Related papers: Cognitive Science in the era of Artificial Intelli…
There is growing excitement about the potential of Language Models (LMs) to accelerate scientific discovery. Falsifying hypotheses is key to scientific progress, as it allows claims to be iteratively refined over time. This process requires…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across various natural language tasks, marking significant strides towards general artificial intelligence. While general artificial intelligence is leveraged by…
The iterated learning model simulates the transmission of language from generation to generation in order to explore how the constraints imposed by language transmission facilitate the emergence of language structure. Despite each modelled…
Transformer-based large language models are rapidly advancing in the field of machine learning research, with applications spanning natural language, biology, chemistry, and computer programming. Extreme scaling and reinforcement learning…
Human language acquisition is an efficient, supervised, and continual process. In this work, we took inspiration from how human babies acquire their first language, and developed a computational process for word acquisition through…
Recent studies suggest that very small language models (SLMs) can generate surprisingly coherent text when trained on simplified, child-directed corpora such as TinyStories. These findings have been interpreted as evidence that readability…
Scientific information expresses human understanding of nature. This knowledge is largely disseminated in different forms of text, including scientific papers, news articles, and discourse among people on social media. While important for…
Referential games offer a grounded learning environment for neural agents which accounts for the fact that language is functionally used to communicate. However, they do not take into account a second constraint considered to be fundamental…
We describe our team's contribution to the STRICT-SMALL track of the BabyLM Challenge. The challenge requires training a language model from scratch using only a relatively small training dataset of ten million words. We experiment with…
Pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown success in a diverse set of language inference and understanding tasks. The pre-training stage of LLMs looks at a large corpus of raw textual data. The BabyLM shared task compares LLM…
An increasing number of people in the world today speak a mixed-language as a result of being multilingual. However, building a speech recognition system for code-switching remains difficult due to the availability of limited resources and…
Developmental machine learning studies how artificial agents can model the way children learn open-ended repertoires of skills. Such agents need to create and represent goals, select which ones to pursue and learn to achieve them. Recent…
For the complex human brain that enables us to communicate in natural language, we gathered good understandings of principles underlying language acquisition and processing, knowledge about socio-cultural conditions, and insights about…
Reverse thinking plays a crucial role in human reasoning. Humans can reason not only from a problem to a solution but also in reverse, i.e., start from the solution and reason towards the problem. This often enhances overall reasoning…
Within months of birth, children develop meaningful expectations about the world around them. How much of this early knowledge can be explained through generic learning mechanisms applied to sensory data, and how much of it requires more…
Research in developmental psychology consistently shows that children explore the world thoroughly and efficiently and that this exploration allows them to learn. In turn, this early learning supports more robust generalization and…
Human memory is fleeting. As words are processed, the exact wordforms that make up incoming sentences are rapidly lost. Cognitive scientists have long believed that this limitation of memory may, paradoxically, help in learning language -…
Language is crucial for human intelligence, but what exactly is its role? We take language to be a part of a system for understanding and communicating about situations. The human ability to understand and communicate about situations…
Generative AI systems have entered everyday academic, professional, and personal life with remarkable speed, yet most users encounter them as mysterious artifacts rather than intelligible systems. This chapter discusses large language…
Social learning plays an important role in the development of human intelligence. As children, we imitate our parents' speech patterns until we are able to produce sounds; we learn from them praising us and scolding us; and as adults, we…