reading

• From System 1 to System 2: A Survey of Reasoning Large Language Models +

  Li et al. (2025) talk about reasoning and non-reasoning models as System 1 (fast decision making) and System 2 (logical reasoning with more accurate judgements) immitators.

• Language-specific Neurons Do Not Facilitate Cross-Lingual Transfer +

  Mondal et al. (2025) identify language-specific neurons and perform test-time interventions on those neurons (fine-tuning only language-specific neurons and other variations). They demonstrate that this approach is not effective in cross-lingual knowledge transfer on XNLI and XQuAD. Finally, they hypothesize that language-specific neurons lack independence due to their polysemantic nature.

• How to Test Generation Capabilities of LLMs? +

  lm_evaluation_harness package by EleutherAI. 60 standard academic benchmarks and all HuggingFace models supported.

• How do Large Language Models Handle Multilingualism? +

  A paper by Zhao et al. (2024) hypothesizes that mutilingual models go through three stages when prompted with non-English queries - (1) LLMs understand a prompt by converting linguistic features into a unified representation, (2) they reason in English (with self-attention) and incorporate multilingual knowledge to get factual information (with feed-forward networks), and (3) generate responses in the language of the initial prompt. They further propose Parallel Language-specific Neuron Detection that, unlike other methods, works with unlabeled data and then fine-tune language-specific neurons on the target language.

• Do Multilingual LLMs Think in English? +

  A paper by Schut et al. (2025) suggests that LLMs make decision concerning sementically-loaded words in the intermediate layers in English whereas other types of words are routed through non-English language representations.

• The Right Philosophy for Our Times +

  An essay (by Adam Dhalla) on transcendentalism, a philosophical movement placing an emphasis on self-reliance and individuality. Nurturing these elements can "build mental resilience at the individual level of our society and increase the strength of our network".