Related papers: Language models are better than humans at next-tok…
When we read, we make predictions about upcoming words; these predictions influence our reading behavior. The success of large language models (LLMs), which, like humans, make predictions about upcoming words, has motivated their use as…
Advances in deep learning systems have allowed large models to match or surpass human accuracy on a number of skills such as image classification, basic programming, and standardized test taking. As the performance of the most capable…
Language models (LMs) are statistical models trained to assign probability to human-generated text. As such, it is reasonable to question whether they approximate linguistic variability exhibited by humans well. This form of statistical…
Language models that are trained on the next-word prediction task have been shown to accurately model human behavior in word prediction and reading speed. In contrast with these findings, we present a scenario in which the performance of…
Large language models such as GPT and Llama are trained with a next-token prediction loss. In this work, we suggest that training language models to predict multiple future tokens at once results in higher sample efficiency. More…
Recent psycholinguistic studies have drawn conflicting conclusions about the relationship between the quality of a language model and the ability of its surprisal estimates to predict human reading times, which has been speculated to be due…
Language models are increasingly being deployed as user simulators, but their memory is far more reliable than that of real users. To measure this gap, we run a series of classic memory experiments from psychology on both humans and…
Rapid progress in machine learning for natural language processing has the potential to transform debates about how humans learn language. However, the learning environments and biases of current artificial learners and humans diverge in…
Large language models such as GPT and Llama are trained with a next-token prediction loss. In this work, we suggest that training language models to predict multiple future tokens at once results in higher sample efficiency. More…
Are the predictions of humans and language models affected by similar things? Research suggests that while comprehending language, humans make predictions about upcoming words, with more predictable words being processed more easily.…
Humans read texts at a varying pace, while machine learning models treat each token in the same way in terms of a computational process. Therefore, we ask, does it help to make models act more like humans? In this paper, we convert this…
Pretrained language models often do not perform tasks in ways that are in line with our preferences, e.g., generating offensive text or factually incorrect summaries. Recent work approaches the above issue by learning from a simple form of…
Human reading behavior is tuned to the statistics of natural language: the time it takes human subjects to read a word can be predicted from estimates of the word's probability in context. However, it remains an open question what…
In this work we compare the generative behavior at the next token prediction level in several language models by comparing them to human productions in the cloze task. We find that while large models trained for longer are typically better…
Large-scale pretrained language models are the major driving force behind recent improvements in performance on the Winograd Schema Challenge, a widely employed test of common sense reasoning ability. We show, however, with a new diagnostic…
Large language models are powerful systems that excel at many tasks, ranging from translation to mathematical reasoning. Yet, at the same time, these models often show unhuman-like characteristics. In the present paper, we address this gap…
A better understanding of the emergent computation and problem-solving capabilities of recent large language models is of paramount importance to further improve them and broaden their applicability. This work investigates how a language…
Modern language models predict the next token in the sequence by considering the past text through a powerful function such as attention. However, language models have no explicit mechanism that allows them to spend computation time for…
General-purpose language models have demonstrated impressive capabilities, performing on par with state-of-the-art approaches on a range of downstream natural language processing (NLP) tasks and benchmarks when inferring instructions from…
Recent work has shown that larger language models have better predictive power for eye movement and reading time data. While even the best models under-allocate probability mass to human responses, larger models assign higher-quality…