As large language models are increasingly deployed in real-world systems, safety failures can still lead to harmful outputs and dangerous misuse. We argue that the essence of safety is adversarial: many failures arise not from natural inputs alone, but from strategic attempts to evade model policies and safeguards. However, existing general-purpose model development largely overlook this adversarial nature, and often remain insufficient for realistic safety scenarios involving planning, tool use, and multi-step reasoning, causing measured safety performance to overestimate real deployment robustness. To address this gap, we present Yuvion LLM, a large language model built for adversarially robust content safety and broader AI safety. Yuvion LLM treats adversarial robustness and agentic capability as first-class objectives. Its pipeline combines adversarially aware data construction, knowledge-enhanced continued pretraining, and policy-grounded multi-task safety post-training, including risk-aware supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning-based policy optimization, together with safety-aware agentic reinforcement learning for tool use and multi-step reasoning in complex safety scenarios. We further introduce the Yuvion LLM RiskEval (YLRE), a collection of 93 benchmarks across four evaluation categories, covering diverse open and internal evaluations with a focus on safety, adversarial robustness, and real-world capability requirements. Across these evaluations, Yuvion LLM demonstrates clear advantages on safety-focused benchmarks and particularly strong robustness under adversarial conditions, while maintaining solid overall capability. Notably, Yuvion-8B outperforms most state-of-the-art baselines, including substantially larger models such as GPT-5.4 and Qwen3-MAX, on several safety tasks.
Aligned large language models (LLMs) remain vulnerable to adversarial manipulation, and their reliance on web-scale pretraining creates a subtle but consequential attack surface. We study Stealth Pretraining Seeding (SPS), a threat model in which adversaries distribute small amounts of poisoned content across stealth websites, increasing the likelihood that such material is absorbed into future training corpora derived from sources such as Common Crawl. Because each individual payload is tiny, diffuse, and superficially benign, the attack is difficult to detect during dataset construction or filtering. The result is a latent form of poisoning that remains largely invisible under standard evaluation, yet can later be activated by a precise trigger such as <00TRIGGER00>. We call this attack PermaFrost, reflecting its latent and reactivatable nature. We study it through PermaFrost-Attack, a controlled framework for latent conceptual poisoning, together with three geometric diagnostics: Thermodynamic Length, Spectral Curvature, and the Infection Traceback Graph. Across multiple model families and scales, we show that this controlled SPS proxy can induce persistent unsafe behavior that often remains hidden under standard evaluation. Our results identify SPS as a practical and underappreciated threat to future foundation models. This paper introduces a novel geometric diagnostic lens for systematically examining latent model behavior, providing a principled foundation for detecting, characterizing, and understanding vulnerabilities that may remain invisible under standard evaluation.
We present MIDI-LLM, a recipe that improves multitrack text-to-MIDI generation via adapting Large Language Models (LLMs). MIDI-LLM expands an LLM's text vocabulary to include MIDI tokens and employs a two-stage training pipeline: (i) unimodal continued pretraining on music-adjacent text and standalone MIDIs, and (ii) multimodal supervised finetuning on text-MIDI pairs. Our instantiation of MIDI-LLM based on Llama 3.2 (1B) outperforms the recent Text2midi model in both text control and musical quality, and readily integrates with optimized inference ecosystems like vLLM. To align with real-world songwriting workflows, we further finetune our MIDI-LLM on the TheoryTab dataset for text-conditioned lead sheet (i.e., melody + chords) generation and infilling. A comprehensive ablation study validates the synergy between LLM text pretraining, standalone MIDI pretraining, and supervised text-to-MIDI finetuning. Finally, an in-the-wild blind user study conducted in a real-world creative workflow at scale with 58 Hookpad Aria users and 4,002 generated outputs demonstrates that our MIDI-LLM achieves the highest acceptance rate in zero-to-one lead sheet generation over baselines without text control or LLM pretraining, confirming its efficacy in human-AI music co-creation.
专题命中
预训练与数据
:LLM(title,abstract);large language model(title,abstract);language model(title,abstract);pretraining(title,abstract)
详情
英文摘要
In this study, we introduce CT-LLM, a 2B large language model (LLM) that illustrates a pivotal shift towards prioritizing the Chinese language in developing LLMs. Uniquely initiated from scratch, CT-LLM diverges from the conventional methodology by primarily incorporating Chinese textual data, utilizing an extensive corpus of 1,200 billion tokens, including 800 billion Chinese tokens, 300 billion English tokens, and 100 billion code tokens. This strategic composition facilitates the model's exceptional proficiency in understanding and processing Chinese, a capability further enhanced through alignment techniques. Demonstrating remarkable performance on the CHC-Bench, CT-LLM excels in Chinese language tasks, and showcases its adeptness in English through SFT. This research challenges the prevailing paradigm of training LLMs predominantly on English corpora and then adapting them to other languages, broadening the horizons for LLM training methodologies. By open-sourcing the full process of training a Chinese LLM, including a detailed data processing procedure with the obtained Massive Appropriate Pretraining Chinese Corpus (MAP-CC), a well-chosen multidisciplinary Chinese Hard Case Benchmark (CHC-Bench), and the 2B-size Chinese Tiny LLM (CT-LLM), we aim to foster further exploration and innovation in both academia and industry, paving the way for more inclusive and versatile language models.
