Related papers: The Curious Case of Control
While fine-tuned language models perform well on many tasks, they were also shown to rely on superficial surface features such as lexical overlap. Excessive utilization of such heuristics can lead to failure on challenging inputs. We…
This chapter critically examines the potential contributions of modern language models to theoretical linguistics. Despite their focus on engineering goals, these models' ability to acquire sophisticated linguistic knowledge from mere…
Recent papers show LLMs achieve near-random accuracy in causal relation classification, raising questions about whether such failures arise from limited pretraining exposure or deeper representational gaps. We investigate this under…
There is increasing focus on adapting predictive models into agent-like systems, most notably AI assistants based on language models. We outline two structural reasons for why these models can fail when turned into agents. First, we discuss…
How well do language models deal with quantification? In this study, we focus on 'few'-type quantifiers, as in 'few children like toys', which might pose a particular challenge for language models because the sentence components with out…
One way to personalize and steer generations from large language models (LLM) is to assign a persona: a role that describes how the user expects the LLM to behave (e.g., a helpful assistant, a teacher, a woman). This paper investigates how…
Individual's semantics have been used for guiding the learning process of Genetic Programming solving supervised learning problems. The semantics has been used to proposed novel genetic operators as well as different ways of performing…
The achievements of Large Language Models in Natural Language Processing, especially for high-resource languages, call for a better understanding of their characteristics from a cognitive perspective. Researchers have attempted to evaluate…
The deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) as tool-using agents causes their alignment training to manifest in new ways. Recent work finds that language models can use tools in ways that contradict the interests or explicit instructions…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to domains that require reasoning about other agents' behavior, such as negotiation, policy design, and market simulation, yet existing research has mostly evaluated their adherence to…
Steering vectors are a lightweight method to control language model behavior by adding a learned bias to the activations at inference time. Although steering demonstrates promising performance, recent work shows that it can be unreliable or…
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…
Neural language models learn, to varying degrees of accuracy, the grammatical properties of natural languages. In this work, we investigate whether there are systematic sources of variation in the language models' accuracy. Focusing on…
Understanding how linguistic structure emerges in language models is central to interpreting what these systems learn from data and how much supervision they truly require. In particular, semantic role understanding ("who did what to whom")…
Although large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in modeling text and generating human-like text, they may exhibit biases acquired from training data in doing so. Specifically, LLMs may be susceptible to a…
Some researchers claim that language acquisition is critically dependent on experiencing linguistic input in order of increasing complexity. We set out to test this hypothesis using a simple recurrent neural network (SRN) trained to predict…
Power differences shape human communication through well documented socio cognitive effects, including language coordination, pronoun usage, authority bias, and harmful compliance. We examine whether large language models (LLMs) exhibit…
We explore using latent natural language instructions as an expressive and compositional representation of complex actions for hierarchical decision making. Rather than directly selecting micro-actions, our agent first generates a latent…
Large language models are highly capable of answering difficult questions by retrieving, recombining, and attending to information in long contexts. For agentic tasks, an additional capability is required: the preservation of an exact state…
Causal learning is the cognitive process of developing the capability of making causal inferences based on available information, often guided by normative principles. This process is prone to errors and biases, such as the illusion of…