Related papers: How important is language for human-like intellige…
In this essay I will consider a sequence of questions. The first questions concern the biological function of intelligence in general, and cognitive prostheses of human intelligence in particular. These will lead into questions concerning…
Programming languages serve a dual purpose: to communicate programs to computers, and to communicate programs to humans. Indeed, it is this dual purpose that makes programming language design a constrained and challenging problem.…
Recent studies of the applications of conversational AI tools, such as chatbots powered by large language models, to complex real-world knowledge work have shown limitations related to reasoning and multi-step problem solving. Specifically,…
In AI-assisted decision-making, humans often passively review AI's suggestion and decide whether to accept or reject it as a whole. In such a paradigm, humans are found to rarely trigger analytical thinking and face difficulties in…
Output diversity is crucial for Large Language Models as it underpins pluralism and creativity. In this work, we reveal that controlling the language used during model thinking-the language of thought-provides a novel and structural source…
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…
Language, as an information medium created by advanced organisms, has always been a concern of neuroscience regarding how it is represented in the brain. Decoding linguistic representations in the evoked brain has shown groundbreaking…
Language is a powerful communicative and cognitive tool. It enables humans to express thoughts, share intentions, and reason about complex phenomena. Despite our fluency in using and understanding language, the question of how it arises and…
We survey a current, heated debate in the AI research community on whether large pre-trained language models can be said to "understand" language -- and the physical and social situations language encodes -- in any important sense. We…
When we speak, write or listen, we continuously make predictions based on our knowledge of a language's grammar. Remarkably, children acquire this grammatical knowledge within just a few years, enabling them to understand and generalise to…
Generative AI techniques have opened the path for new generations of machines in diverse domains. These machines have various capabilities for example, they can produce images, generate answers or stories, and write codes based on the…
Researchers are increasingly subjecting artificial intelligence systems to psychological testing. But to rigorously compare their cognitive capacities with humans and other animals, we must avoid both over- and under-stating our…
Trying to be effective (no matter who exactly and in what field) a person face the problem which inevitably destroys all our attempts to easily get to a desired goal. The problem is the existence of some insuperable barriers for our mind,…
LLMorphism is the biased belief that human cognition works like a large language model. I argue that the rise of conversational LLMs may make this bias increasingly psychologically available. When artificial systems produce human-like…
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…
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…
Concepts play a pivotal role in various human cognitive functions, including learning, reasoning and communication. However, there is very little work on endowing machines with the ability to form and reason with concepts. In particular,…
What role can the otherwise successful Large Language Models (LLMs) play in the understanding of human cognition, and in particular in terms of informing language acquisition debates? To contribute to this question, we first argue that…
Objects are a centerpiece of the mathematical realm and our interaction with and reasoning about it, just as they are of the physical one (if not more). And humans' mathematical reasoning must ultimately be grounded in our general…
This paper explores the advancements in making large language models (LLMs) more human-like. We focus on techniques that enhance natural language understanding, conversational coherence, and emotional intelligence in AI systems. The study…