Related papers: Language Model Probabilities are Not Calibrated in…
Language models (LMs) are increasingly used as simulacra for people, yet their ability to match the distribution of views of a specific demographic group and be \textit{distributionally aligned} remains uncertain. This notion of…
Despite being trained specifically to follow user instructions, today's instructiontuned language models perform poorly when instructed to produce random outputs. For example, when prompted to pick a number uniformly between one and ten…
Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate partial forecasting competence across social, political, and economic events. Yet, their predictive ability varies sharply with domain structure and prompt framing. We investigate how forecasting…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across various applications, fundamentally reshaping the landscape of natural language processing (NLP) research. However, recent evaluation frameworks often rely on the…
The relationship between the quality of a string, as judged by a human reader, and its probability, $p(\boldsymbol{y})$ under a language model undergirds the development of better language models. For example, many popular algorithms for…
As one of the most exciting features of large language models (LLMs), in-context learning is a mixed blessing. While it allows users to fast-prototype a task solver with only a few training examples, the performance is generally sensitive…
Democratic opinion-forming may be manipulated if newspapers' alignment to political or economical orientation is ambiguous. Various methods have been developed to better understand newspapers' positioning. Recently, the advent of Large…
GPT-3 can perform numerous tasks when provided a natural language prompt that contains a few training examples. We show that this type of few-shot learning can be unstable: the choice of prompt format, training examples, and even the order…
Large language models (LLMs) have been found to produce hallucinations when the question exceeds their internal knowledge boundaries. A reliable model should have a clear perception of its knowledge boundaries, providing correct answers…
In many applications of natural language processing (NLP) it is necessary to determine the likelihood of a given word combination. For example, a speech recognizer may need to determine which of the two word combinations ``eat a peach'' and…
We posit that large language models (LLMs) should be capable of expressing their intrinsic uncertainty in natural language. For example, if the LLM is equally likely to output two contradicting answers to the same question, then its…
The advent of pre-trained language models (PLMs) has enabled significant performance gains in the field of natural language processing. However, recent studies have found PLMs to suffer from miscalibration, indicating a lack of accuracy in…
Learning to predict masked tokens in a sequence has been shown to be a helpful pretraining objective for powerful language models such as PaLM2. After training, such masked language models (MLMs) can provide distributions of tokens in the…
We show that a GPT-3 model can learn to express uncertainty about its own answers in natural language -- without use of model logits. When given a question, the model generates both an answer and a level of confidence (e.g. "90% confidence"…
The open-ended nature of language generation makes the evaluation of autoregressive large language models (LLMs) challenging. One common evaluation approach uses multiple-choice questions (MCQ) to limit the response space. The model is then…
Language models are increasingly used in settings where outputs must satisfy user-specified randomness constraints, yet their generation probabilities are often poorly calibrated to those targets. We study whether this capability can be…
Language models (LMs) have been argued to overlap substantially with human beings in grammaticality judgment tasks. But when humans systematically make errors in language processing, should we expect LMs to behave like cognitive models of…
Unlocking the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) in data classification represents a promising frontier in natural language processing. In this work, we evaluate the performance of different LLMs in comparison with state-of-the-art…
Distributional semantics is the linguistic theory that a word's meaning can be derived from its distribution in natural language (i.e., its use). Language models are commonly viewed as an implementation of distributional semantics, as they…
In this paper, we initiate our discussion by demonstrating how Large Language Models (LLMs), when tasked with responding to queries, display a more even probability distribution in their answers if they are more adept, as opposed to their…