Papers for

ai content generation teams

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Diffusion language model sampling changes who appears in text

Who Gets Unmasked? Sampler-Induced Bias in Diffusion Language Models

Abstract: Diffusion language models (dLLMs) generate by gradually unmasking a canvas, so their samplers decide not only which token to write but also when to commit it. We show that this second decision changes who appears in generated text, a sampler-induced bias on top of the model's own. Common commit rules, including LLaDA's default, commit the positions whose sampled tokens are most probable; this peeking favors majority options. To separate the sampler from the model, we read the model's belief about a fork, such as a protagonist's gender, in one forward pass, and show that this belief matches exact sampling from the model. Measured against it, peeking samplers on LLaDA and Dream amplify occupational gender stereotypes and collapse opinion distributions, and confidence-based ordering shifts gender-balanced occupations toward men, more so under faster parallel decoding. We propose Fork-First Sampling, which decides the fork before anything else is written: it follows the belief or any target distribution, improves fluency, and avoids the stories that remark on the protagonist's gender, which prompt-based fixes produce, at the cost of one forward pass. Fairness evaluations of dLLMs should report the commit rule.

Sat 17 OctComputation and LanguageMachine Learning
The gist
Some language models write text step-by-step, choosing when and which words to reveal. The researchers found that this timing decision can make the model favor certain groups, like showing more men in jobs that should be gender balanced. They tested how much the model itself versus the sampling method affects this bias. To fix it, they suggest deciding on key story details (like a character's gender) upfront, which makes the generated text fairer and smoother.
Open → 2610.24795v1

Doc2LoRA enables language model representations for scientific paper ideas

Doc2LoRA Provides Decodable Representations of Scientific Ideas

Abstract: Representing scientific papers as points in a space lets us search for similar papers and inquire about how fields relate to one another and drive innovation. Beyond search, the vector space of papers invites generation: mixing papers through simple vector operations creates new points, mirroring combinatorial novelty, the recombination of existing ideas into new ones. However, a mixed point often represents an idea no paper has yet realized, with no papers nearby to identify the idea. We propose representing each paper by a LoRA adapter generated by the Doc-to-LoRA hypernetwork. Every point in the space, including mixtures, thus represents a large language model (LLM) open to questions and instructions in natural language. On papers from the American Physical Society (APS), we instruct the LLM at the average of each subfield to name the field in a few words and obtain labels closer to the official names than the labels of five baselines, as judged by word overlap and a panel of five LLM judges. We also ask the LLMs at points between two APS papers to write an abstract and obtain descriptions shifting from one paper to the other in step with the mixing weight. While Doc-to-LoRA is trained for generation, a small invertible transform makes the embeddings competitive for search, on par with SPECTER2 and EmbeddingGemma and close to SBERT. Because the transform is invertible, every point in the transformed space still maps back to an LLM. The embeddings thus serve both search and generation, enabling researchers to question the idea at any point in the space as a starting point for generating new ideas.

Tue 29 SeptComputation and LanguageDigital LibrariesInformation Retrieval
The gist
It can be hard to understand and explore scientific papers by just reading them. The authors created a way to turn each paper into a special language model adapter that can talk about the paper's ideas. By mixing these adapters, people can generate explanations for new combined ideas that don't exist yet. This method also helps find similar papers and describe scientific fields more accurately than some current methods.
Open → 2609.38374v1

Large language models struggle to list complex facts out of order

The Canonical Order Problem: When Large Language Models Are Unreliable Knowledge Bases for Multi-Valued Relations

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as knowledge bases (KBs) due to the vast amount of knowledge they acquire during pre-training. While many works focus on extracting single relational triples, most real-world relations are multi-valued and require generating sets of entities. In this paper, we investigate how LLMs represent and generate multi-valued relations. We identify the canonical order problem: The probabilistic distributions inside LLMs organize many multi-valued relations according to a canonical ordering (e.g., alphabetical or chronological). Through mechanistic analysis, we show that set generation in LLMs can be thought of in terms of three phases: (1) retrieval of candidate entities, (2) internal sorting, and (3) selection of the next element. As a result, prompts aiming to construct KBs that deviate from this internal canonical ordering lead to a markedly reduced reliability of LLMs when aiming to generate complete sets for multi-valued relations.

Mon 28 SeptComputation and Language
The gist
Large language models (LLMs) know a lot of facts and are often used like encyclopedias. But when facts involve multiple related items that aren’t just one answer—like lists of things—LLMs tend to organize them in a fixed order, like alphabetical. The authors found that when you try to get these models to give answers in a different order, their answers become less reliable. This happens because LLMs first retrieve possible answers, then sort them internally in a certain order, before picking the next item.
Open → 2609.36209v1

Language models learn differently from tokens as targets and context

Decoupling Token Roles in Autoregressive Pretraining

Abstract: Autoregressive pretraining increasingly draws on heterogeneous data, making it important to understand how a model learns from an individual token. The next-token prediction objective naturally identifies a token's contribution with its own loss. However, each token is not only a prediction target but also context for what follows. Using controlled corruption, we decouple these two roles and find a reversal: making a noisy token easier to predict reduces its damage as a target but increases it as context. The same decoupling helps explain text generated by language models: generation selects each token by its fit to the prefix, while its role as context is never tested against an independently determined continuation, because that continuation is generated to fit it. At known corrupted positions, acting through the context can reduce damage that removing the token's own loss does not. Understanding and controlling what a model learns from a token therefore requires decoupling its roles.

Sun 27 SeptMachine LearningArtificial IntelligenceComputation and Language
The gist
Predicting the next word is key to training language models, but each word also helps shape what comes next. The authors show that fixing a word to be easier to guess makes it less harmful as a target but more influential as context. This means models learn differently from a word when predicting it versus when using it as context. Understanding these two roles separately can improve how we design and analyze language models.
Open → 2609.33405v1