Related papers: Prompts have evil twins
We introduce and study artificial impressions--patterns in LLMs' internal representations of prompts that resemble human impressions and stereotypes based on language. We fit linear probes on generated prompts to predict impressions…
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.…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated great capabilities in natural language understanding and generation, largely attributed to the intricate alignment process using human feedback. While alignment has become an essential training…
Soft prompts have been popularized as a cheap and easy way to improve task-specific LLM performance beyond few-shot prompts. Despite their origin as an automated prompting method, however, soft prompts and other trainable prompts remain a…
Do language models (LMs) offer insights into human language learning? A common argument against this idea is that because their architecture and training paradigm are so vastly different from humans, LMs can learn arbitrary inputs as easily…
Modern language models (LMs) are not robust to out-of-distribution inputs. Machine generated (``optimized'') prompts can be used to modulate LM outputs and induce specific behaviors while appearing completely uninterpretable. In this work,…
According to Futrell and Mahowald [arXiv:2501.17047], both infants and language models (LMs) find attested languages easier to learn than impossible languages that have unnatural structures. We review the literature and show that LMs often…
Fine-tuning continuous prompts for target tasks has recently emerged as a compact alternative to full model fine-tuning. Motivated by these promising results, we investigate the feasibility of extracting a discrete (textual) interpretation…
Machine-learned language models have transformed everyday life: they steer us when we study, drive, manage money. They have the potential to transform our civilization. But they hallucinate. Their realities are virtual. This note provides a…
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…
A controversial test for Large Language Models concerns the ability to discern possible from impossible language. While some evidence attests to the models' sensitivity to what crosses the limits of grammatically impossible language, this…
System prompts that include detailed instructions to describe the task performed by the underlying LLM can easily transform foundation models into tools and services with minimal overhead. They are often considered intellectual property,…
Prompting is the primary method by which we study and control large language models. It is also one of the most powerful: nearly every major capability attributed to LLMs-few-shot learning, chain-of-thought, constitutional AI-was first…
Interaction with Large Language Models (LLMs) is primarily carried out via prompting. A prompt is a natural language instruction designed to elicit certain behaviour or output from a model. In theory, natural language prompts enable…
Homonyms are words with identical spelling but distinct meanings, which pose challenges for many generative models. When a homonym appears in a prompt, diffusion models may generate multiple senses of the word simultaneously, which is known…
Prompt sensitivity, referring to the phenomenon where paraphrasing (i.e., repeating something written or spoken using different words) leads to significant changes in large language model (LLM) performance, has been widely accepted as a…
The ever-growing size of the foundation language model has brought significant performance gains in various types of downstream tasks. With the existence of side-effects brought about by the large size of the foundation language model such…
We study whether automatically-induced prompts that effectively extract information from a language model can also be used, out-of-the-box, to probe other language models for the same information. After confirming that discrete prompts…
We argue that language models (LMs) have strong potential as investigative tools for probing the distinction between possible and impossible natural languages and thus uncovering the inductive biases that support human language learning. We…
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…