

A major consideration in multilingual language modeling is how to best represent languages with diverse vocabularies and scripts. Although contemporary text encoding methods cover most of the world's writing systems, they exhibit bias towards the high-resource languages of the Global West. As a result, texts of underrepresented languages tend to be segmented into long sequences of linguistically meaningless units. To address the disparities, we introduce a new paradigm that encodes the same information with segments of consistent size across diverse languages. Our encoding convention (MYTE) is based on morphemes, as their inventories are more balanced across languages than characters, which are used in previous methods. We show that MYTE produces shorter encodings for all 99 analyzed languages, with the most notable improvements for non-European languages and non-Latin scripts. This, in turn, improves multilingual LM performance and diminishes the perplexity gap throughout diverse languages.

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit impressive performance on a range of NLP tasks, due to the general-purpose linguistic knowledge acquired during pretraining. Existing model interpretability research (Tenney et al., 2019) suggests that a linguistic hierarchy emerges in the LLM layers, with lower layers better suited to solving syntactic tasks and higher layers employed for semantic processing. Yet, little is known about how encodings of different linguistic phenomena interact within the models and to what extent processing of linguistically-related categories relies on the same, shared model representations. In this paper, we propose a framework for testing the joint encoding of linguistic categories in LLMs. Focusing on syntax, we find evidence of joint encoding both at the same (related part-of-speech (POS) classes) and different (POS classes and related syntactic dependency relations) levels of linguistic hierarchy. Our cross-lingual experiments show that the same patterns hold across languages in multilingual LLMs.

Current language models tailored for code tasks often adopt the pre-training-then-fine-tuning paradigm from natural language processing, modeling source code as plain text. This approach, however, overlooks the unambiguous structures inherent in programming languages. In this work, we explore data-efficient adaptation of pre-trained code models by further pre-training and fine-tuning them with program structures. Specifically, we represent programs as parse trees -- also known as concrete syntax trees (CSTs) -- and adapt pre-trained models on serialized CSTs. Although the models that we adapt have been pre-trained only on the surface form of programs, we find that a small amount of continual pre-training and fine-tuning on CSTs without changing the model architecture yields improvements over the baseline approach across various code tasks. The improvements are found to be particularly significant when there are limited training examples, demonstrating the effectiveness of integrating program structures with plain-text representation even when working with backbone models that have not been pre-trained with structures.

Output diversity is crucial for Large Language Models as it underpins pluralism and creativity. In this work, we reveal that controlling the language used during model thinking-the language of thought-provides a novel and structural source of output diversity. Our preliminary study shows that different thinking languages occupy distinct regions in a model's thinking space. Based on this observation, we study two repeated sampling strategies under multilingual thinking-Single-Language Sampling and Mixed-Language Sampling-and conduct diversity evaluation on outputs that are controlled to be in English, regardless of the thinking language used. Across extensive experiments, we demonstrate that switching the thinking language from English to non-English languages consistently increases output diversity, with a clear and consistent positive correlation such that languages farther from English in the thinking space yield larger gains. We further show that aggregating samples across multiple thinking languages yields additional improvements through compositional effects, and that scaling sampling with linguistic heterogeneity expands the model's diversity ceiling. Finally, we show that these findings translate into practical benefits in pluralistic alignment scenarios, leading to broader coverage of cultural knowledge and value orientations in LLM outputs. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/iNLP-Lab/Multilingual-LoT-Diversity.

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated the effectiveness of Iterative Self-Improvement (ISI) techniques. However, continuous training on self-generated data leads to reduced output diversity, a limitation particularly critical in reasoning tasks where diverse solution paths are essential. We present DIVE (Diversified Iterative Self-Improvement), a novel framework that addresses this challenge through two key components: Sample Pool Expansion for broader solution exploration, and Data Selection for balancing diversity and quality in preference pairs. Experiments on MATH and GSM8k datasets show that DIVE achieves a 10% to 45% relative increase in output diversity metrics while maintaining performance quality compared to vanilla ISI. Our ablation studies confirm both components' significance in achieving these improvements. Code is available at https://github.com/qinyiwei/DIVE.

Language models depend on massive text corpora that are often filtered for quality, a process that can unintentionally exclude non-standard linguistic varieties, reduce model robustness and reinforce representational biases. In this paper, we argue that language models should aim to capture the full spectrum of language variation (dialectal, historical, informal, etc.) rather than relying solely on standardized text. Focusing on Basque, a morphologically rich and low-resource language, we construct new corpora combining standard, social media, and historical sources, and pre-train the BERnaT family of encoder-only models in three configurations: standard, diverse, and combined. We further propose an evaluation framework that separates Natural Language Understanding (NLU) tasks into standard and diverse subsets to assess linguistic generalization. Results show that models trained on both standard and diverse data consistently outperform those trained on standard corpora, improving performance across all task types without compromising standard benchmark accuracy. These findings highlight the importance of linguistic diversity in building inclusive, generalizable language models.

Sequence-to-sequence models excel at handling natural language variation, but have been shown to struggle with out-of-distribution compositional generalization. This has motivated new specialized architectures with stronger compositional biases, but most of these approaches have only been evaluated on synthetically-generated datasets, which are not representative of natural language variation. In this work we ask: can we develop a semantic parsing approach that handles both natural language variation and compositional generalization? To better assess this capability, we propose new train and test splits of non-synthetic datasets. We demonstrate that strong existing approaches do not perform well across a broad set of evaluations. We also propose NQG-T5, a hybrid model that combines a high-precision grammar-based approach with a pre-trained sequence-to-sequence model. It outperforms existing approaches across several compositional generalization challenges on non-synthetic data, while also being competitive with the state-of-the-art on standard evaluations. While still far from solving this problem, our study highlights the importance of diverse evaluations and the open challenge of handling both compositional generalization and natural language variation in semantic parsing.

