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Large Language Models (LLMs) frequently memorize long sequences verbatim, often with serious legal and privacy implications. Much prior work has studied such verbatim memorization using observational data. To complement such work, we develop a framework to study verbatim memorization in a controlled setting by continuing pre-training from Pythia checkpoints with injected sequences. We find that (1) non-trivial amounts of repetition are necessary for verbatim memorization to happen; (2) later (and presumably better) checkpoints are more likely to verbatim memorize sequences, even for out-of-distribution sequences; (3) the generation of memorized sequences is triggered by distributed model states that encode high-level features and makes important use of general language modeling capabilities. Guided by these insights, we develop stress tests to evaluate unlearning methods and find they often fail to remove the verbatim memorized information, while also degrading the LM. Overall, these findings challenge the hypothesis that verbatim memorization stems from specific model weights or mechanisms. Rather, verbatim memorization is intertwined with the LM&#39;s general capabilities and thus will be very difficult to isolate and suppress without degrading model quality.

EMNLP 2024

Demystifying Verbatim Memorization in Large Language Models

task ambiguity

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AAAI 2026

We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

Large Language Models (LLMs) frequently memorize long sequences verbatim, often with serious legal and privacy implications. Much prior work has studied such verbatim memorization using observational data. To complement such work, we develop a framework to study verbatim memorization in a controlled setting by continuing pre-training from Pythia checkpoints with injected sequences. We find that (1) non-trivial amounts of repetition are necessary for verbatim memorization to happen; (2) later (and presumably better) checkpoints are more likely to verbatim memorize sequences, even for out-of-distribution sequences; (3) the generation of memorized sequences is triggered by distributed model states that encode high-level features and makes important use of general language modeling capabilities. Guided by these insights, we develop stress tests to evaluate unlearning methods and find they often fail to remove the verbatim memorized information, while also degrading the LM. Overall, these findings challenge the hypothesis that verbatim memorization stems from specific model weights or mechanisms. Rather, verbatim memorization is intertwined with the LM's general capabilities and thus will be very difficult to isolate and suppress without degrading model quality.

poster

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Subword regularization, used widely in NLP, improves model performance by reducing the dependency on exact tokenizations, augmenting the training corpus, and exposing the model to more unique contexts during training. BPE and MaxMatch, two popular subword tokenization schemes, have stochastic dropout regularization variants. However, there has not been an analysis of the distributions formed by them.

We show that these stochastic variants are heavily biased towards a small set of tokenizations per word. If the benefits of subword regularization are as mentioned, we hypothesize that biasedness artificially limits the effectiveness of these schemes. Thus, we propose an algorithm to uniformly sample tokenizations that we use as a drop-in replacement for the stochastic aspects of existing tokenizers, and find that it improves machine translation quality.

Distributional Properties of Subword Regularization

Despite their popularity in non-English NLP, multilingual language models often underperform monolingual ones due to inter-language competition for model parameters. We propose Cross-lingual Expert Language Models (X-ELM), which mitigate this competition by independently training language models on subsets of the multilingual corpus. This process specializes X-ELMs to different languages while remaining effective as a multilingual ensemble. Our experiments show that when given the same compute budget, X-ELM outperforms jointly trained multilingual models across all 16 considered languages and that these gains transfer to downstream tasks. X-ELM provides additional benefits over performance improvements: new experts can be iteratively added, adapting X-ELM to new languages without catastrophic forgetting. Furthermore, training is asynchronous, reducing the hardware requirements for multilingual training and democratizing multilingual modeling.

Breaking the Curse of Multilinguality with Cross-lingual Expert Language Models

Stable pre-training is essential for achieving better-performing language models. However, tracking pre-training stability is impractical due to high computational costs. We study Token Embedding Variability as a simple proxy to estimate pre-training stability. We theoretically and empirically demonstrate that Multi-head Low-Rank Attention acts as a fundamental approach to reducing instability. This is supported by empirical findings on variants on GPT-2, demonstrating improved stability and lower perplexities, even at deeper layer counts.

Stable Language Model Pre-training by Reducing Embedding Variability

Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate the same sequences contained in the pre-train corpora, known as memorization.
Previous research studied it at a macro level, leaving micro yet important questions under-explored, e.g., what makes sentences memorized, the dynamics when generating memorized sequence, its connection to unmemorized sequence, and its predictability.
We answer the above questions by analyzing the relationship of memorization with outputs from LLM, namely, embeddings, probability distributions, and generated tokens.
A memorization score is calculated as the overlap between generated tokens and actual continuations when the LLM is prompted with a context sequence from the pre-train corpora.
Our findings reveal:
(1) The inter-correlation between memorized/unmemorized sentences, model size, continuation size, and context size, as well as the transition dynamics between sentences of different memorization scores,
(2) A sudden drop and increase in the frequency of input tokens when generating memorized/unmemorized sequences (boundary effect),
(3) Cluster of sentences with different memorization scores in the embedding space,
(4) An inverse boundary effect in the entropy of probability distributions for generated memorized/unmemorized sequences,
(5) The predictability of memorization is related to model size and continuation length. 
In addition, we show a Transformer model trained by the hidden states of LLM can predict unmemorized tokens.

