Large Language Model
To model human linguistic prediction, make LLMs less superhuman
When people listen to or read a sentence, they actively make predictions about upcoming words: words that are less predictable are generally read more slowly than predictable ones. The success of large language models (LLMs), which, like humans, make predictions about upcoming words, has motivated exploring the use of these models as cognitive models of human linguistic prediction. Surprisingly, in the last few years, as language models have become better at predicting the next word, their ability to predict human reading behavior has declined. This is because LLMs are able to predict upcoming words much better than people can, leading them to predict lower processing difficulty in reading than observed in human experiments; in other words, mainstream LLMs are'superhuman' as models of language comprehension. In this position paper, we argue that LLMs' superhumanness is primarily driven by two factors: compared to humans, LLMs have much stronger long-term memory for facts and training examples, and they have much better short-term memory for previous words in the text. W e advocate for creating models that have human-like long-term and short-term memory, and outline some possible directions for achieving this goal. Finally, we argue that currently available human data is insufficient to measure progress towards this goal, and outline human experiments that can address this gap.
NLD-LLM: A systematic framework for evaluating small language transformer models on natural language description
Jelodar, Hamed, Meymani, Mohammad, Hamedi, Parisa, Nwankwo, Tochukwu Emmanuel, Bai, Samita, Razavi-Far, Roozbeh, Ghorbani, Ali A.
Natural Language Description (NLD) is a Natural Language Processing (NLP) task that requires models to generate structured and meaningful outputs from natural language inputs. In this work, we propose NLD-LLM, a systematic NLP framework to evaluate the performance of language models to generate accurate and concise source code descriptions. This framework incorporates a diverse set of transformer models, including Qwen, DeepSeek, Phi, LLaMA, and Mistral, spanning various sizes, architectures, and training approaches. Central to NLD-LLM is a comprehensive prompt design strategy that includes standardized formatting, clear task guidance, and NLD prompting, ensuring fair and consistent evaluation. Additionally, we apply an iterative refinement process to improve output's quality and assess the model's adaptability. Using semantic and structural metrics, our analysis demonstrates that prompt engineering significantly impacts the effectiveness of the model such that smaller models often performing competitively when supported by well-crafted prompts.
Linguistic Characteristics of AI-Generated Text: A Survey
Terฤon, Luka, Dobrovoljc, Kaja
Large language models (LLMs) are solidifying their position in the modern world as effective tools for the automatic generation of text. Their use is quickly becoming commonplace in fields such as education, healthcare, and scientific research. There is a growing need to study the linguistic features present in AI-generated text, as the increasing presence of such texts has profound implications in various disciplines such as corpus linguistics, computational linguistics, and natural language processing. Many observations have already been made, however a broader synthesis of the findings made so far is required to provide a better understanding of the topic. The present survey paper aims to provide such a synthesis of extant research. We categorize the existing works along several dimensions, including the levels of linguistic description, the models included, the genres analyzed, the languages analyzed, and the approach to prompting. Additionally, the same scheme is used to present the findings made so far and expose the current trends followed by researchers. Among the most-often reported findings is the observation that AI-generated text is more likely to contain a more formal and impersonal style, signaled by the increased presence of nouns, determiners, and adpositions and the lower reliance on adjectives and adverbs. AI-generated text is also more likely to feature a lower lexical diversity, a smaller vocabulary size, and repetitive text. Current research, however, remains heavily concentrated on English data and mostly on text generated by the GPT model family, highlighting the need for broader cross-linguistic and cross-model investigation. In most cases authors also fail to address the issue of prompt sensitivity, leaving much room for future studies that employ multiple prompt wordings in the text generation phase.