Time2Lang: Bridging Time-Series Foundation Models and Large Language Models for Health Sensing Beyond Prompting
Arvind Pillai, Dimitris Spathis, Subigya Nepal, Amanda C Collins, Daniel M Mackin, Michael V Heinz, Tess Z Griffin, Nicholas C Jacobson, Andrew Campbell
机构
*
Dartmouth College(达特茅斯学院)
;
University of Cambridge(剑桥大学)
;
Stanford University(斯坦福大学)
;
Google Research(谷歌研究)
专题命中
预训练与数据
:large language model(title,abstract);language model(title,abstract);foundation model(title,abstract);prompting(title,abstract)
Large language models (LLMs) show promise for health applications when combined with behavioral sensing data. Traditional approaches convert sensor data into text prompts, but this process is prone to errors, computationally expensive, and requires domain expertise. These challenges are particularly acute when processing extended time series data. While time series foundation models (TFMs) have recently emerged as powerful tools for learning representations from temporal data, bridging TFMs and LLMs remains challenging. Here, we present Time2Lang, a framework that directly maps TFM outputs to LLM representations without intermediate text conversion. Our approach first trains on synthetic data using periodicity prediction as a pretext task, followed by evaluation on mental health classification tasks. We validate Time2Lang on two longitudinal wearable and mobile sensing datasets: daily depression prediction using step count data (17,251 days from 256 participants) and flourishing classification based on conversation duration (46 participants over 10 weeks). Time2Lang maintains near constant inference times regardless of input length, unlike traditional prompting methods. The generated embeddings preserve essential time-series characteristics such as auto-correlation. Our results demonstrate that TFMs and LLMs can be effectively integrated while minimizing information loss and enabling performance transfer across these distinct modeling paradigms. To our knowledge, we are the first to integrate a TFM and an LLM for health, thus establishing a foundation for future research combining general-purpose large models for complex healthcare tasks.
Pretraining is fundamental to the development of Large Language Models (LLMs), yet the opacity of pretraining data complicates model analysis and raises ethical, legal, and fairness concerns. Detecting whether specific datasets were used during pretraining is, therefore, critical. Existing state-of-the-art methods typically rely on access to model probability distributions, making them unsuitable for closed-source LLMs that provide only input-output interfaces. To address this limitation, we introduce Masked Corpus-level Pretraining Data Detection (MC-PDD), a novel method inspired by the masked language modeling paradigm. MC-PDD masks highly specific tokens in each text and prompts the LLM to predict the missing content. It then assesses whether the difference in prediction hit rates between a candidate corpus and a reference non-member corpus is statistically significant. Based on this comparison, MC-PDD determines whether the candidate texts were likely included in the model's pretraining data. Experimental results demonstrate clear and consistent differences in prediction hit rates between pretrained and unseen data across three datasets, for both open-source and closed-source LLMs. Despite operating under a stricter black-box setting, MC-PDD achieves performance comparable to existing detection methods. Our approach enables practical applications such as model auditing and data copyright verification using only standard API access. Upon acceptance, we will publicly release the code and datasets.
Incorporating metadata in Large Language Models (LLMs) pretraining has recently emerged as a promising approach to accelerate training. However prior work highlighted only one useful signal-URLs, leaving open the question of whether other forms of metadata could yield greater benefits. In this study, we investigate a wider range of metadata types and find other types of metadata, such as fine-grained indicators of document quality that can also accelerate pretraining when prepended. We identify a common feature among effective metadata: they encode information at a finer granularity. We further introduce metadata appending as a means of improving training efficiency, where predicting an appropriate metadata as auxiliary task can help speed up pretraining. In addition, learnable meta-tokens trained with masked loss can recover part of the speedup by inducing quality-aware latent structure. Using probing, we analyze latent representations to understand how metadata shapes learning. Together, these results yield practical guidelines for integrating metadata to improve both the efficiency and effectiveness of LLM pretraining.
Pretraining large language models (LLMs) typically requires centralized clusters with thousands of high-memory GPUs (e.g., H100/A100). Recent decentralized training methods reduce communication overhead by employing federated optimization; however, they still need to train the entire model on each node, remaining constrained by GPU memory limitations. In this work, we propose SParse Expert Synchronization (SPES), a memory-efficient decentralized framework for pretraining mixture-of-experts (MoE) LLMs. SPES trains only a subset of experts per node, substantially lowering the memory footprint. Each node updates its local experts and periodically synchronizes with other nodes, eliminating full-parameter transmission while ensuring efficient knowledge sharing. To mitigate limited per-expert data utilization under sparse expert updates, we introduce an expert-merging warm-up strategy, where experts exchange knowledge early in training, to rapidly establish foundational capabilities. With SPES, we train a 2B-parameter MoE LLM using 16 standalone 48GB GPUs over internet connections, which achieves competitive performance with centrally trained LLMs under similar computational budgets. We further demonstrate scalability by training a 7B model from scratch and a 9B model upcycled from a dense checkpoint, both of which match prior centralized baselines. Our code is available at https://github.com/zjr2000/SPES.
