Large language models learn and continually learn through the accumulation of gradient-based updates, but how individual pieces of new information affect existing knowledge, leading to both beneficial generalization and problematic hallucination, remains poorly understood. We demonstrate that when learning new information, LLMs exhibit a "priming" effect: learning a new fact can cause the model to inappropriately apply that knowledge in unrelated contexts. To systematically study this phenomenon, we introduce "Outlandish," a carefully curated dataset of 1320 diverse text samples designed to probe how new knowledge permeates through an LLM's existing knowledge base. Using this dataset, we show that the degree of priming after learning new information can be predicted by measuring the token probability of key words before learning. This relationship holds robustly across different model architectures (PALM-2, Gemma, Llama), sizes, and training stages. Finally, we develop two novel techniques to modulate how new knowledge affects existing model behavior: (1) a ``stepping-stone'' text augmentation strategy and (2) an ``ignore-k'' update pruning method. These approaches reduce undesirable priming effects by 50-95\% while preserving the model's ability to learn new information. Our findings provide both empirical insights into how LLMs learn and practical tools for improving the specificity of knowledge insertion in language models. Further materials: https://sunchipsster1.github.io/projects/outlandish/

--When applying pre-trained large language models (LLMs) to address anomaly detection tasks, the multivariate time series (MTS) modality of anomaly detection does not align with the text modality of LLMs. Existing methods simply transform the MTS data into multiple univariate time series sequences, which can cause many problems. This paper introduces MADLLM, a novel multivariate anomaly detection method via pre-trained LLMs. We design a new triple encoding technique to align the MTS modality with the text modality of LLMs. Specifically, this technique integrates the traditional patch embedding method with two novel embedding approaches: (i) Skip Embedding, which alters the order of patch processing in traditional methods to help LLMs retain knowledge of previous features, and (ii) Feature Embedding, which leverages contrastive learning to allow the model to better understand the correlations between different features. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in various public anomaly detection datasets. Anomaly detection is widely used across a range of fields, including finance.

The capabilities of the latest large language models (LLMs) have been extended from pure natural language understanding to complex reasoning tasks. However, current reasoning models often exhibit factual inaccuracies in longer reasoning chains, which poses challenges for historical reasoning and limits the potential of LLMs in complex, knowledge-intensive tasks. Historical studies require not only the accurate presentation of factual information but also the ability to establish cross-temporal correlations and derive coherent conclusions from fragmentary and often ambiguous sources. To address these challenges, we propose Kongzi, a large language model specifically designed for historical analysis. Through the integration of curated, high-quality historical data and a novel fact-reinforcement learning strategy, Kongzi demonstrates strong factual alignment and sophisticated reasoning depth. Extensive experiments on tasks such as historical question answering and narrative generation demonstrate that Kongzi outperforms existing models in both factual accuracy and reasoning depth. By effectively addressing the unique challenges inherent in historical texts, Kongzi sets a new standard for the development of accurate and reliable LLMs in professional domains.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently garnered widespread attention due to their adeptness at generating innovative responses to the given prompts across a multitude of domains. However, LLMs often suffer from the inherent limitation of hallucinations and generate incorrect information while maintaining well-structured and coherent responses. In this work, we hypothesize that hallucinations stem from the internal dynamics of LLMs. Our observations indicate that, during passage generation, LLMs tend to deviate from factual accuracy in subtle parts of responses, eventually shifting toward misinformation. This phenomenon bears a resemblance to human cognition, where individuals may hallucinate while maintaining logical coherence, embedding uncertainty within minor segments of their speech. To investigate this further, we introduce an innovative approach, HalluShift, designed to analyze the distribution shifts in the internal state space and token probabilities of the LLM-generated responses. Our method attains superior performance compared to existing baselines across various benchmark datasets. Our codebase is available at https://github.com/sharanya-dasgupta001/hallushift.

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across a wide range of tasks. However, their vulnerability to user gaslighting-the deliberate use of misleading or contradictory inputs-raises critical concerns about their reliability in real-world applications. In this paper, we address the novel and challenging issue of mitigating the negative impact of negation-based gaslighting on LMMs, where deceptive user statements lead to significant drops in model accuracy. Specifically, we introduce GasEraser, a training-free approach that reallocates attention weights from misleading textual tokens to semantically salient visual regions. By suppressing the influence of "attention sink" tokens and enhancing focus on visually grounded cues, GasEraser significantly improves LMM robustness without requiring retraining or additional supervision. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that GasEraser is effective across several leading open-source LMMs on the GaslightingBench. Notably, for LLaVA-v1.5-7B, GasEraser reduces the misguidance rate by 48.2%, demonstrating its potential for more trustworthy LMMs.

