📢 PhD position in Developmental Language Modelling (PLZ RT) What can human language acquisition teach us about training language models? Join us as a PhD! mpi.nl/career-education/vacancies/vacancy/fully-funded-4-year-phd-position-developmental-language @carorowland.bsky.social @mpi-nl.bsky.social

LLMs excel at finding surprising “needles” in very long documents, but can they detect when information is conspicuously missing? 🫥AbsenceBench🫥 shows that even SoTA LLMs struggle on this task, suggesting that LLMs have trouble perceiving “negative spaces”. Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2506.11440 🧵[1/n]

New preprint alert! We often prompt ICL tasks using either demonstrations or instructions. How much does the form of the prompt matter to the task representation formed by a language model? Stick around to find out 1/N

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning lets LLMs solve complex tasks, but long CoTs are expensive. How short can they be while still working? Our new ICML paper tackles this foundational question.

Check out our new paper on unlearning for LLMs 🤖. We show that *not all data are unlearned equally* and argue that future work on LLM unlearning should take properties of the data to be unlearned into account. This work was lead by my intern @a-krishnan.bsky.social 🔗: arxiv.org/abs/2504.05058

Our new paper! "Analytic theory of creativity in convolutional diffusion models" lead expertly by @masonkamb.bsky.social arxiv.org/abs/2412.20292 Our closed-form theory needs no training, is mechanistically interpretable & accurately predicts diffusion model outputs with high median r^2~0.9

Just read this, neat paper! I really enjoyed Figure 3 illustrating the basic idea: Suppose you train a diffusion model where the denoiser is restricted to be "local" (each pixel i only depends on its 3x3 neighborhood N(i)). The optimal local denoiser for pixel i is E[ x_0[i] | x_t[ N(i) ] ]...cont