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have established the new paradigm in the field of NLP. For more powerful PLMs, one of the most popular and successful way is to continuously scale up sizes of the models and the pre-training corpora. These large corpora are generally obtained by converging smaller ones from multiple sources, they are thus growing increasingly diverse. However, the side-effects of these colossal converged corpora remain understudied. In this paper, we identify the disadvantage of heterogeneous corpora from multiple sources for pre-training PLMs. Towards coordinated pre-training on diverse corpora, we further propose source prompts (SP), which explicitly prompt the model of the data source at the pre-training and fine-tuning stages. Results of extensive experiments demonstrate that PLMs pre-trained with SP on diverse corpora gain significant improvement in various downstream tasks.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is becoming a dominant subset of artificial intelligence as the need to help machines understand human language looks indispensable. Several NLP applications are ubiquitous, partly due to the myriads of datasets being churned out daily through mediums like social networking sites. However, the growing development has not been evident in most African languages due to the persisting resource limitation, among other issues. Yorùbá language, a tonal and morphologically rich African language, suffers a similar fate, resulting in limited NLP usage. To encourage further research towards improving this situation, this systematic literature review aims to comprehensively analyse studies addressing NLP development for Yorùbá, identifying challenges, resources, techniques, and applications. A well-defined search string from a structured protocol was employed to search, select, and analyse 105 primary studies between 2014 and 2024 from reputable databases. The review highlights the scarcity of annotated corpora, limited availability of pre-trained language models, and linguistic challenges like tonal complexity and diacritic dependency as significant obstacles. It also revealed the prominent techniques, including rule-based methods, among others. The findings reveal a growing body of multilingual and monolingual resources, even though the field is constrained by socio-cultural factors such as code-switching and desertion of language for digital usage. This review synthesises existing research, providing a foundation for advancing NLP for Yorùbá and in African languages generally. It aims to guide future research by identifying gaps and opportunities, thereby contributing to the broader inclusion of Yorùbá and other under-resourced African languages in global NLP advancements.

Effective generalization in language models depends critically on the diversity of their training data. Yet existing diversity metrics often fall short of this goal, relying on surface-level heuristics that are decoupled from model behavior. This motivates us to ask: What kind of diversity in training data actually drives generalization in language models -- and how can we measure and amplify it? Through large-scale empirical analyses spanning over 300 training runs, carefully controlled for data scale and quality, we show that data diversity can be a strong predictor of generalization in LLM reasoning -- as measured by average model performance on unseen out-of-distribution benchmarks. We introduce G-Vendi, a metric that quantifies diversity via the entropy of model-induced gradients. Despite using a small off-the-shelf proxy model for gradients, G-Vendi consistently outperforms alternative measures, achieving strong correlation (Spearman's rho approx 0.9) with out-of-distribution (OOD) performance on both natural language inference (NLI) and math reasoning tasks. Building on this insight, we present Prismatic Synthesis, a framework for generating diverse synthetic data by targeting underrepresented regions in gradient space. Experimental results show that Prismatic Synthesis consistently improves model performance as we scale synthetic data -- not just on in-distribution test but across unseen, out-of-distribution benchmarks -- significantly outperforming state-of-the-art models that rely on 20 times larger data generator than ours. For example, PrismMath-7B, our model distilled from a 32B LLM, outperforms R1-Distill-Qwen-7B -- the same base model trained on proprietary data generated by 671B R1 -- on 6 out of 7 challenging benchmarks.

Compositional generalization, the ability of intelligent models to extrapolate understanding of components to novel compositions, is a fundamental yet challenging facet in AI research, especially within multimodal environments. In this work, we address this challenge by exploiting the syntactic structure of language to boost compositional generalization. This paper elevates the importance of syntactic grounding, particularly through attention masking techniques derived from text input parsing. We introduce and evaluate the merits of using syntactic information in the multimodal grounding problem. Our results on grounded compositional generalization underscore the positive impact of dependency parsing across diverse tasks when utilized with Weight Sharing across the Transformer encoder. The results push the state-of-the-art in multimodal grounding and parameter-efficient modeling and provide insights for future research.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful tools capable of accomplishing a broad spectrum of tasks. Their abilities span numerous areas, and one area where they have made a significant impact is in the domain of code generation. In this context, we view LLMs as mutation and crossover tools. Meanwhile, Quality-Diversity (QD) algorithms are known to discover diverse and robust solutions. By merging the code-generating abilities of LLMs with the diversity and robustness of QD solutions, we introduce LLMatic, a Neural Architecture Search (NAS) algorithm. While LLMs struggle to conduct NAS directly through prompts, LLMatic uses a procedural approach, leveraging QD for prompts and network architecture to create diverse and highly performant networks. We test LLMatic on the CIFAR-10 image classification benchmark, demonstrating that it can produce competitive networks with just 2,000 searches, even without prior knowledge of the benchmark domain or exposure to any previous top-performing models for the benchmark.

Diversity has been gaining interest in the NLP community in recent years. At the same time, state-of-the-art transformer models such as ModernBERT use very large pre-training datasets, which are driven by size rather than by diversity. This summons for an investigation of the impact of diversity on the ModernBERT pre-training. We do so in this study, with the express intent of reducing pre-training dataset size, while retaining at least comparable performance. We compare diversity-driven sampling algorithms, so as to pick the best one. We find that diversity-driven sampling allows in some tasks to gain 10 points relative to randomly-sampled pre-training data of commensurate size. We also see that a model pre-trained for 483h on a diversity-driven dataset of 150M tokens can yield a commensurate performance to a model pre-trained for 1,775h on a randomly-driven dataset of 2.4B tokens.