Curiosity-Driven LLM-as-a-judge for Personalized Creative Judgment
Kumar, Vanya Bannihatti, Goyal, Divyanshu, Eppa, Akhil, Bhandari, Neel
Creative Thinking(TTCW) benchmark introduced in Chakrabarty et al. (2024), Rigorous, standardized evaluation has repeatedly catalyzed progress in machine learning, from ImageNetRussakovsky et al. (2015) and GLUEWang et al. (2019), driving leaps in the fields of computer vision and Natural Language Processing, respectively. The same effect is evident in objective math reasoning, where benchmarks like GSM8KCobbe et al. (2021), together with RL-trained reasoning models such as OpenAI's o1OpenAI et al. (2024) and DeepSeek-R1DeepSeek-AI Models(LLM) as a judge prefer their own generations making them unreliable. As shown in Chakrabarty et al. (2024) and Table 12 and Table 2, even Specifically, when the model is "surprised" by an expert's explanation, it signals a mismatch between the LLM's prior belief and the expert's The intuition behind predicting the annotator is that the model can learn which annotator caused the belief shift, allowing it to calibrate the curiosity signal for each annotator individually, thereby improving personalization. In our experiments, we establish a baseline using an SFT model that predicts annotators' binary More details about the results can be found in Fig 4.Figure 1: Overview of Architecture during training for Curiosity Driven LLM-as-a-judgeFigure 2: Overview of Architecture during inference for Curiosity Driven LLM-as-a-judge 2 (a) Baseline without using explanations (b) Baseline using explanations TTCW dataset Chakrabarty et al. (2024), which is based on the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking Torrance (1966) but adapted for LLMs. All the distinct dimensions in the TTCW dataset are mentioned in Appendix A.1.
Characterizing Model Behavior Under Synthetic Data Training: An Empirical Study Across Scales and Mixing Ratios
Du, Y., Wu, G., Tang, G., Wang, W., Fan, Q.
Synthetic data generated by large language models has become integral to modern NLP training pipelines, from bootstrapping reasoning capabilities to augmenting instruction-following datasets. While recent work demonstrates successful applications maintaining high external data ratios, systematic understanding of how synthetic data proportion affects model behavior across different scales remains limited. This paper presents a controlled empirical study examining model performance, calibration, and output characteristics when trained on varying synthetic-to-external data ratios. Using the Pythia model suite (410M-12B parameters) across five diverse tasks, we evaluate models after one to three training iterations with synthetic data proportions ranging from 0-50\%. Our key findings include: models maintain stable performance with up to 20\% synthetic data, but degradation accelerates beyond 30\%; larger models (6.9B-12B) show greater robustness to synthetic data than smaller models (410M-1.4B); calibration degradation precedes accuracy loss, providing an early warning signal; and task characteristics matter, with reasoning tasks degrading faster than retrieval tasks under synthetic data training. Importantly, we find that current best practices, such as those employed in STaR and Self-Instruct systems that maintain greater than 80\% external data, operate well within safe regimes identified by our experiments. We provide practical guidance for practitioners on synthetic data budgets based on model scale and task requirements, alongside detailed comparison with concurrent work including Shumailov et al.'s model collapse findings.
Rationale-Augmented Retrieval with Constrained LLM Re-Ranking for Task Discovery
Head Start programs utilizing GoEngage face significant challenges when new or rotating staff attempt to locate appropriate Tasks (modules) on the platform homepage. These difficulties arise from domain-specific jargon (e.g., IFPA, DRDP), system-specific nomenclature (e.g., Application Pool), and the inherent limitations of lexical search in handling typos and varied word ordering. We propose a pragmatic hybrid semantic search system that synergistically combines lightweight typo-tolerant lexical retrieval, embedding-based vector similarity, and constrained large language model (LLM) re-ranking. Our approach leverages the organization's existing Task Repository and Knowledge Base infrastructure while ensuring trustworthiness through low false-positive rates, evolvability to accommodate terminological changes, and economic efficiency via intelligent caching, shortlist generation, and graceful degradation mechanisms. We provide a comprehensive framework detailing required resources, a phased implementation strategy with concrete milestones, an offline evaluation protocol utilizing curated test cases (Hit@K, Precision@K, Recall@K, MRR), and an online measurement methodology incorporating query success metrics, zero-result rates, and dwell-time proxies.
