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Probabilistic programming languages rely fundamentally on some notion of sampling, and this is doubly true for probabilistic programming languages which perform Bayesian inference using Monte Carlo techniques. Verifying samplers - proving…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2023-04-27 Fredrik Dahlqvist , Alexandra Silva , William Smith

With the rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) for handling complex language tasks, an increasing number of studies are employing LLMs as agents to emulate the sequential decision-making processes of humans often represented as…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-19 Jia Gu , Liang Pang , Huawei Shen , Xueqi Cheng

Within psychology, neuroscience and artificial intelligence, there has been increasing interest in the proposal that the brain builds probabilistic models of sensory and linguistic input: that is, to infer a probabilistic model from a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-08-08 Paul M. B. Vitanyi , Nick Chater

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly utilized in autonomous decision-making, where they sample options from vast action spaces. However, the heuristics that guide this sampling process remain under explored. We study this sampling…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-11 Sarath Sivaprasad , Pramod Kaushik , Sahar Abdelnabi , Mario Fritz

An increasing body of evidence suggests that the trial-to-trial variability of spiking activity in the brain is not mere noise, but rather the reflection of a sampling-based encoding scheme for probabilistic computing. Since the precise…

Recent advancements in deep generative modeling make it possible to learn prior distributions from complex data that subsequently can be used for Bayesian inference. However, we find that distributions learned by deep generative models for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-04 Maurice Frank , Maximilian Ilse

Reasoning is key to many decision making processes. It requires consolidating a set of rule-like premises that are often associated with degrees of uncertainty and observations to draw conclusions. In this work, we address both the case…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-15 Timo Pierre Schrader , Lukas Lange , Simon Razniewski , Annemarie Friedrich

Do language models make decisions under uncertainty like humans do, and what role does chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning play in the underlying decision process? We introduce an active probabilistic reasoning task that cleanly separates…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Gonçalo Guiomar , Elia Torre , Pehuen Moure , Victoria Shavina , Mario Giulianelli , Shih-Chii Liu , Valerio Mante

Large language models (LLMs) have been proposed as alternatives to human experts for estimating unknown quantities with associated uncertainty, a process known as Bayesian elicitation. We test this by asking eleven LLMs to estimate…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-03 Luka Hobor , Mario Brcic , Mihael Kovac , Kristijan Poje

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated their capabilities across various tasks, from language translation to complex reasoning. Understanding and predicting human behavior and biases are crucial for artificial intelligence (AI)…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-08-06 Thuy Ngoc Nguyen , Kasturi Jamale , Cleotilde Gonzalez

Recent advances in AI have been significantly driven by the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) to solve complex problems in ways that resemble human thinking. However, there is an ongoing debate about the extent to which LLMs are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-16 Javier González , Aditya V. Nori

Language models (LM) are capable of remarkably complex linguistic tasks; however, numerical reasoning is an area in which they frequently struggle. An important but rarely evaluated form of reasoning is understanding probability…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-01 Akshay Paruchuri , Jake Garrison , Shun Liao , John Hernandez , Jacob Sunshine , Tim Althoff , Xin Liu , Daniel McDuff

In this work, we evaluate the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) in building Bayesian Networks (BNs) by approximating domain expert priors. LLMs have demonstrated potential as factual knowledge bases; however, their capability to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-12 Aliakbar Nafar , Kristen Brent Venable , Zijun Cui , Parisa Kordjamshidi

As large language models (LLMs) transition from chat interfaces to integral components of stochastic pipelines and systems approaching general intelligence, the ability to faithfully sample from specified probability distributions has…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-27 Minda Zhao , Yilun Du , Mengyu Wang

We propose a hybrid approach to machine Theory of Mind (ToM) that uses large language models (LLMs) as a mechanism for generating hypotheses and likelihood functions with a Bayesian inverse planning model that computes posterior…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Rebekah A. Gelpí , Eric Xue , William A. Cunningham

The ability to combine linguistic guidance from others with direct experience is central to human development, enabling safe and rapid learning in new environments. How do people integrate these two sources of knowledge, and how might AI…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-19 Cédric Colas , Tracey Mills , Ben Prystawski , Michael Henry Tessler , Noah Goodman , Jacob Andreas , Joshua Tenenbaum

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-21 Zhang Enyan , Zewei Wang , Michael A. Lepori , Ellie Pavlick , Helena Aparicio

The impressive performance of language models is undeniable. However, the presence of biases based on gender, race, socio-economic status, physical appearance, and sexual orientation makes the deployment of language models challenging. This…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-13 Swati Rajwal , Shivank Garg , Reem Abdel-Salam , Abdelrahman Zayed

We examine whether large language models (LLMs) can predict biased decision-making in conversational settings, and whether their predictions capture not only human cognitive biases but also how those effects change under cognitive load. In…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Stephen Pilli , Vivek Nallur

Large language models (LLMs) sometimes fail to respond appropriately to deterministic tasks -- such as counting or forming acronyms -- because the implicit prior distribution they have learned over sequences of tokens influences their…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-18 Liyi Zhang , Veniamin Veselovsky , R. Thomas McCoy , Thomas L. Griffiths