The pretraining data mixture of Large Language Models (LLMs) constitutes their "digital DNA", shaping model behaviors, capabilities, and failure modes. Yet this composition is rarely disclosed, making post-hoc auditing of data combination or provenance difficult. In this work, we formalize $\textbf{Data Mixture Surgery (DMS)}$: given only generated text from a target LLM, estimate the domain-level distribution of its pretraining corpus under a predefined taxonomy. We propose $\textbf{LLMSurgeon}$, a strong framework that casts DMS as an inverse problem under the label-shift assumption. Rather than directly aggregating classifier outputs, LLMSurgeon estimates a calibrated $\textit{soft}$ confusion matrix and solves a constrained inverse problem to correct systematic domain confusion and recover the latent mixture prior. To evaluate, we introduce $\textbf{LLMScan}$, a recipe-verifiable evaluation suite built from open-source LLMs with transparent pretraining mixtures. Across LLMScan, LLMSurgeon recovers domain mixtures with high fidelity under fixed protocols. Our work presents a practical, post-hoc approach for auditing the digital DNA of foundation models without access to their training data.
CommentsAccepted FAccT 2026; 29 pages, 14 tables, 7 figures. Previous title - Not ready for the bench: LLM legal interpretation is unstable and out of step with human judgments; NLLPW 2026
In the U.S. judicial system, a widespread approach to legal interpretation entails assessing how a legal text would be understood by an `ordinary' speaker of the language. Recent scholarship has proposed that legal practitioners leverage large language models (LLMs) to ascertain a text's ordinary meaning. But are LLMs up to the task? As textual interpretation questions arise in spheres ranging from criminal law to civil rights, we argue it is crucial that models not be taken as authoritative without rigorous evaluation. This work offers an empirical argument against LLM-assisted interpretation as recently practiced by legal scholars and federal judges, who reasoned the large amount of data that models see in training would enable models to illuminate how people ordinarily use certain words or phrases. In controlled experiments, we find failures in robustness which cast doubt on this assumption and raise serious questions about the utility of these models in practice. For the models in our evaluation, slight changes to the format of a question can lead to wildly different conclusions -- a vulnerability that parties with an interest in the outcome could exploit. Comparing with a dataset where people were asked similar legal interpretation questions, we see that these models are at best moderately correlated to human judgments -- not strong enough given the stakes in this domain.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have become the predominant paradigm in NLP, advancing both research and industry. As model sizes and pretraining data grow, concerns about Pretraining Data Exposure (PDE) increase due to the scale and opacity of training datasets.
PDE refers to determining whether specific data appeared in an LLM's pretraining corpus. It is critical for ensuring evaluation integrity and protecting privacy, intersecting two key areas: data contamination and membership inference. Though conceptually related, these areas have often been studied in isolation. This paper offers the first unified survey of both under the PDE framework. We formalize PDE across exposure levels, review attack and defense methods, synthesize empirical findings, and highlight open challenges and future research directions.
Juan Manuel Zambrano Chaves, Eric Wang, Tao Tu, Eeshit Dhaval Vaishnav, Byron Lee, S. Sara Mahdavi, Christopher Semturs, David Fleet, Vivek Natarajan, Shekoofeh Azizi
专题命中
预训练与数据
:LLM(title,abstract);large language model(title,abstract);language model(title,abstract);pretraining(abstract)
详情
英文摘要
Developing therapeutics is a lengthy and expensive process that requires the satisfaction of many different criteria, and AI models capable of expediting the process would be invaluable. However, the majority of current AI approaches address only a narrowly defined set of tasks, often circumscribed within a particular domain. To bridge this gap, we introduce Tx-LLM, a generalist large language model (LLM) fine-tuned from PaLM-2 which encodes knowledge about diverse therapeutic modalities. Tx-LLM is trained using a collection of 709 datasets that target 66 tasks spanning various stages of the drug discovery pipeline. Using a single set of weights, Tx-LLM simultaneously processes a wide variety of chemical or biological entities(small molecules, proteins, nucleic acids, cell lines, diseases) interleaved with free-text, allowing it to predict a broad range of associated properties, achieving competitive with state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on 43 out of 66 tasks and exceeding SOTA on 22. Among these, Tx-LLM is particularly powerful and exceeds best-in-class performance on average for tasks combining molecular SMILES representations with text such as cell line names or disease names, likely due to context learned during pretraining. We observe evidence of positive transfer between tasks with diverse drug types (e.g.,tasks involving small molecules and tasks involving proteins), and we study the impact of model size, domain finetuning, and prompting strategies on performance. We believe Tx-LLM represents an important step towards LLMs encoding biochemical knowledge and could have a future role as an end-to-end tool across the drug discovery development pipeline.