Generative commonsense reasoning (GCR) in natural language is to reason about the commonsense while generating coherent text. Recent years have seen a surge of interest in improving the generation quality of commonsense reasoning tasks. Nevertheless, these approaches have seldom investigated diversity in the GCR tasks, which aims to generate alternative explanations for a real-world situation or predict all possible outcomes. Diversifying GCR is challenging as it expects to generate multiple outputs that are not only semantically different but also grounded in commonsense knowledge. In this paper, we propose MoKGE, a novel method that diversifies the generative reasoning by a mixture of expert (MoE) strategy on commonsense knowledge graphs (KG). A set of knowledge experts seek diverse reasoning on KG to encourage various generation outputs. Empirical experiments demonstrated that MoKGE can significantly improve the diversity while achieving on par performance on accuracy on two GCR benchmarks, based on both automatic and human evaluations.

Large language models (LLMs) tend to generate lexically, semantically, and stylistically homogenous texts. This poses a risk of knowledge collapse, where homogenous LLMs mediate a shrinking in the range of accessible information over time. Existing works on homogenization are limited by a focus on closed-ended multiple-choice setups or fuzzy semantic features, and do not look at trends across time and cultural contexts. To overcome this, we present a new methodology to measure epistemic diversity, i.e., variation in real-world claims in LLM outputs, which we use to perform a broad empirical study of LLM knowledge collapse. We test 27 LLMs, 155 topics covering 12 countries, and 200 prompt variations sourced from real user chats. For the topics in our study, we show that while newer models tend to generate more diverse claims, nearly all models are less epistemically diverse than a basic web search. We find that model size has a negative impact on epistemic diversity, while retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has a positive impact, though the improvement from RAG varies by the cultural context. Finally, compared to a traditional knowledge source (Wikipedia), we find that country-specific claims reflect the English language more than the local one, highlighting a gap in epistemic representation

Protein structure tokenization converts 3D structures into discrete or vectorized representations, enabling the integration of structural and sequence data. Despite many recent works on structure tokenization, the properties of the underlying discrete representations are not well understood. In this work, we first demonstrate that the successful utilization of structural tokens in a language model for structure prediction depends on using rich, pre-trained sequence embeddings to bridge the semantic gap between the sequence and structural "language". The analysis of the structural vocabulary itself then reveals significant semantic redundancy, where multiple distinct tokens correspond to nearly identical local geometries, acting as "structural synonyms". This redundancy, rather than being a flaw, can be exploited with a simple "synonym swap" strategy to generate diverse conformational ensembles by perturbing a predicted structure with its structural synonyms. This computationally lightweight method accurately recapitulates protein flexibility, performing competitively with state-of-the-art models. Our study provides fundamental insights into the nature of discrete protein structure representations and introduces a powerful, near-instantaneous method for modeling protein dynamics. Source code is available in https://github.com/IDEA-XL/TokenMD.

Bidirectional masked Transformers have become the core theme in the current NLP landscape. Despite their impressive benchmarks, a recurring theme in recent research has been to question such models' capacity for syntactic generalization. In this work, we seek to address this question by adding a supervised, token-level supertagging objective to standard unsupervised pretraining, enabling the explicit incorporation of syntactic biases into the network's training dynamics. Our approach is straightforward to implement, induces a marginal computational overhead and is general enough to adapt to a variety of settings. We apply our methodology on Lassy Large, an automatically annotated corpus of written Dutch. Our experiments suggest that our syntax-aware model performs on par with established baselines, despite Lassy Large being one order of magnitude smaller than commonly used corpora.

The widespread adoption of synthetic data raises new questions about how models generating the data can influence other large language models (LLMs) via distilled data. To start, our work exhaustively characterizes the impact of passive inheritance of model properties by systematically studying the consequences of synthetic data integration. We provide one of the most comprehensive studies to-date of how the source of synthetic data shapes models' internal biases, calibration and generations' textual attributes and preferences. We find that models are surprisingly sensitive towards certain attributes even when the synthetic data prompts appear "neutral". which invites the question whether this sensitivity can be exploited for good. Our findings invite the question can we explicitly steer the models towards the properties we want at test time by exploiting the data generation process? This would have historically been considered infeasible due to the cost of collecting data with a specific characteristic or objective in mind. However, improvement in the quality of synthetic data, as well as a shift towards general-purpose models designed to follow a diverse way of instructions, means this question is timely. We propose active inheritance as a term to describe intentionally constraining synthetic data according to a non-differentiable objective. We demonstrate how active inheritance can steer the generation profiles of models towards desirable non-differentiable attributes, e.g. high lexical diversity or low toxicity.

Recent research has adopted a new experimental field centered around the concept of text perturbations which has revealed that shuffled word order has little to no impact on the downstream performance of Transformer-based language models across many NLP tasks. These findings contradict the common understanding of how the models encode hierarchical and structural information and even question if the word order is modeled with position embeddings. To this end, this paper proposes nine probing datasets organized by the type of controllable text perturbation for three Indo-European languages with a varying degree of word order flexibility: English, Swedish and Russian. Based on the probing analysis of the M-BERT and M-BART models, we report that the syntactic sensitivity depends on the language and model pre-training objectives. We also find that the sensitivity grows across layers together with the increase of the perturbation granularity. Last but not least, we show that the models barely use the positional information to induce syntactic trees from their intermediate self-attention and contextualized representations.

By merging models, AI systems can combine the distinct strengths of separate language models, achieving a balance between multiple capabilities without requiring substantial retraining. However, the integration process can be intricate due to differences in training methods and fine-tuning, typically necessitating specialized knowledge and repeated refinement. This paper explores model merging techniques across a spectrum of complexity, examining where automated methods like evolutionary strategies stand compared to hyperparameter-driven approaches such as DARE, TIES-Merging and simpler methods like Model Soups. In addition, we introduce Differentiable Adaptive Merging (DAM), an efficient, adaptive merging approach as an alternative to evolutionary merging that optimizes model integration through scaling coefficients, minimizing computational demands. Our findings reveal that even simple averaging methods, like Model Soups, perform competitively when model similarity is high, underscoring each technique's unique strengths and limitations. We open-sourced DAM, including the implementation code and experiment pipeline, on GitHub: https://github.com/arcee-ai/DAM.

