Papers with controlled grammar-learning tasks
Data Drives Unstable Hierarchical Generalization in LMs (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Early in training, LMs can behave like n-gram models but eventually learn tree-based syntactic rules and generalize out of distribution (OOD). |
| Approach: | They study how complex data drives hierarchical rules, while less complex encourages shortcut learning . they find a model uses rules to generalize if its training data is *diverse* . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model learns to generalize hierarchically if its training data is complex . a model learn if it includes center-embedded clauses, a special syntactic structure . |