corpus
Sheetpedia: A300K-Spreadsheet Corpus for Spreadsheet Intelligence and LLMFine-Tuning
Spreadsheets are widely used for data analysis and reporting, yet their complex structure and formula logic pose significant challenges for AI systems. We introduce Sheetpedia, a large-scale corpus of over 290,000 diverse spreadsheets (from 324,000+ workbooks) compiled from enterprise email archives and online forums. We detail a rigorous collection and preprocessing pipeline (integrating the Enron email spreadsheet archive and the Fuse web corpus, plus a new crawl of Excel forums) to standardize formats, filter languages, and remove duplicates. Sheetpedia provides extensive coverage of real formulas and annotations - addressing a gap left by prior table datasets (e.g.
APartition Cover Approach for Tokenization
Tokenization is the process of encoding strings into tokens of a fixed vocabulary size, and is widely utilized in Natural Language Processing applications. The leading tokenization algorithm today is Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE), which formulates the tokenization problem as a compression problem and tackles it by performing sequences of merges. In this work, we formulate tokenization as an optimization objective, show that it is NP-hard via a simple reduction from vertex cover, and propose a polynomial-time greedy algorithm GREEDTOK. Our formulation naturally relaxes to the well-studied weighted maximum coverage problem which has a simple (1 1/e)-approximation algorithm GREEDWMC. Through empirical evaluations on real-world corpora, we show that GREEDTOK outperforms BPE and UNIGRAM on compression and achieves a covering score comparable to GREEDWMC.
Hierarchical Frequency Tagging Probe (HFTP): A Unified Approach to Investigate Syntactic Structure Representations in Large Language Models and the Human Brain
Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate human-level or even superior language abilities, effectively modeling syntactic structures, yet the specific computational units responsible remain unclear. A key question is whether LLM behavioral capabilities stem from mechanisms akin to those in the human brain. To address these questions, we introduce the Hierarchical Frequency Tagging Probe (HFTP), a tool that utilizes frequency-domain analysis to identify neuron-wise components of LLMs (e.g., individual Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) neurons) and cortical regions (via intracranial recordings) encoding syntactic structures. Our results show that models such as GPT-2, Gemma, Gemma 2, Llama 2, Llama 3.1, and GLM-4 process syntax in analogous layers, while the human brain relies on distinct cortical regions for different syntactic levels. Representational similarity analysis reveals a stronger alignment between LLM representations and the left hemisphere of the brain (dominant in language processing). Notably, upgraded models exhibit divergent trends: Gemma 2 shows greater brain similarity than Gemma, while Llama 3.1 shows less alignment with the brain compared to Llama 2. These findings offer new insights into the interpretability of LLM behavioral improvements, raising questions about whether these advancements are driven by human-like or non-human-like mechanisms, and establish HFTP as a valuable tool bridging computational linguistics and cognitive neuroscience. This project is available at https://github.com/LilTiger/HFTP.
Efficiently Maintaining the Multilingual Capacity of MCLIP in Downstream Cross-Modal Retrieval Tasks
While existing research on Multilingual CLIP (MCLIP) has prioritized model architecture design, our work uncovers a critical challenge in practical adaptation: fine-tuning MCLIP through a single source language risks diminishing its multilingual capabilities in downstream tasks due to cross-linguistic disparities. To bridge this gap, we systematically investigate the role of token similarity in cross-lingual transferability for image-text retrieval, establishing it as a key factor governing fine-tuning efficacy. Building on this insight, we propose two novel strategies to enhance efficiency while preserving multilinguality: 1) TaPCL dynamically optimizes training by prioritizing linguistically distant language pairs during corpus sampling, reducing redundant computation, and 2) CiPCL enriches the source corpus with multilingual key terms, enabling targeted knowledge transfer without reliance on exhaustive parallel data. By strategically balancing token similarity and domain-critical information, our methods significantly lower computational costs and mitigate over-dependence on parallel corpora.