As researchers and practitioners apply Machine Learning to increasingly more software engineering problems, the approaches they use become more sophisticated. A lot of modern approaches utilize internal code structure in the form of an abstract syntax tree (AST) or its extensions: path-based representation, complex graph combining AST with additional edges. Even though the process of extracting ASTs from code can be done with different parsers, the impact of choosing a parser on the final model quality remains unstudied. Moreover, researchers often omit the exact details of extracting particular code representations. In this work, we evaluate two models, namely Code2Seq and TreeLSTM, in the method name prediction task backed by eight different parsers for the Java language. To unify the process of data preparation with different parsers, we develop SuperParser, a multi-language parser-agnostic library based on PathMiner. SuperParser facilitates the end-to-end creation of datasets suitable for training and evaluation of ML models that work with structural information from source code. Our results demonstrate that trees built by different parsers vary in their structure and content. We then analyze how this diversity affects the models' quality and show that the quality gap between the most and least suitable parsers for both models turns out to be significant. Finally, we discuss other features of the parsers that researchers and practitioners should take into account when selecting a parser along with the impact on the models' quality. The code of SuperParser is publicly available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6366591. We also publish Java-norm, the dataset we use to evaluate the models: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6366599.

At present, different deep learning models are presenting high accuracy on popular inference datasets such as SNLI, MNLI, and SciTail. However, there are different indicators that those datasets can be exploited by using some simple linguistic patterns. This fact poses difficulties to our understanding of the actual capacity of machine learning models to solve the complex task of textual inference. We propose a new set of syntactic tasks focused on contradiction detection that require specific capacities over linguistic logical forms such as: Boolean coordination, quantifiers, definite description, and counting operators. We evaluate two kinds of deep learning models that implicitly exploit language structure: recurrent models and the Transformer network BERT. We show that although BERT is clearly more efficient to generalize over most logical forms, there is space for improvement when dealing with counting operators. Since the syntactic tasks can be implemented in different languages, we show a successful case of cross-lingual transfer learning between English and Portuguese.

Model customization necessitates high-quality and diverse datasets, but acquiring such data remains time-consuming and labor-intensive. Despite the great potential of large language models (LLMs) for data synthesis, current approaches are constrained by limited seed data, model biases, and low-variation prompts, resulting in limited diversity and biased distributions with the increase of data scales. To tackle this challenge, we introduce TREESYNTH, a tree-guided subspace-based data synthesis approach inspired by decision trees. It constructs a spatial partitioning tree to recursively divide a task-specific full data space (i.e., root node) into numerous atomic subspaces (i.e., leaf nodes) with mutually exclusive and exhaustive attributes to ensure both distinctiveness and comprehensiveness before synthesizing samples within each atomic subspace. This globally dividing-and-synthesizing method finally collects subspace samples into a comprehensive dataset, effectively circumventing repetition and space collapse to ensure the diversity of large-scale data synthesis. Furthermore, the spatial partitioning tree enables sample allocation into atomic subspaces, allowing the rebalancing of existing datasets for more balanced and comprehensive distributions. Empirically, extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks consistently demonstrate the superior data diversity, model performance, and robust scalability of TREESYNTH compared to both human-crafted datasets and peer data synthesis methods, with an average performance gain reaching 10%. Besides, the consistent improvements of TREESYNTH-balanced datasets highlight its efficacious application to redistribute existing datasets for more comprehensive coverage and the induced performance enhancement. The code is available at https://github.com/cpa2001/TreeSynth.

Presenting high-level arguments is a crucial task for fostering participation in online societal discussions. Current argument summarization approaches miss an important facet of this task -- capturing diversity -- which is important for accommodating multiple perspectives. We introduce three aspects of diversity: those of opinions, annotators, and sources. We evaluate approaches to a popular argument summarization task called Key Point Analysis, which shows how these approaches struggle to (1) represent arguments shared by few people, (2) deal with data from various sources, and (3) align with subjectivity in human-provided annotations. We find that both general-purpose LLMs and dedicated KPA models exhibit this behavior, but have complementary strengths. Further, we observe that diversification of training data may ameliorate generalization. Addressing diversity in argument summarization requires a mix of strategies to deal with subjectivity.

The development of state-of-the-art (SOTA) Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems has steadily been establishing new techniques to absorb the statistics of linguistic data. These techniques often trace well-known constructs from traditional theories, and we study these connections to close gaps around key NLP methods as a means to orient future work. For this, we introduce an analytic model of the statistics learned by seminal algorithms (including GloVe and Word2Vec), and derive insights for systems that use these algorithms and the statistics of co-occurrence, in general. In this work, we derive -- to the best of our knowledge -- the first known solution to Word2Vec's softmax-optimized, skip-gram algorithm. This result presents exciting potential for future development as a direct solution to a deep learning (DL) language model's (LM's) matrix factorization. However, we use the solution to demonstrate a seemingly-universal existence of a property that word vectors exhibit and which allows for the prophylactic discernment of biases in data -- prior to their absorption by DL models. To qualify our work, we conduct an analysis of independence, i.e., on the density of statistical dependencies in co-occurrence models, which in turn renders insights on the distributional hypothesis' partial fulfillment by co-occurrence statistics.

