Related papers: Meaning without reference in large language models

The emergent few-shot reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) have excited the natural language and machine learning community over recent years. Despite of numerous successful applications, the underlying mechanism of such…

There is considerable confusion about the role of Large Language Models (LLMs) in planning and reasoning tasks. On one side are over-optimistic claims that LLMs can indeed do these tasks with just the right prompting or self-verification…

Advances in the general capabilities of large language models (LLMs) have led to their use for information retrieval, and as components in automated decision systems. A faithful representation of probabilistic reasoning in these models may…

While large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong capability in structured prediction tasks such as semantic parsing, few amounts of research have explored the underlying mechanisms of their success. Our work studies different…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are capable of displaying a wide range of abilities that are not directly connected with the task for which they are trained: predicting the next words of human-written texts. In this article, I review recent…

Large language models are not detailed models of human linguistic processing. They are, however, extremely successful at their primary task: providing a model for language. For this reason and because there are no animal models for…

Analogical reasoning -- the capacity to identify and map structural relationships between different domains -- is fundamental to human cognition and learning. Recent studies have shown that large language models (LLMs) can sometimes match…

Current Large Language Models (LLMs) are unparalleled in their ability to generate grammatically correct, fluent text. LLMs are appearing rapidly, and debates on LLM capacities have taken off, but reflection is lagging behind. Thus, in this…

Subjective language understanding refers to a broad set of natural language processing tasks where the goal is to interpret or generate content that conveys personal feelings, opinions, or figurative meanings rather than objective facts.…

Driven by vast and diverse textual data, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance across numerous natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Yet, a critical question persists: does their generalization arise from…

With the advent of large language models (LLMs), the trend in NLP has been to train LLMs on vast amounts of data to solve diverse language understanding and generation tasks. The list of LLM successes is long and varied. Nevertheless,…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are known for their remarkable ability to generate synthesized 'knowledge', such as text documents, music, images, etc. However, there is a huge gap between LLM's and human capabilities for understanding…

The last decade has seen huge progress in the development of advanced machine learning models; however, those models are powerless unless human users can interpret them. Here we show how the mind's construction of concepts and meaning can…

In this paper, we address the concept of "alignment" in large language models (LLMs) through the lens of post-structuralist socio-political theory, specifically examining its parallels to empty signifiers. To establish a shared vocabulary…

Machines have achieved a broad and growing set of linguistic competencies, thanks to recent progress in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Psychologists have shown increasing interest in such models, comparing their output to psychological…

Abstract concepts - justice, theory, availability - have no single perceivable referent; in the human brain, their meaning emerges from a web of experiences, affect, and social context. Do large language models (LLMs) ground abstract…

Large language models (LLMs) sometimes appear to exhibit emotional reactions. We investigate why this is the case in Claude Sonnet 4.5 and explore implications for alignment-relevant behavior. We find internal representations of emotion…

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable performances across a wide range of tasks. However, the mechanisms by which these models encode tasks of varying complexities remain poorly understood. In this paper, we explore the…

How human cognitive abilities are formed has long captivated researchers. However, a significant challenge lies in developing meaningful methods to measure these complex processes. With the advent of large language models (LLMs), which now…

Large Language Models have shown tremendous performance on a large variety of natural language processing tasks, ranging from text comprehension to common sense reasoning. However, the mechanisms responsible for this success remain opaque,…