TACOMORE: Exploring a replicable prompting protocol for LLM-assisted corpus analysis
TACOMORE: 探索一种可复现的提示协议用于LLM辅助语料库分析
Bingru Li, Han Wang, Nicholas Groom
机构
*
Department of Linguistics and Communication, University of Birmingham(伯明翰大学语言学与传播系)
;
Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science, University of Trento(特伦托大学信息工程与计算机科学系)
;
Institute of Foreign Languages and Cultures, University of Tartu(塔尔图大学外国语言与文化研究所)
专题命中
预训练与数据
:LLM(title,title_cn);prompting(title,abstract);large language model(abstract);language model(abstract)
As corpus linguistics continues to scale, researchers are facing a growing methodological bottleneck: while computational tools can easily count billions of words, the qualitative interpretation of these data remains a slow and labor-intensive human task. Large Language Models (LLMs) offer a promising way to automate this process, yet their integration into the field is often hindered by concerns over black-box unpredictability and a lack of replicability. This study introduces TACOMORE, a structured prompting framework designed to transform ad-hoc AI interactions into a standardized linguistic protocol. Built upon four foundational principles (Task, Context, Model, and Replicability), the framework guides LLMs to move beyond generic probability prediction to anchoring their reasoning in the specific co-occurrence patterns of a target corpus. We applied this framework to three core corpus tasks, i.e., the analysis of keywords, collocates, and concordances, using an open corpus of COVID-19 research abstracts. After testing three LLMs, we found that while structured prompting improves accuracy and replicability, inherent limitations regarding hallucination persist. This research offers a critical lens into the role of LLMs in corpus linguistics, highlighting their potential as complementary tools while emphasizing the irreplaceable role of human validation.
The rise of large language models (LLMs) has enabled the generation of highly persuasive spam reviews that closely mimic human writing. These reviews pose significant challenges for existing detection systems and threaten the credibility of online platforms. In this work, we first create three realistic LLM-generated spam review datasets using three distinct LLMs, each guided by product metadata and genuine reference reviews. Evaluations by GPT-4.1 confirm the high persuasion and deceptive potential of these reviews. To address this threat, we propose FraudSquad, a hybrid detection model that integrates text embeddings from a pre-trained language model with a gated graph transformer for spam node classification. FraudSquad captures both semantic and behavioral signals without relying on manual feature engineering or massive training resources. Experiments show that FraudSquad outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by up to 44.22% in precision and 43.01% in recall on three LLM-generated datasets, while also achieving promising results on two human-written spam datasets. Furthermore, FraudSquad maintains a modest model size and requires minimal labeled training data, making it a practical solution for real-world applications. Our contributions include new synthetic datasets, a practical detection framework, and empirical evidence highlighting the urgency of adapting spam detection to the LLM era. Our code and datasets are available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/FraudSquad-5389/.
Personally Identifiable Information (PII) redaction usually replaces detected entities with placeholder tokens such as [PERSON], destroying the downstream utility of the redacted text for retrieval and Named Entity Recognition (NER) training. We propose a fully on-device pipeline that substitutes PII with consistent, type-preserving fake values: a 1.5 B mixture-of-experts token classifier (openai/privacy-filter) detects spans, a 1-bit Bonsai-1.7B Small Language Model (SLM) proposes contextual surrogates for names, addresses, and dates, and a rule-based generator (faker) handles patterned fields. We report a prompting finding more important than the quantization choice: with naive fixed three-shot demonstrations, the 1-bit SLM regurgitates demonstration outputs verbatim regardless of input; 1.58-bit Ternary-Bonsai-1.7B reproduces byte-identical failures, ruling out quantization as the cause. We fix this with locale-conditioned rotating few-shot demonstrations: a character-range heuristic picks a locale-pure pool and a per-input MD5 hash samples three demonstrations. With the fix, 482/482 unique Bonsai-1.7B calls succeed (no echoes) and produce locale-correct surrogates, although the SLM still copies from a small same-locale demonstration pool - a residual narrowness we quantify. On a 2000-document multilingual corpus, hybrid perplexity (PPL) beats faker in all six locales under a multilingual evaluator (XGLM-564M); length preservation is best-of-three in 4 of 6 locales. On downstream NER (400 train / 100 test, English), redact yields F1=0.000, faker 0.656, original 0.960; on a matched 160/40 subset including hybrid, faker (0.506) outperforms hybrid (0.346) at p < 0.001. We report this as an honest negative finding: SLM surrogates produce more natural text but a less varied training distribution, and downstream NER benefits more from variety than from naturalness.
