Related papers: Emergent World Representations: Exploring a Sequen…

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…

State representation learning, or the ability to capture latent generative factors of an environment, is crucial for building intelligent agents that can perform a wide variety of tasks. Learning such representations without supervision…

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate an impressive capacity to recall a vast range of factual knowledge. However, understanding their underlying reasoning and internal mechanisms in exploiting this knowledge remains a key research area.…

Ambiguity is an intrinsic feature of natural language. Managing ambiguity is a key part of human language understanding, allowing us to anticipate misunderstanding as communicators and revise our interpretations as listeners. As language…

Intelligent agents such as robots are increasingly deployed in real-world, safety-critical settings. It is vital that these agents are able to explain the reasoning behind their decisions to human counterparts, however, their behavior is…

Researchers are using deep learning models to explore the emergence of language in various language games, where agents interact and develop an emergent language to solve tasks. We focus on the factors that determine the expressivity of…

Whether Large Language Models (LLMs) develop coherent internal world models remains a core debate. While conventional Next-Token Prediction (NTP) focuses on one-step-ahead supervision, Multi-Token Prediction (MTP) has shown promise in…

Representations are internal models of the environment that can provide guidance to a behaving agent, even in the absence of sensory information. It is not clear how representations are developed and whether or not they are necessary or…

Recurrent models for sequences have been recently successful at many tasks, especially for language modeling and machine translation. Nevertheless, it remains challenging to extract good representations from these models. For instance, even…

The standard recurrent neural network language model (RNNLM) generates sentences one word at a time and does not work from an explicit global sentence representation. In this work, we introduce and study an RNN-based variational autoencoder…

Large language models (LLMs) are demonstrably capable of cross-lingual transfer, but can produce inconsistent output when prompted with the same queries written in different languages. To understand how language models are able to…

Scaling up language models has been shown to predictably improve performance and sample efficiency on a wide range of downstream tasks. This paper instead discusses an unpredictable phenomenon that we refer to as emergent abilities of large…

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated emergent abilities across diverse tasks, raising the question of whether they acquire internal world models. In this work, we investigate whether LLMs implicitly encode linear spatial world…

Understanding a long document requires tracking how entities are introduced and evolve over time. We present a new type of language model, EntityNLM, that can explicitly model entities, dynamically update their representations, and…

Humans use language to refer to entities in the external world. Motivated by this, in recent years several models that incorporate a bias towards learning entity representations have been proposed. Such entity-centric models have shown…

Observable social traits determine how we interact in society and remain pervasive even in our globalized world. While a popular hypothesis states that they may help promote cooperation, the alternative explanation that they facilitate…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been reported to have strong performance on natural language processing tasks. However, performance metrics such as accuracy do not measure the quality of the model in terms of its ability to robustly…

We study a referential game (a type of signaling game) where two agents communicate with each other via a discrete bottleneck to achieve a common goal. In our referential game, the goal of the speaker is to compose a message or a symbolic…

How can agents learn internal models that veridically represent interactions with the real world is a largely open question. As machine learning is moving towards representations containing not just observational but also interventional…

A fundamental open challenge in modern LLM scaling is the lack of understanding around emergent capabilities. In particular, language model pretraining loss is known to be highly predictable as a function of compute. However, downstream…