We present the Knesset Corpus, a corpus of Hebrew parliamentary proceedings containing over 30 million sentences (over 384 million tokens) from all the (plenary and committee) protocols held in the Israeli parliament between 1998 and 2022. Sentences are annotated with morpho-syntactic information and are associated with detailed meta-information reflecting demographic and political properties of the speakers, based on a large database of parliament members and factions that we compiled. We discuss the structure and composition of the corpus and the various processing steps we applied to it. To demonstrate the utility of this novel dataset we present two use cases. We show that the corpus can be used to examine historical developments in the style of political discussions by showing a reduction in lexical richness in the proceedings over time. We also investigate some differences between the styles of men and women speakers. These use cases exemplify the potential of the corpus to shed light on important trends in the Israeli society, supporting research in linguistics, political science, communication, law, etc.

Machine learning, notably deep learning, has significantly propelled molecular investigations within the biochemical sphere. Traditionally, modeling for such research has centered around a handful of paradigms. For instance, the prediction paradigm is frequently deployed for tasks such as molecular property prediction. To enhance the generation and decipherability of purely data-driven models, scholars have integrated biochemical domain knowledge into these molecular study models. This integration has sparked a surge in paradigm transfer, which is solving one molecular learning task by reformulating it as another one. With the emergence of Large Language Models, these paradigms have demonstrated an escalating trend towards harmonized unification. In this work, we delineate a literature survey focused on knowledge-informed molecular learning from the perspective of paradigm transfer. We classify the paradigms, scrutinize their methodologies, and dissect the contribution of domain knowledge. Moreover, we encapsulate prevailing trends and identify intriguing avenues for future exploration in molecular learning.

Lemmatization is a natural language processing (NLP) task which consists of producing, from a given inflected word, its canonical form or lemma. Lemmatization is one of the basic tasks that facilitate downstream NLP applications, and is of particular importance for high-inflected languages. Given that the process to obtain a lemma from an inflected word can be explained by looking at its morphosyntactic category, including fine-grained morphosyntactic information to train contextual lemmatizers has become common practice, without considering whether that is the optimum in terms of downstream performance. In order to address this issue, in this paper we empirically investigate the role of morphological information to develop contextual lemmatizers in six languages within a varied spectrum of morphological complexity: Basque, Turkish, Russian, Czech, Spanish and English. Furthermore, and unlike the vast majority of previous work, we also evaluate lemmatizers in out-of-domain settings, which constitutes, after all, their most common application use. The results of our study are rather surprising. It turns out that providing lemmatizers with fine-grained morphological features during training is not that beneficial, not even for agglutinative languages. In fact, modern contextual word representations seem to implicitly encode enough morphological information to obtain competitive contextual lemmatizers without seeing any explicit morphological signal. Moreover, our experiments suggest that the best lemmatizers out-of-domain are those using simple UPOS tags or those trained without morphology and, finally, that current evaluation practices for lemmatization are not adequate to clearly discriminate between models.

The rapid evolution of specialized large language models (LLMs) has transitioned from simple domain adaptation to sophisticated native architectures, marking a paradigm shift in AI development. This survey systematically examines this progression across healthcare, finance, legal, and technical domains. Besides the wide use of specialized LLMs, technical breakthrough such as the emergence of domain-native designs beyond fine-tuning, growing emphasis on parameter efficiency through sparse computation and quantization, increasing integration of multimodal capabilities and so on are applied to recent LLM agent. Our analysis reveals how these innovations address fundamental limitations of general-purpose LLMs in professional applications, with specialized models consistently performance gains on domain-specific benchmarks. The survey further highlights the implications for E-Commerce field to fill gaps in the field.

The Sejong dictionary dataset offers a valuable resource, providing extensive coverage of morphology, syntax, and semantic representation. This dataset can be utilized to explore linguistic information in greater depth. The labeled linguistic structures within this dataset form the basis for uncovering relationships between words and phrases and their associations with target verbs. This paper introduces a user-friendly web interface designed for the collection and consolidation of verb-related information, with a particular focus on subcategorization frames. Additionally, it outlines our efforts in mapping this information by aligning subcategorization frames with corresponding illustrative sentence examples. Furthermore, we provide a Python library that would simplify syntactic parsing and semantic role labeling. These tools are intended to assist individuals interested in harnessing the Sejong dictionary dataset to develop applications for Korean language processing.

Modern NLP breakthrough includes large multilingual models capable of performing tasks across more than 100 languages. State-of-the-art language models came a long way, starting from the simple one-hot representation of words capable of performing tasks like natural language understanding, common-sense reasoning, or question-answering, thus capturing both the syntax and semantics of texts. At the same time, language models are expanding beyond our known language boundary, even competitively performing over very low-resource dialects of endangered languages. However, there are still problems to solve to ensure an equitable representation of texts through a unified modeling space across language and speakers. In this survey, we shed light on this iterative progression of multilingual text representation and discuss the driving factors that ultimately led to the current state-of-the-art. Subsequently, we discuss how the full potential of language democratization could be obtained, reaching beyond the known limits and what is the scope of improvement in that space.

Despite their impressive capabilities, aligned large language models (LLMs) often generate outputs that lack diversity. What drives this stability in the generation? We investigate this phenomenon through the lens of probability concentration in the model's output distribution. To quantify this concentration, we introduce the Branching Factor (BF) -- a token-invariant measure of the effective number of plausible next steps during generation. Our empirical analysis reveals two key findings: (1) BF often decreases as generation progresses, suggesting that LLMs become more predictable as they generate. (2) alignment tuning substantially sharpens the model's output distribution from the outset, reducing BF by nearly an order of magnitude (e.g., from 12 to 1.2) relative to base models. This stark reduction helps explain why aligned models often appear less sensitive to decoding strategies. Building on this insight, we find this stability has surprising implications for complex reasoning. Aligned Chain-of-Thought (CoT) models (e.g., DeepSeek-distilled models), for instance, leverage this effect; by generating longer reasoning chains, they push generation into later, more deterministic (lower BF) stages, resulting in more stable outputs. We hypothesize that alignment tuning does not fundamentally change a model's behavior, but instead steers it toward stylistic tokens (e.g., "Sure") that unlock low-entropy trajectories already present in the base model. This view is supported by nudging experiments, which show that prompting base models with such tokens can similarly reduce BF. Together, our findings establish BF as a powerful diagnostic for understanding and controlling LLM outputs - clarifying how alignment reduces variability, how CoT promotes stable generations, and how base models can be steered away from diversity.