Data Mixing for Large Language Models Pretraining: A Survey and Outlook
大型语言模型预训练中的数据混合:综述与展望
Zhuo Chen, Yuxuan Miao, Supryadi, Deyi Xiong
机构
*
The International Joint Institute of Tianjin University(天津大学国际联合研究院)
;
Tianjin University(天津大学)
;
TJUNLP Lab, School of Computer Science and Technology(天津大学自然语言处理实验室,计算机科学与技术学院)
专题命中
预训练与数据
:large language model(title,abstract);language model(title,abstract);pretraining(title,abstract);LLM(abstract,abstract_cn)
Large language models (LLMs) rely on pretraining on massive and heterogeneous corpora, where training data composition has a decisive impact on training efficiency and downstream generalization under realistic compute and data budget constraints. Unlike sample-level data selection, data mixing optimizes domain-level sampling weights to allocate limited budgets more effectively. In recent years, a growing body of work has proposed principled data mixing methods for LLM pretraining; however, the literature remains fragmented and lacks a dedicated, systematic survey. This paper provides a comprehensive review of data mixing for LLM pretraining. We first formalize data mixture optimization as a bilevel problem on the probability simplex and clarify the role of data mixing in the pretraining pipeline, and briefly explain how existing methods make this formulation tractable in practice. We then introduce a fine-grained taxonomy that organizes existing methods along two dimensions: static versus dynamic mixing. Static mixing is further categorized into rule-based and learning-based methods, while dynamic mixing is grouped into adaptive and externally guided families. For each class, we summarize representative approaches and analyze their strengths and limitations from a performance-cost trade-off perspective. Building on this analysis, we highlight challenges that cut across methods, including limited transferability across data domains, optimization objectives, models, and validation sets, as well as unstandardized evaluation protocols and benchmarks, and the inherent tension between performance gains and cost control in learning-based methods. Finally, we outline several exploratory directions, including finer-grained domain partitioning and inverse data mixing, as well as pipeline-aware designs, aiming to provide conceptual and methodological insights for future research.
AdamS: Momentum Itself Can Be A Normalizer for LLM Pretraining and Post-training
Huishuai Zhang, Bohan Wang, Luoxin Chen
机构
*
Wangxuan Institute of Computer Technology, Peking University(北京大学王宣计算机技术研究所)
;
University of Science and Technology of China(中国科学技术大学)
;
State Key Laboratory of General Artificial Intelligence(通用人工智能国家重点实验室)
专题命中
预训练与数据
:LLM(title,abstract);pretraining(title,abstract);post-training(title,abstract);large language model(abstract)
详情
英文摘要
We introduce AdamS, a simple yet effective alternative to Adam for large language model (LLM) pretraining and post-training. By leveraging a novel denominator, i.e., the root of weighted sum of squares of the momentum and the current gradient, AdamS eliminates the need for second-moment estimates. Hence, AdamS is efficient, matching the memory and compute footprint of SGD with momentum while delivering superior optimization performance. Moreover, AdamS is easy to adopt: it can directly inherit hyperparameters of AdamW, and is entirely model-agnostic, integrating seamlessly into existing pipelines without modifications to optimizer APIs or architectures. The motivation behind AdamS stems from the observed $(L_0, L_1)$ smoothness properties in transformer objectives, where local smoothness is governed by gradient magnitudes that can be further approximated by momentum magnitudes. We establish rigorous theoretical convergence guarantees and provide practical guidelines for hyperparameter selection. Empirically, AdamS demonstrates strong performance in various tasks, including pre-training runs on GPT-2 and Llama2 (up to 13B parameters) and reinforcement learning in post-training regimes. With its efficiency, simplicity, and theoretical grounding, AdamS stands as a compelling alternative to existing optimizers.
Large language models (LLMs) learn non-trivial abstractions during pretraining, such as detecting irregular plural noun subjects. However, because traditional evaluation methods (e.g., benchmarking) fail to reveal how models acquire these concepts and capabilities, it is not well understood when and how these specific linguistic abilities emerge. To bridge this gap and better understand model training at the concept level, we use sparse crosscoders to discover and align features across model checkpoints. Using this approach, we track the evolution of linguistic features during pretraining. We train crosscoders between open-sourced checkpoint triplets with significant performance and representation shifts, and introduce a novel metric, Relative Indirect Effects (RelIE), to trace training stages at which individual features become causally important for task performance. We show that crosscoders can detect feature emergence, maintenance, and discontinuation during pretraining. Our approach is architecture-agnostic and scalable, offering a promising path toward more interpretable and fine-grained analysis of representation learning throughout pretraining.
Large language models (LLMs) are highly capable of answering questions, but they are often unaware of their own knowledge boundary, i.e., knowing what they know and what they don't know. As a result, they can generate factually incorrect responses on topics they do not have enough knowledge of, commonly known as hallucination. Rather than hallucinating, a language model should be more honest and respond with "I don't know" when it does not have enough knowledge about a topic. Many methods have been proposed to improve LLM honesty, but their evaluations lack robustness, as they do not take into account the knowledge that the LLM has ingested during its pretraining. In this paper, we propose a more robust evaluation benchmark dataset for LLM honesty by utilizing Pythia, a truly open LLM with publicly available pretraining data. In addition, we also propose a novel method for harnessing the pretraining data to build a more honest LLM.