Sheetpedia: A 300K-Spreadsheet Corpus for Spreadsheet Intelligence and LLM Fine-Tuning
Spreadsheets are widely used for data analysis and reporting, yet their complex structure and formula logic pose significant challenges for AI systems. We introduce Sheetpedia, a large-scale corpus of over 290,000 diverse spreadsheets (from 324,000+ workbooks) compiled from enterprise email archives and online forums. We detail a rigorous collection and preprocessing pipeline (integrating the Enron email spreadsheet archive and the Fuse web corpus, plus a new crawl of Excel forums) to standardize formats, filter languages, and remove duplicates. Sheetpedia provides extensive coverage of real formulas and annotations - addressing a gap left by prior table datasets (e.g.
Unsupervised Identification and Removal of Spurious Correlations During Fine-Tuning
Gilligan-Lee, Ciarรกn M., Egan, Joseph, Zhu, Yuchen, O'Riordan, Michael
Fine-tuning a pretrained language model on a curated dataset can produce spurious correlations between the fine-tuning task and unintended latent factors -- such as misaligned personas or political slant -- that the curation procedure has entangled with the task. The model can latch onto these spurious correlations, leading to bias and reduced out-of-distribution generalisation. We prove that under reasonable assumptions on task complexity and the spurious correlation, such latent factors can be identified, without supervision, from the weights of a naive LoRA fine-tune. Existing approaches to removing bias, such as activation steering, remove identified factors from residual-stream activations, either at inference or during training. We argue, however, that the goal should be to remove the spurious correlation, not the latent factor itself, as the pretrained model may rely on it for genuine task signal. To enable this, we propose GRASP, GRadient projection of Associated Spurious Patterns, which prevents the model from acquiring new reliance on the identified latent factor while preserving any pretrained content along it. We validate on three fine-tuning tasks. The first two involve emergent misalignment, where fine-tuning on a narrow task -- in our case, writing insecure code and giving bad medical advice -- leads to misaligned responses on unrelated topics. Here our method completely removes misalignment in the insecure code case and reduces them by ~5x in the bad medical advice case, beating all baselines in the trade-off between misalignment-reduction and task-preservation. The last is a novel political-bias experiment, where fine-tuning on right-skewed Reddit financial-advice data causes political-lean drift on unrelated topics. Here our method reduces drift by more than half, while improving financial task performance, beating all baselines.
When Is Next-Token Prediction Useful? Marginalization, Ergodicity, Mixture Identifiability, Local Sufficiency, RAG, Tools, and Programming
Language models trained on observed sequences are often described as learning the conditional distribution of the next token given previous tokens. This description is only conditionally correct. A model trained on realized token trajectories does not observe full conditional laws; it receives sampled continuations. Moreover, real language generation is conditioned not only on previous words but also on non-textual circumstances: facts, events, intentions, goals, beliefs, social context, and task-specific constraints. This paper distinguishes three objects that are often conflated: the full conditional language process conditioned on latent circumstances, the marginal text-only process obtained by integrating those circumstances out, and the model-induced distribution learned from finite observed corpora. The paper argues that interpreting model training as estimating the marginal text-only law requires strong assumptions of stationarity, representativeness, and ergodicity, assumptions that are standard in statistical estimation but problematic when applied to heterogeneous language corpora. Even if these assumptions hold, the marginal text-only law is useful only when the observed prefix is an approximately sufficient statistic for the latent circumstances relevant to continuation. In information-theoretic terms, usefulness requires that the residual conditional mutual information between the next token and the omitted circumstances, given the observed text, be small. The paper then extends this argument to heterogeneous training corpora. Finally, the paper interprets Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) and tool use as conditional sufficiency devices.
DeepMath - Deep Sequence Models for Premise Selection
Geoffrey Irving, Christian Szegedy, Alexander A. Alemi, Niklas Een, Francois Chollet, Josef Urban
We study the effectiveness of neural sequence models for premise selection in automated theorem proving, one of the main bottlenecks in the formalization of mathematics. We propose a two stage approach for this task that yields good results for the premise selection task on the Mizar corpus while avoiding the handengineered features of existing state-of-the-art models. To our knowledge, this is the first time deep learning has been applied to theorem proving on a large scale.