Current safety alignment techniques for large language models (LLMs) face two key challenges: (1) under-generalization, which leaves models vulnerable to novel jailbreak attacks, and (2) over-alignment, which leads to the excessive refusal of benign instructions. Our preliminary investigation reveals semantic overlap between jailbreak/harmful queries and normal prompts in embedding space, suggesting that more effective safety alignment requires a deeper semantic understanding. This motivates us to incorporate safety-policy-driven reasoning into the alignment process. To this end, we propose the Safety-oriented Reasoning Optimization Framework (SaRO), which consists of two stages: (1) Reasoning-style Warmup (RW) that enables LLMs to internalize long-chain reasoning through supervised fine-tuning, and (2) Safety-oriented Reasoning Process Optimization (SRPO) that promotes safety reflection via direct preference optimization (DPO). Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of SaRO over traditional alignment methods.

Humans are sensitive to suspicious coincidences when generalizing inductively over data, as they make assumptions as to how the data was sampled. This results in smaller, more specific hypotheses being favored over more general ones. For instance, when provided the set {Austin, Dallas, Houston}, one is more likely to think that this is sampled from "Texas Cities" over "US Cities" even though both are compatible. Suspicious coincidence is strongly connected to pragmatic reasoning, and can serve as a testbed to analyze systems on their sensitivity towards the communicative goals of the task (i.e., figuring out the true category underlying the data). In this paper, we analyze whether suspicious coincidence effects are reflected in language models' (LMs) behavior. We do so in the context of two domains: 1) the number game, where humans made judgments of whether a number (e.g., 4) fits a list of given numbers (e.g., 16, 32, 2); and 2) by extending the number game setup to prominent cities. For both domains, the data is compatible with multiple hypotheses and we study which hypothesis is most consistent with the models' behavior. On analyzing five models, we do not find strong evidence for suspicious coincidences in LMs' zero-shot behavior. However, when provided access to the hypotheses space via chain-of-thought or explicit prompting, LMs start to show an effect resembling suspicious coincidences, sometimes even showing effects consistent with humans. Our study suggests that inductive reasoning behavior in LMs can be enhanced with explicit access to the hypothesis landscape.

Robots operating in unstructured environments face significant challenges when interacting with everyday objects like doors. They particularly struggle to generalize across diverse door types and conditions. Existing vision-based and open-loop planning methods often lack the robustness to handle varying door designs, mechanisms, and push/pull configurations. In this work, we propose a haptic-aware closed-loop hierarchical control framework that enables robots to explore and open different unseen doors in the wild. Our approach leverages real-time haptic feedback, allowing the robot to adjust its strategy dynamically based on force feedback during manipulation. We test our system on 20 unseen doors across different buildings, featuring diverse appearances and mechanical types. Our framework achieves a 90% success rate, demonstrating its ability to generalize and robustly handle varied door-opening tasks. This scalable solution offers potential applications in broader open-world articulated object manipulation tasks.

Automation of existing Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) is important but hard to achieve. Upstream of making the GUI user-accessible or somehow scriptable, even the data-collection to understand the original interface poses significant challenges. For example, large quantities of general UI data seem helpful for training general machine learning (ML) models, but accessibility for each person can hinge on the ML's precision on a specific app. We therefore take the perspective that a given user needs confidence, that the relevant UI elements are being detected correctly throughout one app or digital environment. We mostly assume that the target application is known in advance, so that data collection and ML-training can be personalized for the test-time target domain. The proposed Explorer system focuses on detecting on-screen buttons and text-entry fields, i.e. interactables, where the training process has access to a live version of the application. The live application can run on almost any popular platform except iOS phones, and the collection is especially streamlined for Android phones or for desktop Chrome browsers. Explorer also enables the recording of interactive user sessions, and subsequent mapping of how such sessions overlap and sometimes loop back to similar states. We show how having such a map enables a kind of path planning through the GUI, letting a user issue audio commands to get to their destination. Critically, we are releasing our code for Explorer openly at https://github.com/varnelis/Explorer.

Mixture of Experts (MoE) LLMs, characterized by their sparse activation patterns, offer a promising approach to scaling language models while avoiding proportionally increasing the inference cost. However, their large parameter sizes present deployment challenges in resource-constrained environments with limited GPU memory capacity, as GPU memory is often insufficient to accommodate the full set of model weights. Consequently, typical deployments rely on CPU-GPU hybrid execution: the GPU handles compute-intensive GEMM operations, while the CPU processes the relatively lightweight attention mechanism. This setup introduces a key challenge: how to effectively optimize resource utilization across CPU and GPU? Prior work has designed system optimizations based on performance models with limited scope. Specifically, such models do not capture the complex interactions between hardware properties and system execution mechanisms. Therefore, previous approaches neither identify nor achieve the hardware limit. This paper presents MoE-Lens, a high-throughput MoE LLM inference system designed through holistic performance modeling for resource-constrained environments. Our performance model thoroughly analyzes various fundamental system components, including CPU memory capacity, GPU compute power, and workload characteristics, to understand the theoretical performance upper bound of MoE inference. Furthermore, it captures the system execution mechanisms to identify the key hardware bottlenecks and accurately predict the achievable throughput. Informed by our performance model, MoE-Lens introduces an inference system approaching hardware limits. Evaluated on diverse MoE models and datasets, MoE-Lens outperforms the state-of-the-art solution by 4.6x on average (up to 25.5x), with our theoretical model predicting performance with an average 94% accuracy.