Large language models (LLMs) exhibit systematic preferences for well-known entities, a phenomenon often attributed to popularity bias. However, the extent to which these preferences reflect real-world popularity versus statistical exposure during pretraining remains unclear, largely due to the inaccessibility of most training corpora. We provide the first direct, large-scale analysis of popularity bias grounded in fully observable pretraining data. Leveraging the open OLMo models and their complete pretraining corpus, Dolma, we compute precise entity-level exposure statistics across 7.4 trillion tokens. We analyze 2,000 entities spanning five types (Person, Location, Organization, Art, Product) and compare pretraining exposure against Wikipedia pageviews and two elicited LLM popularity signals: direct scalar estimation and pairwise comparison. Our results show that pretraining exposure strongly correlates with Wikipedia popularity, validating exposure as a meaningful proxy for real-world salience during the training period. More importantly, we find that LLM popularity judgments align more closely with exposure than with Wikipedia, especially when elicited via pairwise comparisons. This alignment is strongest for larger models and persists in the long tail, where Wikipedia popularity becomes unreliable. Overall, our findings demonstrate that popularity priors in LLMs are primarily shaped by pretraining statistics rather than external popularity signals, offering concrete evidence that data exposure plays a central role in driving popularity bias.
Joint Knowledge Base Completion and Question Answering by Combining Large Language Models and Small Language Models
通过结合大语言模型和小语言模型实现知识库补全与问答的联合处理
Yinan Liu, Dongying Lin, Sigang Luo, Xiaochun Yang, Bin Wang
机构
*
School of Computer Science and Engineering, Northeastern University, Shenyang, China(东北大学计算机科学与工程学院,沈阳,中国)
;
National Frontiers Science Center for Industrial Intelligence and Systems optimization, Northeastern University, Shenyang, China(东北大学工业智能与系统优化国家级前沿科学中心,沈阳,中国)
专题命中
预训练与数据
:large language model(title,abstract);language model(title,abstract);small language model(title,abstract);LLM(abstract)
Knowledge Bases (KBs) play a key role in various applications. As two representative KB-related tasks, knowledge base completion (KBC) and knowledge base question answering (KBQA) are closely related and inherently complementary with each other. Thus, it will be beneficial to solve the task of joint KBC and KBQA to make them reinforce each other. However, existing studies usually rely on the small language model (SLM) to enhance them jointly, and the large language model (LLM)'s strong reasoning ability is ignored. In this paper, by combining the strengths of the LLM with the SLM, we propose a novel framework JCQL, which can make these two tasks enhance each other in an iterative manner. To make KBC enhance KBQA, we augment the LLM agent-based KBQA model's reasoning paths by incorporating an SLM-trained KBC model as an action of the agent, alleviating the LLM's hallucination and high computational costs issue in KBQA. To make KBQA enhance KBC, we incrementally fine-tune the KBC model by leveraging KBQA's reasoning paths as its supplementary training data, improving the ability of the SLM in KBC. Extensive experiments over two public benchmark data sets demonstrate that JCQL surpasses all baselines for both KBC and KBQA tasks.
Data curation is a critical part of post-training pipelines for large language models, yet existing tools often treat ingestion, deduplication, synthetic generation, and quality filtering as separate stages. This fragmentation makes it difficult to audit pipeline decisions or understand why individual samples are rejected. CuratorKIT is an open-source Python library that covers this full lifecycle in a single configurable pipeline. The framework is composed of six source format readers and automatic schema detection, a pre-generation data hygiene layer for credentials, PII, and toxic content, eight LLM-powered generation tasks, three complementary quality gates with provenance-exact hallucination verification, structured adaptive recovery, and five training-ready export formats compatible with TRL, Unsloth, and AlignTune. Every pipeline decision is recorded in an append-only per-sample provenance chain, and rejected samples carry structured failure reasons rather than being silently discarded. CuratorKIT supports 100+ LLM providers through LiteLLM, exposes both a Python API and a YAML-driven CLI, and is designed for practitioners who need reproducible, auditable data pipelines at scale .
Query-focused summarization (QFS) aims to produce summaries that answer particular questions of interest, enabling greater user control and personalization. The advent of large language models (LLMs), shows their impressive capability of textual understanding through large-scale pretraining, which implies the great potential of extractive snippet generation. In this paper, we systematically investigated two indispensable characteristics that the LLMs-based QFS models should be harnessed, \emph{Efficiently Fine-grained Query-LLM Alignment} and \emph{Lengthy Document Summarization}, respectively. Correspondingly, we propose two modules called Query-aware HyperExpert and Query-focused Infini-attention to access the aforementioned characteristics. These innovations pave the way for broader application and accessibility in the field of QFS technology. Extensive experiments conducted on existing QFS benchmarks indicate the effectiveness and generalizability of the proposed approach.
