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 Large Language Model


The Achilles' Heel of LLMs: How Altering a Handful of Neurons Can Cripple Language Abilities

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become foundational tools in natural language processing, powering a wide range of applications and research. Many studies have shown that LLMs share significant similarities with the human brain. Recent neuroscience research has found that a small subset of biological neurons in the human brain are crucial for core cognitive functions, which raises a fundamental question: do LLMs also contain a small subset of critical neurons? In this paper, we investigate this question by proposing a Perturbation-based Causal Identification of Critical Neurons method to systematically locate such critical neurons in LLMs. Our findings reveal three key insights: (1) LLMs contain ultra-sparse critical neuron sets. Disrupting these critical neurons can cause a 72B-parameter model with over 1.1 billion neurons to completely collapse, with perplexity increasing by up to 20 orders of magnitude; (2) These critical neurons are not uniformly distributed, but tend to concentrate in the outer layers, particularly within the MLP down_proj components; (3) Performance degradation exhibits sharp phase transitions, rather than a gradual decline, when these critical neurons are disrupted. Through comprehensive experiments across diverse model architectures and scales, we provide deeper analysis of these phenomena and their implications for LLM robustness and inter-pretability. These findings can offer guidance for developing more robust model architectures and improving deployment security in safety-critical applications.


Text2Token: Unsupervised Text Representation Learning with Token Target Prediction

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Unsupervised text representation learning (TRL) is a fundamental task in natural language processing, which is beneficial for improving search and recommendations with the web's unlabeled texts. A recent empirical study finds that the high-quality representation aligns with the key token of the input text, uncovering the potential connection between representation space and vocabulary space. Inspired by the findings, we revisit the generative tasks and develop an unsupervised generative framework for TRL, Text2Token. The framework is based on the token target prediction task, utilizing carefully constructed target token distribution as supervisory signals. To construct the high-quality target token distribution, we analyze the token-alignment properties with advanced embedders and identify two essential categories of key tokens: (1) the meaningful tokens in the text and (2) semantically derived tokens beyond the text. Based on these insights, we propose two methods -- data-driven and model-derived -- to construct synthetic token targets from data or the LLM backbone. Experiments on the MTEB v2 benchmark demonstrate that Text2Token achieves performance competitive with the state-of-the-art embedder with unsupervised contrastive learning, LLM2Vec. Our analysis further shows that vocabulary and representation spaces optimize together and toward the optimum solution during training, providing new ideas and insights for future work.


You only need 4 extra tokens: Synergistic Test-time Adaptation for LLMs

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in specialized domains such as finance, medicine, and agriculture, where they face significant distribution shifts from their training data. Domain-specific fine-tuning can mitigate this challenge but relies on high-quality labeled data that is expensive and slow to collect in expertise-limited settings. We study label-free test-time adaptation for language models and present SyTTA, an inference-time framework that adapts models on-the-fly without additional supervision. SyTTA couples two complementary uncertainty signals that arise under distribution shift: input-side perplexity, indicating mismatch with domain-specific terminology and patterns, and output-side predictive entropy, indicating diffuse and unstable token probabilities during generation. Across diverse model architectures and domain-specific benchmarks, SyTTA delivers consistent gains. Notably, on agricultural question answering, SyTTA improves Rouge-LSum by over 120% on Qwen-2.5-7B with only 4 extra tokens per query. These results show that effective test-time adaptation for language models is achievable without labeled examples, supporting deployment in label-scarce domains. The code will be made available upon acceptance.


Learning to Guarantee Type Correctness in Code Generation through Type-Guided Program Synthesis

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Language models have shown remarkable proficiency in code generation; nevertheless, ensuring type correctness remains a challenge. Although traditional methods, such as constrained decoding, alleviate this problem by externally rejecting untypable code, the model itself does not effectively learn type reasoning internally, which ultimately limits its overall performance. This paper introduces TyFlow, a novel system that internalizes type reasoning within code generation to guide the model to learn the type system. The core of our approach is a novel type-guided program synthesis system that maintains an isomorphism between type derivation trees and synthesis derivation trees, enabling a new code representation based on synthesis decision sequences rather than traditional text-based token sequences. By offloading the complexity of type system learning to the representation itself, models can redirect their computational resources toward higher-level program semantics. Our evaluation shows that TyFlow not only eliminates type errors but also significantly improves functional correctness, highlighting the importance of aligning LMs with type systems internally.


Weed Out, Then Harvest: Dual Low-Rank Adaptation is an Effective Noisy Label Detector for Noise-Robust Learning

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive performance in various downstream tasks. However, in many real-world scenarios, the collected training data inevitably contains noisy labels. To learn from noisy labels, most solutions select samples with small losses for model training. However, the selected samples, in turn, impact the loss computation in the next iteration. An inaccurate initial selection can create a vicious cycle, leading to suboptimal performance. To break this cycle, we propose Delora, a novel framework that decouples the sample selection from model training. For sample selection, Delora establishes a noisy label detector by introducing clean and noisy LoRA. Benefiting from the memory effect, the clean LoRA is encouraged to memorize clean data, while the noisy LoRA is constrained to memorize mislabeled data, which serves as a learnable threshold for selecting clean and noisy samples. For model training, Delora can use carefully selected samples to fine-tune language models seamlessly. Experimental results on synthetic and real-world noisy datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of Delora in noisy label detection and text classification.


