Position: Let's Develop Data Probes to Fundamentally Understand How Data Affects LLM Performance

In three linesPosition paper advocating for 'data probes'—synthetic sequences from random processes—to systematically understand how data characteristics affect LLM performance across training, tuning, alignment, and in-context learning. Uses theoretical concepts like typical sets to move beyond compute-intensive empirical heuristics.

Summary generated by Claude — human-verified