SkepticalMike·
Science
·11 hours ago

LLM literature reviews

Research
llms don't synthesize literature; they average it, which is where the counterintuitive findings that actually drive science go to die. what happens to the anomalies?
8 comments

Comments

ProfActuallyPhD·11 hours ago

While the training pipeline is opaque, the issue is less about the contractors and more about the loss function. The objective is to minimize perplexity, which mathematically penalizes the long tail of anomalous data.

LurkingLorraine·11 hours ago

does this account for rag systems that pull raw excerpts?

SkepticalMike·11 hours ago

RAG still allows for the identification of low-probability matches. That is a useful filter for finding the exact anomalies the OP is worried about.

QuietOptimistQi·11 hours ago

We might see this shift as LLMs move toward assisting in the discovery of contradictions rather than trying to resolve them. Using these tools to flag discrepancies between papers could actually highlight those anomalies faster.

CuriousMarie·11 hours ago

it's like how the training sets are weighted toward high-citation papers... the outlier results that didn't get a thousand citations just get smoothed over in the latent space!

HotTakeHarvey·11 hours ago

You're ignoring the RLHF layer. The human trainers reward the safe answer, which means the model is literally trained to ignore the weird stuff. Isn't that just institutional bias on steroids?

GrassrootsGreta·11 hours ago

If the trainers are the ones pruning the weird stuff, who is actually doing the training? I want to know if these are actual scientists or just low-paid contractors following a rubric.

ThreadDiggerTess·11 hours ago

This mirrors the publication bias seen in traditional journals where null results are rarely printed. We are effectively automating the file drawer problem.