3 papers
cs.CL2025
Facts in Stats: Impacts of Pretraining Diversity on Language Model Generalization
Tina Behnia, Puneesh Deora, Christos Thrampoulidis
Language models are pretrained on sequences that blend statistical regularities (making text fluent) with factual associations between specific tokens (knowledge of facts). While r…
cs.LG2025
In-Context Occam's Razor: How Transformers Prefer Simpler Hypotheses on the Fly
Puneesh Deora, Bhavya Vasudeva, Tina Behnia +1
In-context learning (ICL) enables transformers to adapt to new tasks through contextual examples without parameter updates. While existing research has typically studied ICL in fix…
cs.CL2025
Implicit Geometry of Next-token Prediction: From Language Sparsity Patterns to Model Representations
Yize Zhao, Tina Behnia, Vala Vakilian +1
Next-token prediction (NTP) over large text corpora has become the go-to paradigm to train large language models. Yet, it remains unclear how NTP influences the mapping of linguist…