Related papers: MetaOthello: A Controlled Study of Multiple World …

Foundation models exhibit significant capabilities in decision-making and logical deductions. Nonetheless, a continuing discourse persists regarding their genuine understanding of the world as opposed to mere stochastic mimicry. This paper…

Language models show a surprising range of capabilities, but the source of their apparent competence is unclear. Do these networks just memorize a collection of surface statistics, or do they rely on internal representations of the process…

Language models are often said to face a symbol grounding problem. While some have argued the problem can be solved without resort to other modalities, many have speculated that grounded learning is more efficient. We explore this question…

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at tasks like language processing, strategy games, and reasoning but struggle to build generalizable internal representations essential for adaptive decision-making in agents. For agents to effectively…

OthelloGPT, a transformer trained to predict valid moves in Othello, provides an ideal testbed for interpretability research. The model is complex enough to exhibit rich computational patterns, yet grounded in rule-based game logic that…

Li et al. (2023) used the Othello board game as a test case for the ability of GPT-2 to induce world models, and were followed up by Nanda et al. (2023b). We briefly discuss the original experiments, expanding them to include more language…

Do transformers, when trained on sequential reasoning traces, build internal models of the underlying task? And if so, does the structure of those internal representations mirror the structure of the domain? We train an 8-layer transformer…

How do sequence models represent their decision-making process? Prior work suggests that Othello-playing neural network learned nonlinear models of the board state (Li et al., 2023). In this work, we provide evidence of a closely related…

Language models like OpenAI's Generative Pre-Trained Transformers (GPT-2/3) capture the long-term correlations needed to generate text in a variety of domains (such as language translators) and recently in gameplay (chess, Go, and…

Language models have shown unprecedented capabilities, sparking debate over the source of their performance. Is it merely the outcome of learning syntactic patterns and surface level statistics, or do they extract semantics and a world…

Language models trained on diverse datasets unlock generalization by in-context learning. Reinforcement Learning (RL) policies can achieve a similar effect by meta-learning within the memory of a sequence model. However, meta-RL research…

Are generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) models, trained only to predict the next token, implicitly learning a world model from which sequences are generated one token at a time? We address this question by deriving a causal…

Many pretrained multilingual models exhibit cross-lingual transfer ability, which is often attributed to a learned language-neutral representation during pretraining. However, it remains unclear what factors contribute to the learning of a…

Modern large language models (LLMs) excel at tasks that require storing and retrieving knowledge, such as factual recall and question answering. Transformers are central to this capability because they can encode information during training…

Transformers pretrained via next token prediction learn to factor their world into parts, representing these factors in orthogonal subspaces of the residual stream. We formalize two representational hypotheses: (1) a representation in the…

Achieving superhuman playing level by AlphaGo corroborated the capabilities of convolutional neural architectures (CNNs) for capturing complex spatial patterns. This result was to a great extent due to several analogies between Go board…

Federated learning is a setting where agents, each with access to their own data source, combine models from local data to create a global model. If agents are drawing their data from different distributions, though, federated learning…

Federated learning is an emerging research paradigm enabling collaborative training of machine learning models among different organizations while keeping data private at each institution. Despite recent progress, there remain fundamental…

Recent studies have highlighted the limitations of large language models in mathematical reasoning, particularly their inability to capture the underlying logic. Inspired by meta-learning, we propose that models should acquire not only…

The growth and diversity of machine learning applications motivate a rethinking of learning with mobile and edge devices. How can we address diverse client goals and learn with scarce heterogeneous data? While federated learning aims to…