Exemplars in Disguise: Pure Exemplar Models Mimic Abstraction-First Learning
Whether idiosyncratic, item-specific knowledge is learned before abstract class-level generalizations, or vice versa, is a central question in language learning, with exemplar and abstraction-based theories making opposite predictions. Recent methods have claimed to show that, at least for large language models, abstract knowledge is learned first. We show that these methods fall short: pure memorizer models with no abstract representations can appear, by the same criteria, to learn either item-specific or class-level knowledge first, depending on their sensitivity to individual observations, with the transition point governed by the distributional properties of the input. We further argu...
| Authors | Zachary Nicholas Houghton, Vsevolod Kapatsinski |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 1 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 3 October 2026 |
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