Skip to content

Category

natural language processing

2,491 papers

Extracting Small Translation Specialists from LLMs by Aggressively Pruning Experts

This paper presents a method for aggressively pruning experts from modern mixture-of-experts LLMs while incurring negligible degradation in translation quality, and shows that translation requires only a fraction of the LLM, enabling substantial compression of the MoE blocks that contain over 90% of parameters.

Liu O. Martin, Lucas Bandarkar, Nanyun Peng · 2 citations · ⚡1
#machine learning Preprint Open access Sep 2026

Universal Activation Verbalizer: A Unified Framework for Cross-Model Activation Explanation

Activation verbalization explains hidden representations in natural language, but existing methods are mostly limited to self-explanation, where each model explains only its own activations. We introduce Universal Activation Verbalizer (UAV), a framework that uses a shared decoder to explain activations from heterogeneous donor models. UAV learns a lightweight adapter that converts donor activations into soft tokens in decoder's embedding space, and further supports adapter-only transfer by reusing a frozen decoder-side LoRA while training only a new adapter for another donor. Across classification, fact retrieval, and gist summarization, UAV remains competitive with strong self-explanation baselines while enabling cross-model verbalization across model families and scales. Ablations show that decoder-side tuning mainly improves task behavior, whereas the adapter provides the activation-grounded factual and semantic information needed for faithful explanations. Code and data are available at https://github.com/hy-zhao23/ActExp.

Haiyan Zhao, Zirui He, Guanchu Wang et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Sep 2026

Correcting test set contamination by spiking the training data

The literature on test set contamination largely focuses on detection, but the correction of contaminated test scores is underexplored. Our core proposal is to spike the training data by intentionally contaminating some test examples at known rates. The spiked examples can then be used to calibrate predictors of model memorization which enable principled statistical correction of inflated test scores. To evaluate different correction estimators, we first present a simulation framework based on the Hubble models. Hubble models come in minimal pairs, where the perturbed model was deliberately contaminated with several test sets, while the standard model was not, serving as the counterfactual and correction target. We consider estimators that use information from a memorization predictor, correctness predictor, or both. In simulation, we establish basic statistical intuitions and show that estimators leveraging memorization and correctness information are better than naive estimation which makes no correction at all. We then instantiate several memorization and correctness predictors, and find that simple predictors such as Platt-scaled membership inference metrics provide good signal for correction. Finally, we examine the practical considerations of spiking. Simple memorization predictors need no more than 10 examples for calibration and often transfer from one dataset to another. Taken together, spiking is a promising solution for test set contamination.

Johnny Tian-Zheng Wei, Jerry Li, Ameya Godbole et al. · 0 citations

Measuring the Depth of LLM Unlearning via Activation Patching

The Unlearning Depth Score (UDS), a metric that quantifies the mechanistic depth of unlearning via activation patching, is introduced, confirming the causal approach as the most reliable for unlearning evaluation.

Jaeung Lee, Dohyun Kim, Jaemin Jo · 1 citation
#artificial intelligence Preprint May 2026

SciAtlas: A Computable Atlas of Science for Knowledge-Grounded AI Research

SciAtlas is presented, a shared, machine-actionable cross-disciplinary scholarly knowledge infrastructure that integrates evidential, conceptual, disciplinary, expertise, and normative layers under a shared schema and achieves a unified neuro-symbolic retrieval mechanism that grounds heterogeneous research objects, propagates relevance across the scholarly topology, and projects the resulting relevance field into the context required by each scientific workflow.

Shuofei Qiao, Yun-Xiang Wei, Bu-Sheng Zhang et al. · 1 citation

When Chain-of-Thought Fails, the Solution Hides in the Hidden States

It is demonstrated that CoT encodes recoverable, token-level problem-solving information, offering new insight into how reasoning is represented and where it breaks down, suggesting complete reasoning chains are not always necessary.

