Jiaxin Wen on Twitter / X

Generalization Dynamics of LM Pre-training

Generalization Dynamics of LM Pre-Training shows that language models can switch abruptly between shallow pattern-following and more transferable computation during pre-training, even when loss and...

Inference-Time Scaling for Generative Pre-Training | Jiaming Song

A short note on the false dichotomy between autoregression and diffusion, why flow maps help, and what this might mean for language models.

Concept Attractors in LLMs and their Applications

Empirically, we see that for prompts pip_{i}, pjp_{j} in each concept 𝒞\mathcal{C}, there exists a layer ll where:

Understanding LSTM Networks -- colah's blog

Humans don’t start their thinking from scratch every second. As you read this essay, you understand each word based on your understanding of previous words. You don’t throw everything away and start thinking from scratch again. Your thoughts have persistence.

LLM Daydreaming

Proposal & discussion of how default mode networks for LLMs are an example of missing capabilities for search and novelty in contemporary AI systems.

Here’s what’s really going on inside an LLM’s neural network

Anthropic's conceptual mapping helps explain why LLMs behave the way they do.

Beyond Model Collapse: Scaling Up with Synthesized Data Requires...

Large Language Models (LLM) are increasingly trained on data generated by other LLM, either because generated text and images become part of the pre-training corpus, or because synthetized data is...

Brandon Stewart on Twitter / X

1/ New @Nature! We study how powerful institutions shape the information environment for LLMs. Commercial LLM training is opaque, so we trace a path from state-coordinated media -> training data -> model responses. pic.twitter.com/5LdFvzbFaf— Brandon Stewart (@b_m_stewart) May 13, 2026

Language model harnesses are compositional generalizers

Harnesses can lead to compositional generalization: we observe a property in training RLMs, in which similarly structured tasks are viewed as isomorphic and all individual LM calls in the harness become in-distribution.

Disentangling Models from Personas in Heterogeneous LLM Simulations

Multi-agent simulations with large language models (LLMs) often operate networks of agents with a single base model. This overlooks the inter-model effects which may dominate engagement dynamics in real-world deployments. To show this, we simulate a heterogeneous social network powered by several different base models and show that the amount of engagement an agent receives depends more on its base model than on its assigned persona. The attraction or repulsion effects of a base model strengthen dramatically when more models are added in the mix, suggesting that networks dynamics may converge to base model effects at scale. To help explain this effect, we conduct a series of content-mediating analyses, showing the predictability of base models across contexts as well as the relationship between a model's lexical patterns and an engagement-maximizing style. In light of recent developments in mass multi-agent interaction, this work underscores the relevance of *heterogeneous* compositions in driving the outcomes of those networks.

Is Slack the new LMS?

Is Slack the new LMS? I’m glad to hear the words Slack and learning in the same sentence. Because I think with a few adjustments Slack could easily become the best LMS (Learning Manage System) …

Group size effects and collective misalignment in LLM multi-agent systems

Multi-agent systems of large language models (LLMs) are rapidly expanding across domains, introducing dynamics not captured by single-agent evaluations. Yet, existing work has mostly contrasted the behavior of a single agent with that of a collective of fixed size, leaving open a central question: How does group size shape dynamics? Here, we move beyond this dichotomy and systematically explore outcomes across the full range of group sizes. We focus on multi-agent misalignment, building on recent evidence that interacting LLMs playing a simple coordination game can generate collective biases absent in individual models. First, we show that collective bias is a deeper phenomenon than previously assessed: Interaction can amplify individual biases, introduce new ones, or override model-level preferences. Second, we demonstrate that group size affects the dynamics in a nonlinear way, revealing model-dependent dynamical regimes. Finally, we develop a mean-field analytical approach and show that, above a critical population size, simulations converge to deterministic predictions that expose the basins of attraction of competing equilibria. These findings establish group size as a key driver of multi-agent dynamics and highlight the need to consider population-level effects when deploying LLM-based systems at scale.

Why Are LLMs Smart?

A popular way to explain how current LLMs work is to say that “all” they do is predict the next most likely word in a sentence.

When Is Collective Intelligence a Lottery? Multi-Agent Scaling Laws for Memetic Drift in LLMs

Multi-agent systems powered by large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in settings that shape consequential decisions, both directly and indirectly. Yet it remains unclear whether their outcomes reflect collective reasoning, systematic bias, or mere chance. Recent work has sharpened this question with naming games, showing that even when no individual agent favors any label a priori, populations rapidly break symmetry and reach consensus. Here, we reveal the mechanism by introducing a minimal model, Quantized Simplex Gossip (QSG), and trace the microscopic origin of this agreement to mutual in-context learning. In QSG, agents maintain internal belief states but learn from one another's sampled outputs, so one agent's arbitrary choice becomes the next agent's evidence and can compound toward agreement. By analogy with neutral evolution, we call this sampling-driven regime memetic drift. QSG predicts a crossover from a drift-dominated regime, where consensus is effectively a lottery, to a selection regime, where weak biases are amplified and shape the outcome. We derive scaling laws for drift-induced polarization as a function of population size, communication bandwidth, in-context adaptation rate, and agents' internal uncertainty, and we validate them in both QSG simulations and naming-game experiments with LLM populations. Together, these results provide a framework for studying the collective mechanisms of social representation formation in multi-agent systems.