Related papers: Filling in the Mechanisms: How do LMs Learn Filler…

Humans develop their grammars by making structural generalizations from finite input. We ask how filler-gap dependencies, which share a structural generalization despite diverse surface forms, might arise from the input. We explicitly…

Language Models (LMs) have emerged as powerful sources of evidence for linguists seeking to develop theories of syntax. In this paper, we argue that causal interpretability methods, applied to LMs, can greatly enhance the value of such…

Children's acquisition of filler-gap dependencies has been argued by some to depend on innate grammatical knowledge, while others suggest that the distributional evidence available in child-directed speech suffices. Unfortunately, the…

Associative learning--forming links between co-occurring items--is fundamental to human cognition, reshaping internal representations in complex ways. Testing hypotheses on how representational changes occur in biological systems is…

Neural language models (LMs) are arguably less data-efficient than humans from a language acquisition perspective. One fundamental question is why this human-LM gap arises. This study explores the advantage of grounded language acquisition,…

Language Models (LMs) have achieved impressive performance on various linguistic tasks, but their relationship to human language processing in the brain remains unclear. This paper examines the gaps and overlaps between LMs and the brain at…

Languages are shaped by the inductive biases of their users. Using a classical referential game, we investigate how artificial languages evolve when optimised for inductive biases in humans and large language models (LLMs) via Human-Human,…

In the training data used by large language models (LLMs), the same latent concept is often presented in multiple distinct ways: the same facts appear in English and Swahili; many functions can be expressed in both Python and Haskell; we…

Humans constantly generate a diverse range of tasks guided by internal motivations. While generative agents powered by large language models (LLMs) aim to simulate this complex behavior, it remains uncertain whether they operate on similar…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are known to exhibit social, demographic, and gender biases, often as a consequence of the data on which they are trained. In this work, we adopt a mechanistic interpretability approach to analyze how such…

Human bilinguals often use similar brain regions to process multiple languages, depending on when they learned their second language and their proficiency. In large language models (LLMs), how are multiple languages learned and encoded? In…

This work develops a probabilistic child language acquisition model to learn a range of linguistic phenonmena, most notably long-range syntactic dependencies of the sort found in object wh-questions, among other constructions. The model is…

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…

As artificial intelligence (AI) systems, particularly large language models (LLMs), become increasingly integrated into decision-making processes, the ability to trust their outputs is crucial. To earn human trust, LLMs must be well…

Human languages have evolved to be structured through repeated language learning and use. These processes introduce biases that operate during language acquisition and shape linguistic systems toward communicative efficiency. In this paper,…

Finding and facilitating commonalities between the linguistic behaviors of large language models and humans could lead to major breakthroughs in our understanding of the acquisition, processing, and evolution of language. However, most…

Large language models (LLMs) are revolutionizing every aspect of society. They are increasingly used in problem-solving tasks to substitute human assessment and reasoning. LLMs are trained on what humans write and are thus exposed to human…

Large language models (LLMs) are demonstrably capable of cross-lingual transfer, but can produce inconsistent output when prompted with the same queries written in different languages. To understand how language models are able to…

Language models (LMs) have been used in cognitive modeling as well as engineering studies -- they compute information-theoretic complexity metrics that simulate humans' cognitive load during reading. This study highlights a limitation of…

Large Language Models (LLMs) represent a landmark achievement in Artificial Intelligence (AI), demonstrating unprecedented proficiency in procedural tasks such as text generation, code completion, and conversational coherence. These…