Gaganpreet Jhajj

Yinhan Lu, Gaganpreet Jhajj, Chen Zhang et al.

In-context learning (ICL) allows large language models (LLMs) to adapt to new tasks from a few examples, making it promising for languages underrepresented in pre-training. Recent work on many-shot ICL suggests that modern LLMs can further benefit from larger ICL examples enabled by their long context windows. However, such gains depend on careful example selection, and the inference cost can be prohibitive for low-resource language communities. In this paper, we present an empirical study of many-shot ICL for machine translation from English into ten truly low-resource languages recently added to FLORES+. We analyze the effects of retrieving more informative examples, using out-of-domain data, and ordering examples by length. Our findings show that many-shot ICL becomes more effective as the number of examples increases. More importantly, we show that BM25-based retrieval substantially improves data efficiency: 50 retrieved examples roughly match 250 many-shot examples, while 250 retrieved examples perform similarly to 1,000 many-shot examples.

Gaganpreet Jhajj, Fuhua Lin

In this work, we propose that reasoning in knowledge graph (KG) networks can be guided by surprise minimization. Entities that are close in graph distance will have lower surprise than those farther apart. This connects the Free Energy Principle (FEP) from neuroscience to KG systems, where the KG serves as the agent's generative model. We formalize surprise using the shortest-path distance in directed graphs and provide a framework for KG-based agents. Graph distance appears in graph neural networks as message passing depth and in model-based reinforcement learning as world model trajectories. This work-in-progress study explores whether distance-based surprise can extend recent work showing that syntax minimizes surprise and free energy via tree structures.

Gaganpreet Jhajj, Fuhua Lin

Knowledge graphs (KGs) require continual updates as new information emerges, but neural embedding models suffer from catastrophic forgetting when learning new tasks sequentially. We evaluate Elastic Weight Consolidation (EWC), a regularization-based continual learning method, on KG link prediction using TransE embeddings on FB15k-237. Across multiple experiments with five random seeds, we find that EWC reduces catastrophic forgetting from 12.62% to 6.85%, a 45.7% reduction compared to naive sequential training. We observe that the task partitioning strategy affects the magnitude of forgetting: relation-based partitioning (grouping triples by relation type) exhibits 9.8 percentage points higher forgetting than randomly partitioned tasks (12.62% vs 2.81%), suggesting that task construction influences evaluation outcomes. While focused on a single embedding model and dataset, our results demonstrate that EWC effectively mitigates catastrophic forgetting in KG continual learning and highlight the importance of evaluation protocol design.