A Multi-Perspective Analysis of Memorization in Large Language Models

Models need appropriate inductive biases to effectively learn from small amounts of data and generalize systematically outside of the training distribution. While Transformers are highly versatile and powerful, they can still benefit from enhanced structural inductive biases for seq2seq tasks, especially those involving syntactic transformations, such as converting active to passive voice or semantic parsing. In this paper, we propose to strengthen the structural inductive bias of a Transformer by intermediate pre-training to perform synthetically generated syntactic transformations of dependency trees given a description of the transformation. Our experiments confirm that this helps with few-shot learning of syntactic tasks such as chunking, and also improves structural generalization for semantic parsing. Our analysis shows that the intermediate pre-training leads to attention heads that keep track of which syntactic transformation needs to be applied to which token, and that the model can leverage these attention heads on downstream tasks.

Strengthening Structural Inductive Biases by Pre-training to Perform Syntactic Transformations

Most language models currently available are prone to self-contradiction during dialogues. To mitigate this issue, this study explores a novel contradictory dialogue processing task that aims to detect and modify contradictory statements in a conversation. This task is inspired by research on context faithfulness and dialogue comprehension, which have demonstrated that the detection and understanding of contradictions often necessitate detailed explanations. We develop a dataset comprising contradictory dialogues, in which one side of the conversation contradicts itself. Each dialogue is accompanied by an explanatory label that highlights the location and details of the contradiction. With this dataset, we present a Red Teaming framework for contradictory dialogue processing. The framework detects and attempts to explain the dialogue, then modifies the existing contradictory content using the explanation. Our experiments demonstrate that the framework improves the ability to detect contradictory dialogues and provides valid explanations. Additionally, it showcases distinct capabilities for modifying such dialogues. Our study highlights the importance of the logical inconsistency problem in conversational AI.

Red Teaming Language Models for Processing Contradictory Dialogues

The limited generalization of coreference resolution (CR) models has been a major bottleneck in the task’s broad application. Prior work has identified annotation differences, especially for mention detection, as one of the main reasons for the generalization gap and proposed using additional annotated target domain data. Rather than relying on this additional annotation, we propose an alternative referential task, Major Entity Identification (MEI), where we: (a) assume the target entities to be specified in the input, and (b) limit the task to only the frequent entities. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that MEI models generalize well across domains on multiple datasets with supervised models and LLM-based few-shot prompting. Additionally, MEI fits the classification framework, which enables the use of robust and intuitive classification-based metrics. Finally, MEI is also of practical use as it allows a user to search for all mentions of a particular entity or a group of entities of interest.

Major Entity Identification: A Generalizable Alternative to Coreference Resolution

Guardrails have emerged as an alternative to safety alignment for content moderation of large language models (LLMs). Existing model-based guardrails have not been designed for resource-constrained computational portable devices, such as mobile phones, more and more of which are running LLM-based applications locally. We introduce LoRA-Guard, a parameter-efficient guardrail adaptation method that relies on knowledge sharing between LLMs and guardrail models. LoRA-Guard extracts language features from the LLMs and adapts them for the content moderation task using low-rank adapters, while a dual-path design prevents any performance degradation on the generative task. We show that LoRA-Guard outperforms existing approaches with 100-1000x lower parameter overhead while maintaining accuracy, enabling on-device content moderation.

LoRA-Guard: Parameter-Efficient Guardrail Adaptation for Content Moderation of Large Language Models

Various linearizations have been proposed to cast syntactic dependency parsing as sequence labeling. However, these approaches do not support more complex graph-based representations, such as semantic dependencies or enhanced universal dependencies, as they cannot handle reentrancy or cycles. By extending them, we define a range of unbounded and bounded linearizations that can be used to cast graph parsing as a tagging task, enlarging the toolbox of problems that can be solved under this paradigm. Experimental results on semantic dependency and enhanced UD parsing show that with a good choice of encoding, sequence-labeling semantic dependency parsers combine high efficiency with accuracies close to the state of the art, in spite of their simplicity.

Dependency Graph Parsing as Sequence Labeling

A key concern with the concept of *"alignment"* is the implicit question of *"alignment to what?"*. AI systems are increasingly used across the world, yet safety alignment is often focused on homogeneous monolingual settings. Additionally, preference training and safety measures often overfit to harms common in Western-centric datasets. Here, we explore the viability of different alignment approaches when balancing dual objectives: addressing and optimizing for a non-homogeneous set of languages and cultural preferences while minimizing both global and local harms. We collect the first human annotated red teaming prompts in different languages, distinguishing between global and local harm, which serve as a laboratory to understand the reliability of alignment techniques when faced with preference distributions that are non-stationary across geographies and languages. While this setting is seldom covered by the literature to date, which primarily centers on English harm mitigation, it captures real-world interactions with AI systems around the world. We establish a new precedent for state-of-the-art alignment techniques across 6 languages with minimal degradation in general performance. Our work provides important insights into cross-lingual transfer and novel optimization approaches to safeguard AI systems designed to serve global populations.

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Distributional Properties of Subword Regularization

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