Large language models (LLMs) are trained on a deluge of text data with limited quality control. As a result, LLMs can exhibit unintended or even harmful behaviours, such as leaking information, fake news or hate speech. Countermeasures, commonly referred to as preference alignment, include fine-tuning the pretrained LLMs with carefully crafted text examples of desired behaviour. Even then, empirical evidence shows preference aligned LLMs can be enticed to harmful behaviour. This so called jailbreaking of LLMs is typically achieved by adversarially modifying the input prompt to the LLM. Our paper provides theoretical insights into the phenomenon of preference alignment and jailbreaking from a statistical perspective. Under our framework, we first show that pretrained LLMs will mimic harmful behaviour if present in the training corpus.

We present a systematic study of subtraction in large language models (LLMs). While prior benchmarks emphasize addition and multiplication, subtraction has received comparatively little attention despite being structurally distinct as a non-commutative operation. We evaluate eight pretrained LLMs spanning four families on addition and subtraction problems. Our experiments reveal that subtraction accuracy lags behind addition by a wide margin. We find that the errors for ($a-b$) are concentrated in cases where ($a

We propose Context-Adaptive Multi-Prompt Embedding, a novel approach to enrich semantic representations in vision-language contrastive learning. Unlike standard CLIP-style models that rely on a single text embedding, our method introduces multiple structured prompts, each containing a distinct adaptive token that captures diverse semantic aspects of the input text. We leverage a pretrained LLM as the text encoder within the CLIP framework, processing all prompts jointly in a single forward pass. The resulting prompt embeddings are combined into a unified text representation, enabling semantically richer alignment with visual features. To further promote semantic diversity and representation quality, we incorporate a diversity regularization loss and a negation-aware loss, encouraging specialization across prompts and improving contrastive discrimination. Our method achieves consistent improvements on both image-text and video-text retrieval benchmarks.

Recent work has argued that large language models (LLMs) are not "abstract reasoners", citing their poor zero-shot performance on a variety of challenging tasks as evidence. We revisit these experiments in order to add nuance to the claim. First, we show that while LLMs indeed perform poorly in a zero-shot setting, even tuning a small subset of parameters for input encoding can enable near-perfect performance. However, we also show that this finetuning does not necessarily transfer across datasets. We take this collection of empirical results as an invitation to (re-)open the discussion of what it means to be an "abstract reasoner", and why it matters whether LLMs fit the bill.

Large Language Models (LLMs) currently respond to every prompt. However, they can produce incorrect answers when they lack knowledge or capability -- a problem known as hallucination. We instead propose post-training an LLM to generate content only when confident in its correctness and to otherwise (partially) abstain. Specifically, our method, HALT, produces capability-aligned post-training data that encodes what the model can and cannot reliably generate. We generate this data by splitting responses of the pretrained LLM into factual fragments (atomic statements or reasoning steps), and use ground truth information to identify incorrect fragments. We achieve capability-aligned finetuning responses by either removing incorrect fragments or replacing them with "Unsure from Here" -- according to a tunable threshold that allows practitioners to trade off response completeness and mean correctness of the response's fragments. We finetune four open-source models for biography writing, mathematics, coding, and medicine with HALT for three different trade-off thresholds. HALT effectively trades off response completeness for correctness, increasing the mean correctness of response fragments by 15% on average, while resulting in a 4% improvement in the F1 score (mean of completeness and correctness of the response) compared to the relevant baselines. By tuning HALT for highest correctness, we train a single reliable Llama3-70B model with correctness increased from 51% to 87% across all four domains while maintaining 53% of the response completeness achieved with standard finetuning.

Large language models (LLMs) are trained on a deluge of text data with limited quality control. As a result, LLMs can exhibit unintended or even harmful behaviours, such as leaking information, fake news or hate speech. Countermeasures, commonly referred to as preference alignment, include fine-tuning the pretrained LLMs with carefully crafted text examples of desired behaviour. Even then, empirical evidence shows preference aligned LLMs can be enticed to harmful behaviour. This so called jailbreaking of LLMs is typically achieved by adversarially modifying the input prompt to the LLM.

Gradient optimization-based adversarial attack methods automate the learning of adversarial triggers to generate jailbreak prompts or leak system prompts. In this work, we take a closer look at the optimization objective of adversarial trigger learning and propose ATLA: Adversarial Trigger Learning with Augmented objectives. ATLA improves the negative log-likelihood loss used by previous studies into a weighted loss formulation that encourages the learned adversarial triggers to optimize more towards response format tokens. This enables ATLA to learn an adversarial trigger from just one query-response pair and the learned trigger generalizes well to other similar queries. We further design a variation to augment trigger optimization with an auxiliary loss that suppresses evasive responses. We showcase how to use ATLA to learn adversarial suffixes jailbreaking LLMs and to extract hidden system prompts. Empirically we demonstrate that ATLA consistently outperforms current state-of-the-art techniques, achieving nearly 100% success in attacking while requiring 80% fewer queries. ATLA learned jailbreak suffixes demonstrate high generalization to unseen queries and transfer well to new LLMs.

In this work, we propose Mutual Reinforcing Data Synthesis (MRDS) within LLMs to improve few-shot dialogue summarization task. Unlike prior methods that require external knowledge, we mutually reinforce the LLM\'s dialogue synthesis and summarization capabilities, allowing them to complement each other during training and enhance overall performances. The dialogue synthesis capability is enhanced by directed preference optimization with preference scoring from summarization capability. The summarization capability is enhanced by the additional high quality dialogue-summary paired data produced by the dialogue synthesis capability. By leveraging the proposed MRDS mechanism, we elicit the internal knowledge of LLM in the format of synthetic data, and use it to augment the few-shot real training dataset. Empirical results demonstrate that our method improves dialogue summarization, achieving a 1.5% increase in ROUGE scores and a 0.3% improvement in BERT scores in few-shot settings. Furthermore, our method attains the highest average scores in human evaluations, surpassing both the pre-trained models and the baselines fine-tuned solely for summarization tasks.

Theorem formalization and proof are fundamental processes in mathematics and computer science that involve expressing mathematical statements in a precise, unambiguous language and rigorously demonstrating their truth or validity. Formalization typically begins by translating an informal mathematical theorem into a formal logical system, where every term, assumption, and conclusion is explicitly defined using axioms, rules of inference, and symbolic notation. This ensures that the statement is free from ambiguity and can be manipulated systematically. Once formalized, the proof process involves constructing a sequence of logically valid steps, starting from agreed-upon axioms or previously proven theorems, to establish the desired result. Proofs can range from simple direct arguments to complex constructions involving advanced techniques like induction, contradiction, or model theory.

In recent years, 3D instruction-following data has become more common, and with the advent of large language models 3D vision and spatial reasoning have long been (LLMs), a range of multi-modal LLMs (MLLMs) has recognized as preferable for accurately perceiving emerged. Following the success of LLaVA (Liu et al., our three-dimensional world, especially when 2023a) for 2D images, recent approaches (e.g., LEO (Huang compared with traditional visual reasoning based et al., 2024) and ShapeLLM (Qi et al., 2024)) also integrate on 2D images. Due to the difficulties in collecting 3D encoders into LLMs through simple linear projection high-quality 3D data, research in this area has layers. Although these models handle tasks such as 3D only recently gained momentum. With the advent question answering, 3D dialogue, and some embodied tasks, of powerful large language models (LLMs), multimodal they devote relatively little attention to optimizing the LLM LLMs for 3D vision have been developed itself for multi-modal data.