The authors test three prompt formulations on Llama-3.1: one that simply asks to continue a digit sequence, one that adds 'the sequence comes from a Markov process', and one that further specifies 'it only depends on the last state'. For the 70B model, adding these Markovian descriptions yields a significant reduction in KL divergence compared to the bare prompt, indicating the model can parse and incorporate natural-language instructions about the generative process into its sequence modeling.
Evidence
correlational
Caveat
The effect is reported only for the 70B model; the paper does not state whether the same improvement holds for 8B or 405B. No specific KL values are printed in the text.