Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable potential across diverse language-related tasks, yet whether they capture deeper linguistic properties--such as syntactic structure, phonetic cues, and metrical patterns--from raw text remains unclear. To analysis whether LLMs can learn these features effectively and apply them to important nature language related tasks, we introduce a novel multilingual genre classification dataset derived from Project Gutenberg, a large-scale digital library offering free access to thousands of public domain literary works, comprising thousands of sentences per binary task (poetry vs. novel; drama vs. poetry; drama vs. novel) in six languages (English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese). We augment each with three explicit linguistic feature sets (syntactic tree structures, metaphor counts, and phonetic metrics) to evaluate their impact on classification performance. Experiments demonstrate that although LLM classifiers can learn latent linguistic structures either from raw text or from explicitly provided features, different features contribute unevenly across tasks, which underscores the importance of incorporating more complex linguistic signals during model training.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong effectiveness and robustness while fine-tuned as dense retrievers. However, their large parameter size brings significant inference time computational challenges, including high encoding costs for large-scale corpora and increased query latency, limiting their practical deployment. While smaller retrievers offer better efficiency, they often fail to generalize effectively with limited supervised fine-tuning data. In this work, we introduce DRAMA, a training framework that leverages LLMs to train smaller generalizable dense retrievers. In particular, we adopt pruned LLMs as the backbone and train on diverse LLM-augmented data in a single-stage contrastive learning setup. Experiments show that DRAMA offers better multilingual and long-context capabilities than traditional encoder-based retrievers, and achieves strong performance across multiple tasks and languages. These highlight the potential of connecting the training of smaller retrievers with the growing advancements in LLMs, bridging the gap between efficiency and generalization.

Probabilistic models analyze data by relying on a set of assumptions. Data that exhibit deviations from these assumptions can undermine inference and prediction quality. Robust models offer protection against mismatch between a model's assumptions and reality. We propose a way to systematically detect and mitigate mismatch of a large class of probabilistic models. The idea is to raise the likelihood of each observation to a weight and then to infer both the latent variables and the weights from data. Inferring the weights allows a model to identify observations that match its assumptions and down-weight others. This enables robust inference and improves predictive accuracy. We study four different forms of mismatch with reality, ranging from missing latent groups to structure misspecification. A Poisson factorization analysis of the Movielens 1M dataset shows the benefits of this approach in a practical scenario.