# Language Model Behavior: A Comprehensive Survey

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.11504 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11504/

## Key facts

- Cited by 92 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 285 of its 393 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Mar 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 285)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Evaluating Large Language Models Trained on Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03374/) (2021)
- [Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.03300/) (2020)
- [Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08361/) (2020)
- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [Measuring Mathematical Problem Solving With the MATH Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03874/) (2021)
- [PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02311/) (2022)
- [RoFormer: Enhanced Transformer with Rotary Position Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09864/) (2021)
- [Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11916/) (2022)
- [DistilBERT, a distilled version of BERT: smaller, faster, cheaper and lighter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01108/) (2019)
- [Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Tools](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04761/) (2023)
- [Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04356/) (2022)
- [On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07258/) (2021)
- [The Power of Scale for Parameter-Efficient Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08691/) (2021)
- [Finetuned Language Models Are Zero-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01652/) (2021)
- [OPT: Open Pre-trained Transformer Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01068/) (2022)
- [Switch Transformers: Scaling to Trillion Parameter Models with Simple and Efficient Sparsity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.03961/) (2021)
- [Training Compute-Optimal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15556/) (2022)
- [TruthfulQA: Measuring How Models Mimic Human Falsehoods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07958/) (2021)
- [Neural Machine Translation of Rare Words with Subword Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.07909/) (2015)
- [The Curious Case of Neural Text Degeneration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09751/) (2019)
- [Locating and Editing Factual Associations in GPT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.05262/) (2022)
- [A Broad-Coverage Challenge Corpus for Sentence Understanding through Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.05426/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 92)

- [A Survey on Large Language Model based Autonomous Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11432/) (2023)
- [Knowledge Conflicts for LLMs: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.08319/) (2024)
- [Can LLM-Generated Misinformation Be Detected?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.13788/) (2023)
- [ChatGPT is a Knowledgeable but Inexperienced Solver: An Investigation of Commonsense Problem in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16421/) (2023)
- [Do LLMs write like humans? Variation in grammatical and rhetorical styles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.16107/) (2024)
- [Give Us the Facts: Enhancing Large Language Models with Knowledge Graphs for Fact-aware Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.11489/) (2023)
- [Generative Pre-trained Transformer: A Comprehensive Review on Enabling Technologies, Potential Applications, Emerging Challenges, and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10435/) (2023)
- [Auxiliary task demands mask the capabilities of smaller language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02418/) (2024)
- [Do LLM Agents Exhibit Social Behavior?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.15198/) (2023)
- [People cannot distinguish GPT-4 from a human in a Turing test](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.08007/) (2024)
- [Scalable Influence and Fact Tracing for Large Language Model Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.17413/) (2024)
- [Benchmarking Knowledge Boundary for Large Language Models: A Different Perspective on Model Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11493/) (2024)
- [Does GPT-4 pass the Turing test?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.20216/) (2023)
- [HowToCaption: Prompting LLMs to Transform Video Annotations at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.04900/) (2023)
- [Distilled GPT for Source Code Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.14731/) (2023)
- [Taming Knowledge Conflicts in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10996/) (2025)
- [Unraveling Cross-Modality Knowledge Conflicts in Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03659/) (2024)
- [Inductive reasoning in humans and large language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.06548/) (2023)
- [(Ir)rationality and Cognitive Biases in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.09193/) (2024)
- [Machine Psychology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13988/) (2023)
- [Representation Engineering for Large-Language Models: Survey and Research Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.17601/) (2025)
- [Position: Key Claims in LLM Research Have a Long Tail of Footnotes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07120/) (2023)
- [Causal Estimation of Memorisation Profiles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04327/) (2024)
- [Generative Models as a Complex Systems Science: How can we make sense of large language model behavior?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00189/) (2023)
- [What Drives Performance in Multilingual Language Models?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.19159/) (2024)
- [Language Model Behavioral Phases are Consistent Across Architecture, Training Data, and Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.24963/) (2025)
- [Beyond Scaling Laws: Understanding Transformer Performance with Associative Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.08707/) (2024)
- [Are formal and functional linguistic mechanisms dissociated in language models?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11302/) (2025)
- [The Factuality of Large Language Models in the Legal Domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.11798/) (2024)
- [Detecting Hallucination and Coverage Errors in Retrieval Augmented Generation for Controversial Topics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.08904/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Transformer language models have received widespread public attention, yet their generated text is often surprising even to NLP researchers. In this survey, we discuss over 250 recent studies of English language model behavior before task-specific fine-tuning. Language models possess basic capabilities in syntax, semantics, pragmatics, world knowledge, and reasoning, but these capabilities are sensitive to specific inputs and surface features. Despite dramatic increases in generated text quality as models scale to hundreds of billions of parameters, the models are still prone to unfactual responses, commonsense errors, memorized text, and social biases. Many of these weaknesses can be framed as over-generalizations or under-generalizations of learned patterns in text. We synthesize recent results to highlight what is currently known about large language model capabilities, thus providing a resource for applied work and for research in adjacent fields that use language models.