Related papers: Bears, all bears, and some bears. Language Constra…

Large language models (LLMs) are trained to imitate humans to explain human decisions. However, do LLMs explain themselves? Can they help humans build mental models of how LLMs process different inputs? To answer these questions, we propose…

Recent breakthroughs in AI have shown the remarkable power of deep learning and deep reinforcement learning. These developments, however, have been tied to specific tasks, and progress in out-of-distribution generalization has been limited.…

Recent cognitive modeling studies have reported that larger language models (LMs) exhibit a poorer fit to human reading behavior (Oh and Schuler, 2023b; Shain et al., 2024; Kuribayashi et al., 2024), leading to claims of their cognitive…

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…

Causal learning is the cognitive process of developing the capability of making causal inferences based on available information, often guided by normative principles. This process is prone to errors and biases, such as the illusion of…

Despite the success of language models using neural networks, it remains unclear to what extent neural models have the generalization ability to perform inferences. In this paper, we introduce a method for evaluating whether neural models…

Large-scale pretrained language models are the major driving force behind recent improvements in performance on the Winograd Schema Challenge, a widely employed test of common sense reasoning ability. We show, however, with a new diagnostic…

Inspired by evidence that pretrained language models (LMs) encode commonsense knowledge, recent work has applied LMs to automatically populate commonsense knowledge graphs (CKGs). However, there is a lack of understanding on their…

Computer vision often treats human perception as homogeneous: an implicit assumption that visual stimuli are perceived similarly by everyone. This assumption is reflected in the way researchers collect datasets and train vision models. By…

Languages encode distinct abstractions and inductive priors, yet most large language models (LLMs) overlook this diversity by reasoning in a single dominant language. In this work, we introduce x1, a family of reasoning models that can…

Children learning their first language face multiple problems of induction: how to learn the meanings of words, and how to build meaningful phrases from those words according to syntactic rules. We consider how children might solve these…

There is growing recognition that many NLP tasks lack a single ground truth, as human judgments reflect diverse perspectives. To capture this variation, models have been developed to predict full annotation distributions rather than…

Recent work has shown that large pretrained Language Models (LMs) can not only perform remarkably well on a range of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks but also start improving on reasoning tasks such as arithmetic induction, symbolic…

_Uncertainty expressions_ such as "probably" or "highly unlikely" are pervasive in human language. While prior work has established that there is population-level agreement in terms of how humans quantitatively interpret these expressions,…

Earlier research has suggested that human infants might use statistical dependencies between speech and non-linguistic multimodal input to bootstrap their language learning before they know how to segment words from running speech. However,…

Do machines and humans process language in similar ways? Recent research has hinted at the affirmative, showing that human neural activity can be effectively predicted using the internal representations of language models (LMs). Although…

Generics express generalizations about the world (e.g., birds can fly) that are not universally true (e.g., newborn birds and penguins cannot fly). Commonsense knowledge bases, used extensively in NLP, encode some generic knowledge but…

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as agents that interact with users and with the world. To do so successfully, LLMs must construct representations of the world and form probabilistic beliefs about them. To provide…

There has been a lot of interest in understanding what information is captured by hidden representations of language models (LMs). Typically, interpretation methods i) do not guarantee that the model actually uses the encoded information,…

Humans refer to objects in their environments all the time, especially in dialogue with other people. We explore generating and comprehending natural language referring expressions for objects in images. In particular, we focus on…