Systematic generalization refers to the capacity to understand and generate novel combinations from known components. Despite recent progress by large language models (LLMs) across various domains, these models often fail to extend their knowledge to novel compositional scenarios, revealing notable limitations in systematic generalization. There has been an ongoing debate about whether neural networks possess the capacity for systematic generalization, with recent studies suggesting that meta-learning approaches designed for compositionality can significantly enhance this ability. However, these insights have largely been confined to linguistic problems, leaving their applicability to other tasks an open question. In this study, we extend meta-learning for compositionality to the domain of abstract spatial reasoning. To this end, we introduce Compositional-ARC-a dataset designed to evaluate the capacity of models to systematically generalize from known geometric transformations (e.g., translation, rotation) of abstract two-dimensional objects to novel combinations of these transformations (e.g., translation+rotation). Our results show that a small transformer-based encoder-decoder model, trained via meta-learning for compositionality, can systematically generalize to previously unseen transformation compositions. Notably, despite having only 5.7M parameters, this model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art LLMs-including o3-mini, GPT-4o, and Gemini 2.0 Flash, which fail to exhibit similar systematic behavior-and performs on par with the winning model of the ARC prize 2024, an 8B-parameter LLM trained via test-time training. Our findings highlight the effectiveness of meta-learning in promoting systematicity beyond linguistic tasks, suggesting a promising direction toward more robust and generalizable models.

Recent years have seen a paradigm shift in NLP towards using pretrained language models ({PLM}) for a wide range of tasks. However, there are many difficult design decisions to represent structures (e.g. tagged text, coreference chains) in a way such that they can be captured by PLMs. Prior work on structured prediction with PLMs typically flattens the structured output into a sequence, which limits the quality of structural information being learned and leads to inferior performance compared to classic discriminative models. In this work, we describe an approach to model structures as sequences of actions in an autoregressive manner with PLMs, allowing in-structure dependencies to be learned without any loss. Our approach achieves the new state-of-the-art on all the structured prediction tasks we looked at, namely, named entity recognition, end-to-end relation extraction, and coreference resolution.

We employ new tools from mechanistic interpretability in order to ask whether the internal structure of large language models (LLMs) shows correspondence to the linguistic structures which underlie the languages on which they are trained. In particular, we ask (1) when two languages employ the same morphosyntactic processes, do LLMs handle them using shared internal circuitry? and (2) when two languages require different morphosyntactic processes, do LLMs handle them using different internal circuitry? Using English and Chinese multilingual and monolingual models, we analyze the internal circuitry involved in two tasks. We find evidence that models employ the same circuit to handle the same syntactic process independently of the language in which it occurs, and that this is the case even for monolingual models trained completely independently. Moreover, we show that multilingual models employ language-specific components (attention heads and feed-forward networks) when needed to handle linguistic processes (e.g., morphological marking) that only exist in some languages. Together, our results provide new insights into how LLMs trade off between exploiting common structures and preserving linguistic differences when tasked with modeling multiple languages simultaneously.

The high computational cost associated with pretraining large language models limits their research. Two strategies have emerged to address this issue: domain specialization and pretraining with high-quality data. To explore these strategies, we specialized the Sabi\'a-2 Small model with 1.9 billion unique tokens from reputable Brazilian legal sources and conducted few-shot evaluations on legal and general knowledge exams. Our model, Juru, demonstrates the benefits of domain specialization with a reduced amount of pretraining data. However, this specialization comes at the expense of degrading performance in other knowledge areas within the same language. This study contributes to the growing body of scientific evidence showing that pretraining data selection may enhance the performance of large language models, enabling the exploration of these models at a lower cost.

While scaling training compute has led to remarkable improvements in large language models (LLMs), scaling inference compute has not yet yielded analogous gains. We hypothesize that a core missing component is a lack of diverse LLM outputs, leading to inefficient search due to models repeatedly sampling highly similar, yet incorrect generations. We empirically demonstrate that this lack of diversity can be mitigated by searching over candidate plans for solving a problem in natural language. Based on this insight, we propose PLANSEARCH, a novel search algorithm which shows strong results across HumanEval+, MBPP+, and LiveCodeBench (a contamination-free benchmark for competitive coding). PLANSEARCH generates a diverse set of observations about the problem and then uses these observations to construct plans for solving the problem. By searching over plans in natural language rather than directly over code solutions, PLANSEARCH explores a significantly more diverse range of potential solutions compared to baseline search methods. Using PLANSEARCH on top of Claude 3.5 Sonnet achieves a state-of-the-art pass@200 of 77.0% on LiveCodeBench, outperforming both the best score achieved without search (pass@1 = 41.4%) and using standard repeated sampling (pass@200 = 60.6%). Finally, we show that, across all models, search algorithms, and benchmarks analyzed, we can accurately predict performance gains due to search as a direct function of the diversity over generated ideas.

Abstract grammatical knowledge - of parts of speech and grammatical patterns - is key to the capacity for linguistic generalization in humans. But how abstract is grammatical knowledge in large language models? In the human literature, compelling evidence for grammatical abstraction comes from structural priming. A sentence that shares the same grammatical structure as a preceding sentence is processed and produced more readily. Because confounds exist when using stimuli in a single language, evidence of abstraction is even more compelling from crosslingual structural priming, where use of a syntactic structure in one language primes an analogous structure in another language. We measure crosslingual structural priming in large language models, comparing model behavior to human experimental results from eight crosslingual experiments covering six languages, and four monolingual structural priming experiments in three non-English languages. We find evidence for abstract monolingual and crosslingual grammatical representations in the models that function similarly to those found in humans. These results demonstrate that grammatical representations in multilingual language models are not only similar across languages, but they can causally influence text produced in different languages.

