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Large Language Models (LLMs) are often misleadingly recognized as having a personality or a set of values. We argue that an LLM can be seen as a superposition of perspectives with different values and personality traits. LLMs exhibit…

How can pretrained language models (PLMs) learn factual knowledge from the training set? We investigate the two most important mechanisms: reasoning and memorization. Prior work has attempted to quantify the number of facts PLMs learn, but…

Large language models (LLMs) can store a vast amount of world knowledge, often extractable via question-answering (e.g., "What is Abraham Lincoln's birthday?"). However, do they answer such questions based on exposure to similar questions…

Previous literatures show that pre-trained masked language models (MLMs) such as BERT can achieve competitive factual knowledge extraction performance on some datasets, indicating that MLMs can potentially be a reliable knowledge source. In…

In everyday conversations, humans can take on different roles and adapt their vocabulary to their chosen roles. We explore whether LLMs can take on, that is impersonate, different roles when they generate text in-context. We ask LLMs to…

In the quest for super-human performance, Large Language Models (LLMs) have traditionally been tethered to human-annotated datasets and predefined training objectives-a process that is both labor-intensive and inherently limited. This paper…

Building on research arguing for the possibility of conceptual and categorical knowledge acquisition through statistics contained in language, we evaluate predictive language models (LMs) -- informed solely by textual input -- on a…

Large language models (LMs) such as GPT-3 have the surprising ability to do in-context learning, where the model learns to do a downstream task simply by conditioning on a prompt consisting of input-output examples. The LM learns from these…

Understanding how Transformer-based Language Models (LMs) learn and recall information is a key goal of the deep learning community. Recent interpretability methods project weights and hidden states obtained from the forward pass to the…

This study explores an LLM's ability to learn new languages using explanations found in a grammar book, a process we term "explicit learning." To rigorously assess this ability, we design controlled translation experiments between English…

Large language models (LLMs) show increasingly advanced emergent capabilities and are being incorporated across various societal domains. Understanding their behavior and reasoning abilities therefore holds significant importance. We argue…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance on various tasks, yet their ability to extract and internalize deeper insights from domain-specific datasets remains underexplored. In this study, we investigate how…

In day-to-day communication, people often approximate the truth - for example, rounding the time or omitting details - in order to be maximally helpful to the listener. How do large language models (LLMs) handle such nuanced trade-offs? To…

Recently, techniques such as explicit structured reasoning have demonstrated strong test-time scaling behavior by enforcing a separation between the model's internal "thinking" process and the final response. A key factor influencing answer…

The learning trajectories of linguistic phenomena in humans provide insight into linguistic representation, beyond what can be gleaned from inspecting the behavior of an adult speaker. To apply a similar approach to analyze neural language…

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at text summarization, a task that requires models to select content based on its importance. However, the exact notion of salience that LLMs have internalized remains unclear. To bridge this gap, we…

Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the field of natural language processing, enabling remarkable progress in various tasks. Different from objective tasks such as commonsense reasoning and arithmetic question-answering, the…

Theory of Mind (ToM)-the ability to reason about the mental states of oneself and others-is a cornerstone of human social intelligence. As Large Language Models (LLMs) become increasingly integrated into daily life, understanding their…

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive capabilities in various applications, yet LLMs face challenges such as limited context windows and difficulties in generalization. In this paper, we introduce a…

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as conversational partners for learning, yet the interactional dynamics supporting users' learning and engagement are understudied. We analyze the linguistic and interactional features from…