Houman Mehrafarin, Amit Parekh, Ioannis Konstas · 2 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Sep 2026

Large language model-enabled automated data extraction for concrete materials informatics

The promise of data-driven materials discovery remains constrained by the scarcity of large, high-quality, and accessible experimental datasets. Here, we introduce a generalizable large language model (LLM)-powered pipeline for automated extraction and structuring of materials data from unstructured scientific literature, using concrete materials as a representative and particularly challenging example. The pipeline exhibits robust performance across a broad range of LLMs and achieves an $F_1$ score of up to 0.98 for diverse composition--process--property attributes. Within one hour, it extracts nearly 9,000 high-quality records with over 100 attributes from a corpus screened from more than 27,000 publications, enabling the construction of the largest open laboratory database for blended cement concrete. Machine learning analyses underscore the importance of large, diverse, and information-rich datasets for enhancing both in-distribution accuracy and out-of-distribution generalization to unseen materials. The proposed pipeline is readily adaptable to other materials domains and accelerates the development of scalable data infrastructures for materials informatics.

Zhanzhao Li, Kengran Yang, Qiyao He et al. · 0 citations

Interpretable Predictability-Based AI Text Detection: A Replication Study

This paper replicates and extends the system used in the AuTexTification shared task for authorship attribution of machine-generated texts, and tested newer multilingual language models and added 26 document-level stylometric features, using ablation, permutation importance, and SHAP analysis to assess feature influence.

Adam Skurla, D. Macko, Jakub Simko · 0 citations

PA3: Policy-Aware Agent Alignment through Chain-of-Thought

This work proposes a multi-stage alignment method that teaches models to recall and apply relevant business policies during chain-of-thought reasoning at inference time, without including the full business policy in-context.

Shubhashis Roy Dipta, Daniel Bis, Kun Zhou et al. · 6 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Sep 2026

Unknown Unknowns: Do Hidden Intentions in LLMs Evade Detection?

LLMs expand accessibility and provide wide-reaching access to information. Yet these interactions also create opportunities to embed subtle, goal-oriented behaviours that shape what users think and how they behave, a concern reflected in governance frameworks that prohibit manipulative AI. We refer to these behaviours as hidden intentions: covert agendas embedded in a model's outputs that can manipulate users' beliefs and actions. In this work, we examine whether hidden intentions can be identified and characterised, and assess whether detection can serve as a mitigation strategy. To operationalise this, we introduce a social-science-grounded set of ten hidden intention categories and show that they are trivially inducible. A case study further confirms that all ten categories manifest in deployed LLMs. We then evaluate static classifiers and LLM judges on these categories, providing the first systematic analysis of why hidden intentions are difficult to detect. Our stress tests show that, unless false-positive rates are vanishingly small, auditing is dominated by precision-prevalence trade-offs. Capability scaling and reasoning models do not close this gap, suggesting a fundamental challenge for open-world detection. These findings expose a core gap of current AI governance: without new auditing paradigms for open-world, low-prevalence risks, bans on manipulative AI remain difficult to enforce.

Devansh Srivastav, David Pape, Lea Sch\"onherr · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Sep 2026

Social Caption: Evaluating Social Understanding in Multimodal Models

Social understanding abilities are crucial for multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to interpret human social interactions. We introduce SOCIAL CAPTION, a framework grounded in interaction theory to evaluate social understanding abilities of MLLMs along three dimensions: Social Inference (SI), the ability to make accurate inferences about interactions; Holistic Social Analysis (HSA), the ability to generate comprehensive descriptions of interactions; Directed Social Analysis (DSA), the ability to generate relevant information from interactions. We analyze factors influencing model performance in social understanding, such as scale, architectural design, and spoken context. Experiments with MLLM judges demonstrate a path towards scaling automated evaluation of multimodal social understanding.

Leena Mathur, Bhaavanaa Thumu, Youssouf Kebe et al. · 0 citations

From tech blogs

See all →
MIT News · Artificial Intelligence Aug 27, 2026

Looking beyond natural sequences

A new machine-learning framework aims to improve the success rate of computational protein design while moving away from results that reproduce sequences found in nature.

MIT News · Artificial Intelligence Aug 20, 2026

Paving the way for greener ammonia production

New MIT research could lead to better materials for a fossil-fuel-free process for making the chemical that's essential to fertilizer and other products.

We use cookies to run the site and, with your consent, for analytics and to show ads. See our Cookie Policy.