Related papers: Garden-Path Traversal in GPT-2
Surprisal theory posits that the processing difficulty of a word is determined by its predictability in context, offering a potential link between human sentence processing and next-word predictions from language models. While language…
Incremental models that process sentences one token at a time will sometimes encounter points where more than one interpretation is possible. Causal models are forced to output one interpretation and continue, whereas models that can revise…
Large Language Models such as GPTs (Generative Pre-trained Transformers) exhibit remarkable capabilities across a broad spectrum of applications. Nevertheless, due to their intrinsic complexity, these models present substantial challenges…
Whether intermediate reasoning is computationally useful or merely explanatory depends on whether chain-of-thought (CoT) tokens contain task-relevant information. We present a mechanistic causal analysis of CoT on GSM8K using activation…
The final MLP of GPT-2 Small exhibits a fully legible routing program -- 27 named neurons organized into a three-tier exception handler -- while the knowledge it routes remains entangled across ~3,040 residual neurons. We decompose all…
Transformers have revolutionized machine learning, yet their inner workings remain opaque to many. We present Transformer Explainer, an interactive visualization tool designed for non-experts to learn about Transformers through the GPT-2…
Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has significantly enhanced the reasoning abilities of large language models. However, recent studies have shown that models can still perform complex reasoning tasks even when the CoT is replaced with…
We train Transformer-based language models on ten foundational algorithmic tasks and observe pronounced phase transitions in their loss curves that deviate from established power-law scaling trends. Over large ranges of compute, the…
The goal of this paper is to explore how Transformer language models process semantic knowledge, especially regarding the plausibility of noun-verb relations. First, I demonstrate GPT2 exhibits a higher degree of similarity with humans in…
In Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), encoding information in a suboptimal or erroneous way can impact the quality of representations based on later elements in the sequence and subsequently lead to wrong predictions and a worse model…
This work presents a detailed linguistic analysis into why larger Transformer-based pre-trained language models with more parameters and lower perplexity nonetheless yield surprisal estimates that are less predictive of human reading times.…
Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) reach state-of-the-art results in a variety of Natural Language Processing tasks. However, understanding of their internal functioning is still insufficient and unsatisfactory.…
Although it is known that transformer language models (LMs) pass features from early layers to later layers, it is not well understood how this information is represented and routed by the model. We analyze a mechanism used in two LMs to…
Semantic sentence embedding models encode natural language sentences into vectors, such that closeness in embedding space indicates closeness in the semantics between the sentences. Bilingual data offers a useful signal for learning such…
Decoder-only transformers lead to a step-change in capability of large language models. However, opinions are mixed as to whether they are really planning or reasoning. A path to making progress in this direction is to study the model's…
Recent probing studies reveal that large language models exhibit linear subspaces that separate true from false statements, yet the mechanism behind their emergence is unclear. We introduce a transparent, one-layer transformer toy model…
Autoregressive transformer language models (LMs) possess strong syntactic abilities, often successfully handling phenomena from agreement to NPI licensing. However, the features they use to incrementally process language inputs are not well…
Neural network language models can serve as computational hypotheses about how humans process language. We compared the model-human consistency of diverse language models using a novel experimental approach: controversial sentence pairs.…
This is an experiential study of investigating a consistent method for deriving the correlation between sentence vector and semantic meaning of a sentence. We first used three state-of-the-art word/sentence embedding methods including…
We demonstrate a situation in which Large Language Models, trained to be helpful, harmless, and honest, can display misaligned behavior and strategically deceive their users about this behavior without being instructed to do so. Concretely,…