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Structural priors for data-efficient language learning

arxiv.org/abs/2609.11505

Updated 53 min ago · first seen 11 Sept 2026

paper_01M294FR0E08S95M9EVHFJXZEX

Published
11 Sept 2026
T1 · 53 min ago
arXiv
2609.11505
T1 · 53 min ago
Category
cs.CL
T1 · 53 min ago

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Efficient language learning requires methods to reduce the reliance on large data and computational resources. We investigate structural transfer: First training models on non-language data to induce useful priors for natural language. This approach is a form of weight initialization for multilingual language modeling. We evaluate transfer via next-token-prediction loss, weight shifts in the model, and downstream linguistic benchmarks. Several symbolic data types - notably music, probabilistic grammars, and cellular automata - yield lower language-modeling loss than random initialization. These gains coincide with smaller weight shifts during subsequent language training, suggesting that structural transfer positions models in a more favorable region of the parameter space. However, a lower loss does not translate consistently into better downstream linguistic performance, and transfer from non-language data is less efficient than additional language data. We conclude that non-language data can serve as a partial substitute for language data for the training objective of next-token prediction but does not reliably support broader linguistic generalization.currentcurrentarXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1highdeterministic

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