A Survey of Inductive Reasoning for Large Language Models

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Reasoning is an important task for large language models (LLMs). Among all the reasoning paradigms, inductive reasoning is one of the fundamental types, which is characterized by its particular-to-general thinking process and the non-uniqueness of its answers. The inductive mode is crucial for knowledge generalization and aligns better with human cognition, so it is a fundamental mode of learning, hence attracting increasing interest. Despite the importance of inductive reasoning, there is no systematic summary of it. Therefore, this paper presents the first comprehensive survey of inductive reasoning for LLMs. First, methods for improving inductive reasoning are categorized into three main areas: post-training, test-time scaling, and data augmentation. Then, current benchmarks of inductive reasoning are summarized, and a unified sandbox-based evaluation approach with the observation coverage metric is derived. Finally, we offer some analyses regarding the source of inductive ability and how simple model architectures and data help with inductive tasks, providing a solid foundation for future research.


LLMs are All You Need? Improving Fuzz Testing for MOJO with Large Language Models

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The rapid development of large language models (LLMs) has revolutionized software testing, particularly fuzz testing, by automating the generation of diverse and effective test inputs. This advancement holds great promise for improving software reliability. Meanwhile, the introduction of MOJO, a high-performance AI programming language blending Python's usability with the efficiency of C and C++, presents new opportunities to enhance AI model scalability and programmability. However, as a new language, MOJO lacks comprehensive testing frameworks and a sufficient corpus for LLM-based testing, which exacerbates model hallucination. In this case, LLMs will generate syntactically valid but semantically incorrect code, significantly reducing the effectiveness of fuzz testing. To address this challenge, we propose MOJOFuzzer, the first adaptive LLM-based fuzzing framework designed for zero-shot learning environments of emerging programming languages. MOJOFuzzer integrates a mutil-phase framework that systematically eliminates low-quality generated inputs before execution, significantly improving test case validity. Furthermore, MOJOFuzzer dynamically adapts LLM prompts based on runtime feedback for test case mutation, enabling an iterative learning process that continuously enhances fuzzing efficiency and bug detection performance. Our experimental results demonstrate that MOJOFuzzer significantly enhances test validity, API coverage, and bug detection performance, outperforming traditional fuzz testing and state-of-the-art LLM-based fuzzing approaches. Using MOJOFuzzer, we have conducted a first large-scale fuzz testing evaluation of MOJO, uncorvering 13 previous unknown bugs. This study not only advances the field of LLM-driven software testing but also establishes a foundational methodology for leveraging LLMs in the testing of emerging programming languages.


BabyBabelLM: A Multilingual Benchmark of Developmentally Plausible Training Data

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We present BabyBabelLM, a multilingual collection of datasets modeling the language a person observes from birth until they acquire a native language. We curate developmentally plausible pretraining data aiming to cover the equivalent of 100M English words of content in each of 45 languages. We compile evaluation suites and train baseline models in each language. BabyBabelLM aims to facilitate multilingual pretraining and cognitive modeling.


CompassNav: Steering From Path Imitation To Decision Understanding In Navigation

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The dominant paradigm for training Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) in navigation relies on imitating expert trajectories. This approach reduces the complex navigation task to a sequence-to-sequence replication of a single correct path, fundamentally limiting the agent's ability to explore and generalize. In this work, we argue for and introduce a new paradigm: a shift from Path Imitation to Decision Understanding. The goal of this paradigm is to build agents that do not just follow, but truly understand how to navigate. We materialize this through two core contributions: first, we introduce Compass-Data-22k, a novel 22k-trajectory dataset.Its Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (RFT) subset provides a panoramic view of the decision landscape by annotating all feasible actions with A* geodesic distances. Second, we design a novel gap-aware hybrid reward function that dynamically adapts its feedback to decision certainty, shifting between decisive signals for optimal actions and nuanced scores to encourage exploration. Integrated into an SFT-then-RFT recipe, our CompassNav agent is trained not to memorize static routes, but to develop an internal ``compass'' that constantly intuits the direction to the goal by evaluating the relative quality of all possible moves. This approach enables our 7B agent to set a new state-of-the-art on Goal navigation benchmarks, outperforming even larger proprietary models, and achieve robust real-world goal navigation on a physical robot.


Hybrid OCR-LLM Framework for Enterprise-Scale Document Information Extraction Under Copy-heavy Task

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Information extraction from copy-heavy documents, characterized by massive volumes of structurally similar content, represents a critical yet understudied challenge in enterprise document processing. We present a systematic framework that strategically combines OCR engines with Large Language Models (LLMs) to optimize the accuracy-efficiency trade-off inherent in repetitive document extraction tasks. Unlike existing approaches that pursue universal solutions, our method exploits document-specific characteristics through intelligent strategy selection. We implement and evaluate 25 configurations across three extraction paradigms (direct, replacement, and table-based) on identity documents spanning four formats (PNG, DOCX, XLSX, PDF). Through table-based extraction methods, our adaptive framework delivers outstanding results: F1=1.0 accuracy with 0.97s latency for structured documents, and F1=0.997 accuracy with 0.6 s for challenging image inputs when integrated with PaddleOCR, all while maintaining sub-second processing speeds. The 54 times performance improvement compared with multimodal methods over naive approaches, coupled with format-aware routing, enables processing of heterogeneous document streams at production scale. Beyond the specific application to identity extraction, this work establishes a general principle: the repetitive nature of copy-heavy tasks can be transformed from a computational burden into an optimization opportunity through structure-aware method selection.