Med-V1: Small Language Models for Zero-shot and Scalable Biomedical Evidence Attribution
Med-V1:用于零样本和可扩展生物医学证据归因的小型语言模型
Qiao Jin, Yin Fang, Lauren He, Yifan Yang, Guangzhi Xiong, Zhizheng Wang, Nicholas Wan, Joey Chan, Donald C. Comeau, Robert Leaman, Charalampos S. Floudas, Aidong Zhang, Michael F. Chiang, Yifan Peng, Zhiyong Lu
机构
*
Division of Intramural Research, National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health(国家医学图书馆内部研究部,国立卫生研究院)
;
Department of Computer Science, University of Virginia(弗吉尼亚大学计算机科学系)
;
Center for Cancer Research, National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health(国家癌症研究所癌症研究中心,国立卫生研究院)
;
Department of Population Health Sciences, Weill Cornell Medicine Institute of AI for Digital Health, Weill Cornell Medicine(韦尔·科恩医学中心流行病学与健康科学系,韦尔·科恩医学中心人工智能与数字健康研究所)
专题命中
预训练与数据
:LLM(summary_cn,abstract);language model(title,abstract);small language model(title,abstract);large language model(abstract)
Assessing whether an article supports an assertion is essential for hallucination detection and claim verification. While large language models (LLMs) have the potential to automate this task, achieving strong performance requires frontier models such as GPT-5 that are prohibitively expensive to deploy at scale. To efficiently perform biomedical evidence attribution, we present Med-V1, a family of small language models with only three billion parameters. Trained on high-quality synthetic data newly developed in this study, Med-V1 substantially outperforms (+27.0% to +71.3%) its base models on five biomedical benchmarks unified into a verification format. Despite its smaller size, Med-V1 performs comparably to frontier LLMs such as GPT-5, along with high-quality explanations for its predictions. We use Med-V1 to conduct a first-of-its-kind use case study that quantifies hallucinations in LLM-generated answers under different citation instructions. Results show that the format instruction strongly affects citation validity and hallucination, with GPT-5 generating more claims but exhibiting hallucination rates similar to GPT-4o. Additionally, we present a second use case showing that Med-V1 can automatically identify high-stakes evidence misattributions in clinical practice guidelines, revealing potentially negative public health impacts that are otherwise challenging to identify at scale. Overall, Med-V1 provides an efficient and accurate lightweight alternative to frontier LLMs for practical and real-world applications in biomedical evidence attribution and verification tasks. Med-V1 is available at https://github.com/ncbi-nlp/Med-V1.
How large language models internally represent high-level behaviors is a core interpretability question with direct relevance to AI safety: it determines what we can detect, audit, or intervene on. Recent work has shown that traits such as evil or sycophancy correspond to linear directions in the internal activations, the so-called persona vectors. Although these vectors are now routinely utilized to inspect and steer model behavior in safety-relevant settings, how these representations are formed during training remains unknown. To address this gap, we trace persona vectors across the pretraining of OLMo-3-7B, finding that persona vectors form remarkably early -- within 0.22% of OLMo-3 pretraining -- and remain effective for steering the fully post-trained instruct models. Although core representations are formed early on, persona vectors continue to refine geometrically and semantically throughout pretraining. We further compare alternative elicitation strategies and find that all yield effective directions, with each strategy surfacing qualitatively distinct facets of the underlying persona. Replicating our analysis on Apertus-8B reveals that our findings transfer qualitatively beyond OLMo-3. Our results establish persona representations as stable features of early pretraining and open a path to studying how training forms, refines, and shapes them.
Fingerprinting Large Language Models (LLMs)is essential for provenance verification and model attribution. Existing fingerprinting methods are primarily evaluated after fine-tuning, where models have already acquired stable signatures from training data, optimization dynamics, or hyperparameters. However, most of a model's capacity and knowledge are acquired during pretraining rather than downstream fine-tuning, making large-scale pretraining a more fundamental regime for lineage verification. We show that existing fingerprinting methods become unreliable in this regime, as they rely on post-hoc signatures that only emerge after substantial training. This limitation contradicts the classical Galton notion of a fingerprint as an intrinsic and persistent identity. In contrast, we propose a stronger and more intrinsic notion of LLM fingerprinting: SeedPrints, a method that leverages random initialization biases as persistent, seed-dependent identifiers present even before training begins. We show that untrained models exhibit reproducible prediction biases induced by their initialization seed, and that these weak signals remain statistically detectable throughout training, enabling high-confidence lineage verification. Unlike prior techniques that fail during early pretraining or degrade under distribution shifts, SeedPrints remains effective across all training stages, from initialization to large-scale pretraining and downstream adaptation. Experiments on LLaMA-style and Qwen-style models demonstrate seed-level distinguishability and enable birth-to-lifecycle identity verification. Evaluations on large-scale pretraining trajectories and real-world fingerprinting benchmarks further confirm its robustness under prolonged training, domain shifts, and parameter modifications.