Large language models (LLMs) have recently reached an impressive level of linguistic capability, prompting comparisons with human language skills. However, there have been relatively few systematic inquiries into the linguistic capabilities of the latest generation of LLMs, and those studies that do exist (i) ignore the remarkable ability of humans to generalize, (ii) focus only on English, and (iii) investigate syntax or semantics and overlook other capabilities that lie at the heart of human language, like morphology. Here, we close these gaps by conducting the first rigorous analysis of the morphological capabilities of ChatGPT in four typologically varied languages (specifically, English, German, Tamil, and Turkish). We apply a version of Berko's (1958) wug test to ChatGPT, using novel, uncontaminated datasets for the four examined languages. We find that ChatGPT massively underperforms purpose-built systems, particularly in English. Overall, our results -- through the lens of morphology -- cast a new light on the linguistic capabilities of ChatGPT, suggesting that claims of human-like language skills are premature and misleading.

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant strides in replicating human-like abilities, there are concerns about a reduction in the linguistic diversity of their outputs. This results in the homogenization of viewpoints and perspectives, as well as the underrepresentation of specific demographic groups. Although several fine-tuning and prompting techniques have been suggested to tackle the issue, they are often tailored to specific tasks or come with a substantial increase in computational cost and latency. This makes them challenging to apply to applications that demand very low latency, such as chatbots and virtual assistants. We propose Possibility Exploration Fine-Tuning (PEFT), a task-agnostic framework that enhances the text diversity of LLMs without increasing latency or computational cost. Given the same prompt, models fine-tuned with PEFT can simultaneously generate multiple diverse responses, each corresponding with a controllable possibility number. Experiments on dialogue and story generation tasks demonstrate that PEFT significantly enhances the diversity of LLM outputs, as evidenced by lower similarity between candidate responses. Since PEFT emphasizes semantic diversity over lexical diversity, it can also notably reduce demographic bias in dialogue systems. The implementations and datasets are available in our repository: https://github.com/mailong25/peft_diversity

Language models (LMs) are challenging to adapt to new data distributions by simple finetuning. This is due to the rigidity of their subword tokenizers, which typically remain unchanged during adaptation. This inflexibility often leads to inefficient tokenization, causing overfragmentation of out-of-distribution domains, unseen languages, or scripts. In this work, we develop byte-level LMs with learnable tokenizers to make tokenization adaptive. Our models include a submodule that learns to predict boundaries between the input byte sequence, encoding it into variable-length segments. Existing tokenizer-free methods train this boundary predictor using an auxiliary loss that enforces a fixed compression rate across the training corpus, introducing a new kind of rigidity. We propose FLEXITOKENS, a simplified training objective that enables significantly greater flexibility during adaptation. Evaluating across multiple multilingual benchmarks, morphologically diverse tasks, and domains, we demonstrate that FLEXITOKENS consistently reduces token over-fragmentation and achieves up to 10\% improvements on downstream task performance compared to subword and other gradient-based tokenizers. Code and data for our experiments will be released at https://github.com/owos/flexitokens

AI is undergoing a paradigm shift, with breakthroughs achieved by systems orchestrating multiple large language models (LLMs) and other complex components. As a result, developing principled and automated optimization methods for compound AI systems is one of the most important new challenges. Neural networks faced a similar challenge in its early days until backpropagation and automatic differentiation transformed the field by making optimization turn-key. Inspired by this, we introduce TextGrad, a powerful framework performing automatic ``differentiation'' via text. TextGrad backpropagates textual feedback provided by LLMs to improve individual components of a compound AI system. In our framework, LLMs provide rich, general, natural language suggestions to optimize variables in computation graphs, ranging from code snippets to molecular structures. TextGrad follows PyTorch's syntax and abstraction and is flexible and easy-to-use. It works out-of-the-box for a variety of tasks, where the users only provide the objective function without tuning components or prompts of the framework. We showcase TextGrad's effectiveness and generality across a diverse range of applications, from question answering and molecule optimization to radiotherapy treatment planning. Without modifying the framework, TextGrad improves the zero-shot accuracy of GPT-4o in Google-Proof Question Answering from 51% to 55%, yields 20% relative performance gain in optimizing LeetCode-Hard coding problem solutions, improves prompts for reasoning, designs new druglike small molecules with desirable in silico binding, and designs radiation oncology treatment plans with high specificity. TextGrad lays a foundation to accelerate the development of the next-generation of AI systems.

The prevalence of social media presents a growing opportunity to collect and analyse examples of English varieties. Whilst usage of these varieties was - and, in many cases, still is - used only in spoken contexts or hard-to-access private messages, social media sites like Twitter provide a platform for users to communicate informally in a scrapeable format. Notably, Indian English (Hinglish), Singaporean English (Singlish), and African-American English (AAE) can be commonly found online. These varieties pose a challenge to existing natural language processing (NLP) tools as they often differ orthographically and syntactically from standard English for which the majority of these tools are built. NLP models trained on standard English texts produced biased outcomes for users of underrepresented varieties. Some research has aimed to overcome the inherent biases caused by unrepresentative data through techniques like data augmentation or adjusting training models. We aim to address the issue of bias at its root - the data itself. We curate a dataset of tweets from countries with high proportions of underserved English variety speakers, and propose an annotation framework of six categorical classifications along a pseudo-spectrum that measures the degree of standard English and that thereby indirectly aims to surface the manifestations of English varieties in these tweets. Following best annotation practices, our growing corpus features 170,800 tweets taken from 7 countries, labeled by annotators who are from those countries and can communicate in regionally-dominant varieties of English. Our corpus highlights the accuracy discrepancies in pre-trained language identifiers between western English and non-western (i.e., less standard) English varieties. We hope to contribute to the growing literature identifying and reducing the implicit demographic discrepancies in NLP.