Catalog-Native LLM: Speaking Item-ID Dialect with Less Entanglement for Recommendation
Shirkavand, Reza, Wei, Xiaokai, Wang, Chen, Hui, Zheng, Huang, Heng, Gong, Michelle
While collaborative filtering delivers predictive accuracy and efficiency, and Large Language Models (LLMs) enable expressive and generalizable reasoning, modern recommendation systems must bring these strengths together. Growing user expectations, such as natural-language queries and transparent explanations, further highlight the need for a unified approach. However, doing so is nontrivial. Collaborative signals are often token-efficient but semantically opaque, while LLMs are semantically rich but struggle to model implicit user preferences when trained only on textual inputs. This paper introduces Item-ID + Oral-language Mixture-of-Experts Language Model (IDIOMoE), which treats item interaction histories as a native dialect within the language space, enabling collaborative signals to be understood in the same way as natural language. By splitting the Feed Forward Network of each block of a pretrained LLM into a separate text expert and an item expert with token-type gating, our method avoids destructive interference between text and catalog modalities. IDIOMoE demonstrates strong recommendation performance across both public and proprietary datasets, while preserving the text understanding of the pretrained model.
Towards Structured Knowledge: Advancing Triple Extraction from Regional Trade Agreements using Large Language Models
Nandini, Durgesh, Koch, Rebekka, Schoenfeld, Mirco
This study investigates the effectiveness of Large Language Models (LLMs) for the extraction of structured knowledge in the form of Subject-Predicate-Object triples. We apply the setup for the domain of Economics application. The findings can be applied to a wide range of scenarios, including the creation of economic trade knowledge graphs from natural language legal trade agreement texts. As a use case, we apply the model to regional trade agreement texts to extract trade-related information triples. In particular, we explore the zero-shot, one-shot and few-shot prompting techniques, incorporating positive and negative examples, and evaluate their performance based on quantitative and qualitative metrics. Specifically, we used Llama 3.1 model to process the unstructured regional trade agreement texts and extract triples. We discuss key insights, challenges, and potential future directions, emphasizing the significance of language models in economic applications.
Hallucination is Inevitable for LLMs with the Open World Assumption
Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit impressive linguistic competence but also produce inaccurate or fabricated outputs, often called ``hallucinations''. Engineering approaches usually regard hallucination as a defect to be minimized, while formal analyses have argued for its theoretical inevitability. Yet both perspectives remain incomplete when considering the conditions required for artificial general intelligence (AGI). This paper reframes ``hallucination'' as a manifestation of the generalization problem. Under the Closed World assumption, where training and test distributions are consistent, hallucinations may be mitigated. Under the Open World assumption, however, where the environment is unbounded, hallucinations become inevitable. This paper further develops a classification of hallucination, distinguishing cases that may be corrected from those that appear unavoidable under open-world conditions. On this basis, it suggests that ``hallucination'' should be approached not merely as an engineering defect but as a structural feature to be tolerated and made compatible with human intelligence.
Collaborative and Proactive Management of Task-Oriented Conversations
Saedi, Arezoo, Fatemi, Afsaneh, Nematbakhsh, Mohammad Ali, Rosset, Sophie, Vilnat, Anne
Task oriented dialogue systems (TOD) complete particular tasks based on user preferences across natural language interactions. Considering the impressive performance of large language models (LLMs) in natural language processing (NLP) tasks, most of the latest TODs are centered on LLMs. While proactive planning is crucial for task completion, many existing TODs overlook effective goal-aware planning. This paper creates a model for managing task-oriented conversations, conceptualized centered on the information state approach to dialogue management. The created model incorporated constructive intermediate information in planning. Initially, predefined slots and text part informational components are created to model user preferences. Investigating intermediate information, critical circumstances are identified. Informational components corresponding to these circumstances are created. Possible configurations for these informational components lead to limited information states. Then, dialogue moves, which indicate movement between these information states and the procedures that must be performed in the movements, are created. Eventually, the update strategy is constructed. The created model is implemented leveraging in-context learning of LLMs. In this model, database queries are created centered on indicated predefined slots and the order of retrieved entities is indicated centered on text part. This mechanism enables passing the whole corresponding entities to the preferences in the order of congruency. Evaluations exploiting the complete test conversations of MultiWOZ, with no more than a domain in a conversation, illustrate maximal inform and success, and improvement compared with previous methods.