语言模型何时学习什么?隐性课程假设
阅读原文· arxiv.org研究者提出隐性课程假设,指出预训练遵循可组合且可预测的课程结构。通过设计涵盖检索、形态转换、逻辑推理和数学等领域的组合任务,对410M至13B参数的四个模型家族进行追踪,发现技能涌现顺序跨模型高度一致(ρ=.81),且复合任务通常在其组件任务之后出现。研究表明该结构编码于模型内部表征中,利用任务表征空间可有效预测未见过组合任务的训练轨迹(R²=.68-.84),揭示预训练过程比损失曲线显示的更具结构性。
Large language models (LLMs) can perform remarkably complex tasks, yet the fine-grained details of how these capabilities emerge during pretraining remain poorly understood. Scaling laws on validation loss tell us how much a model improves with additional compute, but not what skills it acquires in which order. To remedy this, we propose the Implicit Curriculum Hypothesis: pretraining follows a compositional and predictable curriculum across models and data mixtures. We test this by designing a suite of simple, composable tasks spanning retrieval, morphological transformations, coreference, logical reasoning, and mathematics. Using these tasks, we track emergence points across four model families spanning sizes from 410M-13B parameters. We find that emergence orderings of when models reach fixed accuracy thresholds are strikingly consistent (ρ= .81 across 45 model pairs), and that composite tasks most often emerge after their component tasks. Furthermore, we find that this structure is encoded in model representations: tasks with similar function vector representations also tend to follow similar trajectories in training. By using the space of representations derived from our task set, we can effectively predict the training trajectories of simple held-out compositional tasks throughout the course of pretraining (R^2 = .68-.84 across models) without previously evaluating them. Together, these results suggest that pretraining is more structured than loss curves reveal: skills emerge in a compositional order that is consistent across models and readable from their internals.