Code summarization and generation empower conversion between programming language (PL) and natural language (NL), while code translation avails the migration of legacy code from one PL to another. This paper introduces PLBART, a sequence-to-sequence model capable of performing a broad spectrum of program and language understanding and generation tasks. PLBART is pre-trained on an extensive collection of Java and Python functions and associated NL text via denoising autoencoding. Experiments on code summarization in the English language, code generation, and code translation in seven programming languages show that PLBART outperforms or rivals state-of-the-art models. Moreover, experiments on discriminative tasks, e.g., program repair, clone detection, and vulnerable code detection, demonstrate PLBART's effectiveness in program understanding. Furthermore, analysis reveals that PLBART learns program syntax, style (e.g., identifier naming convention), logical flow (e.g., if block inside an else block is equivalent to else if block) that are crucial to program semantics and thus excels even with limited annotations.

In this paper we present SynKB, an open-source, automatically extracted knowledge base of chemical synthesis protocols. Similar to proprietary chemistry databases such as Reaxsys, SynKB allows chemists to retrieve structured knowledge about synthetic procedures. By taking advantage of recent advances in natural language processing for procedural texts, SynKB supports more flexible queries about reaction conditions, and thus has the potential to help chemists search the literature for conditions used in relevant reactions as they design new synthetic routes. Using customized Transformer models to automatically extract information from 6 million synthesis procedures described in U.S. and EU patents, we show that for many queries, SynKB has higher recall than Reaxsys, while maintaining high precision. We plan to make SynKB available as an open-source tool; in contrast, proprietary chemistry databases require costly subscriptions.

Tokenization is the first - and often underappreciated - layer of computation in language models. While Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting enables transformer models to approximate recurrent computation by externalizing intermediate steps, we show that the success of such reasoning is fundamentally bounded by the structure of tokenized inputs. This work presents a theoretical and empirical investigation into how tokenization schemes, particularly subword-based methods like byte-pair encoding (BPE), impede symbolic computation by merging or obscuring atomic reasoning units. We introduce the notion of Token Awareness to formalize how poor token granularity disrupts logical alignment and prevents models from generalizing symbolic procedures. Through systematic evaluation on arithmetic and symbolic tasks, we demonstrate that token structure dramatically affect reasoning performance, causing failure even with CoT, while atomically-aligned formats unlock strong generalization, allowing small models (e.g., GPT-4o-mini) to outperform larger systems (e.g., o1) in structured reasoning. Our findings reveal that symbolic reasoning ability in LLMs is not purely architectural, but deeply conditioned on token-level representations.

Paraphrase generation has been widely used in various downstream tasks. Most tasks benefit mainly from high quality paraphrases, namely those that are semantically similar to, yet linguistically diverse from, the original sentence. Generating high-quality paraphrases is challenging as it becomes increasingly hard to preserve meaning as linguistic diversity increases. Recent works achieve nice results by controlling specific aspects of the paraphrase, such as its syntactic tree. However, they do not allow to directly control the quality of the generated paraphrase, and suffer from low flexibility and scalability. Here we propose QCPG, a quality-guided controlled paraphrase generation model, that allows directly controlling the quality dimensions. Furthermore, we suggest a method that given a sentence, identifies points in the quality control space that are expected to yield optimal generated paraphrases. We show that our method is able to generate paraphrases which maintain the original meaning while achieving higher diversity than the uncontrolled baseline. The models, the code, and the data can be found in https://github.com/IBM/quality-controlled-paraphrase-generation.

Language models strongly rely on frequency information because they maximize the likelihood of tokens during pre-training. As a consequence, language models tend to not generalize well to tokens that are seldom seen during training. Moreover, maximum likelihood training has been discovered to give rise to anisotropy: representations of tokens in a model tend to cluster tightly in a high-dimensional cone, rather than spreading out over their representational capacity. Our work introduces a method for quantifying the frequency bias of a language model by assessing sentence-level perplexity with respect to token-level frequency. We then present a method for reducing the frequency bias of a language model by inducing a syntactic prior over token representations during pre-training. Our Syntactic Smoothing method adjusts the maximum likelihood objective function to distribute the learning signal to syntactically similar tokens. This approach results in better performance on infrequent English tokens and a decrease in anisotropy. We empirically show that the degree of anisotropy in a model correlates with its frequency bias.

Segmenting text into sentences plays an early and crucial role in many NLP systems. This is commonly achieved by using rule-based or statistical methods relying on lexical features such as punctuation. Although some recent works no longer exclusively rely on punctuation, we find that no prior method achieves all of (i) robustness to missing punctuation, (ii) effective adaptability to new domains, and (iii) high efficiency. We introduce a new model - Segment any Text (SaT) - to solve this problem. To enhance robustness, we propose a new pretraining scheme that ensures less reliance on punctuation. To address adaptability, we introduce an extra stage of parameter-efficient fine-tuning, establishing state-of-the-art performance in distinct domains such as verses from lyrics and legal documents. Along the way, we introduce architectural modifications that result in a threefold gain in speed over the previous state of the art and solve spurious reliance on context far in the future. Finally, we introduce a variant of our model with fine-tuning on a diverse, multilingual mixture of sentence-segmented data, acting as a drop-in replacement and enhancement for existing segmentation tools. Overall, our contributions provide a universal approach for segmenting any text. Our method outperforms all baselines - including strong LLMs - across 8 corpora spanning diverse domains and languages, especially in practically relevant situations where text is poorly formatted. Our models and code, including documentation, are available at https://huggingface.co/segment-any-text under the MIT license.