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A fundamental characteristic common to both human vision and natural language is their compositional nature. Yet, despite the performance gains contributed by large vision and language pretraining, recent investigations find that most-if…
Large language models (LLMs) are very performant connectionist systems, but do they exhibit more compositionality? More importantly, is that part of why they perform so well? We present empirical analyses across four LLM families (12…
Humans can learn languages from remarkably little experience. Developing computational models that explain this ability has been a major challenge in cognitive science. Bayesian models that build in strong inductive biases - factors that…
To process novel sentences, language models (LMs) must generalize compositionally -- combine familiar elements in new ways. What aspects of a model's structure promote compositional generalization? Focusing on transformers, we test the…
Humans' distinctive role in the world can largely be attributed to our capacity for iterated learning, a process by which knowledge is expanded and refined over generations. A range of theories seek to explain why humans are so adept at…
We investigate the ability of language models to perform compositional reasoning tasks where the overall solution depends on correctly composing the answers to sub-problems. We measure how often models can correctly answer all sub-problems…
Neurons and networks in the cerebral cortex must operate reliably despite multiple sources of noise. To evaluate the impact of both input and output noise, we determine the robustness of single-neuron stimulus selective responses, as well…
Natural language exhibits various universal properties. But why do these universals exist? One explanation is that they arise from functional pressures to achieve efficient communication, a view which attributes cross-linguistic properties…
Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at providing information acquired during pretraining on large-scale corpora and following instructions through user prompts. This study investigates whether the quality of LLM responses varies depending on…
Neural networks have revolutionized language modeling and excelled in various downstream tasks. However, the extent to which these models achieve compositional generalization comparable to human cognitive abilities remains a topic of…
By the age of two, children tend to assume that new word categories are based on objects' shape, rather than their color or texture; this assumption is called the shape bias. They are thought to learn this bias by observing that their…
Human language defines the most complex outcomes of evolution. The emergence of such an elaborated form of communication allowed humans to create extremely structured societies and manage symbols at different levels including, among others,…
Compositional generalization (the ability to respond correctly to novel combinations of familiar components) is thought to be a cornerstone of intelligent behavior. Compositionally structured (e.g. disentangled) representations support this…
Understanding how biological constraints shape neural computation is a central goal of computational neuroscience. Spatially embedded recurrent neural networks provide a promising avenue to study how modelled constraints shape the combined…
Reliably transmitting messages despite information loss due to a noisy channel is a core problem of information theory. One of the most important aspects of real world communication, e.g. via wifi, is that it may happen at varying levels of…
n this paper, we attempt to explain the emergence of the linguistic diversity that exists across the consonant inventories of some of the major language families of the world through a complex network based growth model. There is only a…
Automatic generation of sequences has been a highly explored field in the last years. In particular, natural language processing and automatic music composition have gained importance due to the recent advances in machine learning and…
In order to communicate, humans flatten a complex representation of ideas and their attributes into a single word or a sentence. We investigate the impact of representation learning in artificial agents by developing graph referential…
When trained on language data, do transformers learn some arbitrary computation that utilizes the full capacity of the architecture or do they learn a simpler, tree-like computation, hypothesized to underlie compositional meaning systems…
Contextual word representations derived from pre-trained bidirectional language models (biLMs) have recently been shown to provide significant improvements to the state of the art for a wide range of NLP tasks. However, many questions…