Large Language Models (LLMs) today are powerful problem solvers across many domains, and they continue to get stronger as they scale in model size, training set size, and training set quality, as shown by extensive research and experimentation across the industry. Training a frontier model today requires on the order of tens to hundreds of yottaflops, which is a massive investment of time, compute, and energy. Improving pretraining efficiency is therefore essential to enable the next generation of even more capable LLMs. While 8-bit floating point (FP8) training is now widely adopted, transitioning to even narrower precision, such as 4-bit floating point (FP4), could unlock additional improvements in computational speed and resource utilization. However, quantization at this level poses challenges to training stability, convergence, and implementation, notably for large-scale models trained on long token horizons.
In this study, we introduce a novel approach for stable and accurate training of large language models (LLMs) using the NVFP4 format. Our method integrates Random Hadamard transforms (RHT) to bound block-level outliers, employs a two-dimensional quantization scheme for consistent representations across both the forward and backward passes, utilizes stochastic rounding for unbiased gradient estimation, and incorporates selective high-precision layers. We validate our approach by training a 12-billion-parameter model on 10 trillion tokens -- the longest publicly documented training run in 4-bit precision to date. Our results show that the model trained with our NVFP4-based pretraining technique achieves training loss and downstream task accuracies comparable to an FP8 baseline. These findings highlight that NVFP4, when combined with our training approach, represents a major step forward in narrow-precision LLM training algorithms.
While speech foundation models (SFMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in audio-only tasks, their adaptation to multimodal scenarios remains underexplored. This work presents UASR-LLM, a novel framework that adapts frozen SFMs to unified visual speech recognition (VSR), automatic speech recognition (ASR), and audio-visual speech recognition (AVSR) by leveraging large language models (LLMs) as text decoders. Visual representations are injected into multiple SFM layers via visual injection modules, enabling multimodal fusion and unified representation learning. The augmented SFMs are connected to decoder-only LLMs through a feed-forward adaptor, where concatenated representations and instruction prompts guide transcription. We propose a two-stage training strategy consisting of visual injection pretraining followed by speech recognition finetuning. The pretraining stage aligns audio, visual, and audio-visual representations within the frozen SFM backbone, while the finetuning stage integrates LLMs for unified optimization across speech recognition tasks. Experimental results demonstrate superior performance over state-of-the-art baselines across VSR, ASR, and AVSR under both clean and noisy conditions. Ablation studies further confirm generalization across various SFMs and LLMs, validating the effectiveness of the proposed training strategy.
LLM-Select: Feature Selection with Large Language Models
Daniel P. Jeong, Zachary C. Lipton, Pradeep Ravikumar
专题命中
预训练与数据
:LLM(title,abstract);large language model(title,abstract);language model(title,abstract);prompting(abstract)
CommentsPublished in Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR), April 2025
详情
英文摘要
In this paper, we demonstrate a surprising capability of large language models (LLMs): given only input feature names and a description of a prediction task, they are capable of selecting the most predictive features, with performance rivaling the standard tools of data science. Remarkably, these models exhibit this capacity across various query mechanisms. For example, we zero-shot prompt an LLM to output a numerical importance score for a feature (e.g., "blood pressure") in predicting an outcome of interest (e.g., "heart failure"), with no additional context. In particular, we find that the latest models, such as GPT-4, can consistently identify the most predictive features regardless of the query mechanism and across various prompting strategies. We illustrate these findings through extensive experiments on real-world data, where we show that LLM-based feature selection consistently achieves strong performance competitive with data-driven methods such as the LASSO, despite never having looked at the downstream training data. Our findings suggest that LLMs may be useful not only for selecting the best features for training but also for deciding which features to collect in the first place. This could benefit practitioners in domains like healthcare and the social sciences, where collecting high-quality data comes at a high cost.
专题命中
预训练与数据
:large language model(title,abstract);language model(title,abstract);pretraining(title,abstract);LLM(abstract)
详情
英文摘要
In the era of large language models (LLMs), detecting pretraining data has been increasingly important due to concerns about fair evaluation and ethical risks. Current methods differentiate members and non-members by designing scoring functions, like Perplexity and Min-k%. However, the diversity and complexity of training data magnifies the difficulty of distinguishing, leading to suboptimal performance in detecting pretraining data. In this paper, we first explore the benefits of unseen data, which can be easily collected after the release of the LLM. We find that the perplexities of LLMs shift differently for members and non-members, after fine-tuning with a small amount of previously unseen data. In light of this, we introduce a novel and effective method termed Fine-tuned Score Deviation(FSD), which improves the performance of current scoring functions for pretraining data detection. In particular, we propose to measure the deviation distance of current scores after fine-tuning on a small amount of unseen data within the same domain. In effect, using a few unseen data can largely decrease the scores of all non-members, leading to a larger deviation distance than members. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, significantly improving the AUC score on common benchmark datasets across various models.