From sugar shortages to military contracts, World War II helped make M&Ms and Hershey's bars into symbols of American abundance. A 1940s Milky Way ad shows candy keeping pilots smiling through the war. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Every year, Hershey manufactures 373 million of its signature milk chocolate bars . While the company doesn't release exact stats on Halloween sales, you can bet a lot of those end up in plastic Jack O'Lantern-shaped pails.

Large language models (LLMs) often generate convincing, fluent explanations. However, different from humans, they often generate inconsistent explanations on different inputs. For example, an LLM may generate the explanation "all birds can fly" when answering the question "Can sparrows fly?" but meanwhile answer "no" to the related question "Can penguins fly?". Explanations should be consistent across related examples so that they allow a human to simulate the LLM's decision process on multiple examples. We propose explanation-consistency finetuning (EC-finetuning), a method that adapts LLMs to generate more consistent natural-language explanations on related examples. EC-finetuning involves finetuning LLMs on synthetic data that is carefully constructed to contain consistent explanations. Across a variety of question-answering datasets in various domains, EC-finetuning yields a 10.0% relative explanation consistency improvement on four finetuning datasets, and generalizes to seven out-of-distribution datasets not seen during finetuning (+4.5% relative). Code is available at https://github.com/yandachen/explanation-consistency-finetuning .

The People's Liberation Army has yet to adopt a definition, let alone a formal plan, for "intelligentization (智能化)," a Chinese vision for the transformation of warfare through artificial intelligence and automation. But Chinese military theorists see it as a rare opportunity for "leapfrog development" over adversaries. One author suggests that Star Wars will "become a reality"; another says the fantasies from "mythological fiction" will come true. Their writings, while not authoritative, have coalesced around several key themes that offer a crucial glimpse into potential PLA thinking and ambitions. Whereas these earlier eras of warfare turned on "mechanization" in the "physical space" and "informationization" in the "information space," PLA theorists argue that intelligentization will center upon a "cognitive space" that privileges complex thinking and effective decision-making.