Looks like the findings are specifically about out-of-context learning, i.e. fine-tuning on facts like “Tom Cruise’s mother was Mary Lee Pfeiffer” is not enough to be able to answer a questions like “Who are the children of Mary Lee Pfeiffer?”, without any prompt engineering/tuning.

However, if you have in the context something like “Who was Tom Cruise’s mother?”, then the LLM has no problem answering correctly “Who are the children of Mary Lee Pfeiffer?”, listing all the children, including Tom Cruise.

Note that it would be confusing even to a human to ask “Who is the son of Mary Lee Pfeiffer?”, which is what they test on, since the lady had more than one son. That was the point of my comment, it’s just a misleading question.

But that’s not the issue in general that the researchers have unearthed, as I assumed based on the “A is B” summary, so yeah, it’s just a poor choice of wording.