Where's the Indirect Evidence? Investigating Grammatical Generalization with Influence Functions
Language models generalize beyond their training corpus to learn linguistic phenomena (Patil et al., 2024; Misra and Mahowald, 2024), showing that there exists indirect evidence driving learning. Prior work has inferred that indirect evidence exists without identifying its character or considered specific hypotheses about what it might be. We explore an alternative bottom-up method for identifying indirect evidence. We use influence functions (Koh and Liang, 2017) to measure how individual training sentences affect model predictions in 15 grammatical phenomena from BLiMP (Warstadt et al., 2020). We filter out a phenomenon's direct evidence using hand-constructed rules and take the 60,000 ...
| Authors | William Dai, Zhenghao Herbert Zhou, Maya Viswanathan et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 16 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 16 October 2026 |
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