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Related papers: Negation Neglect: When models fail to learn negati…

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We study how Large Language Models (LLMs) process negation mechanistically. First, we establish that even though open-weight models often provide wrong answers to questions involving negation, they do possess internal components that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-06 Zhejian Zhou , Tianyi Zhou , Robin Jia , Jonathan May

The study explores whether Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit negation-induced forgetting (NIF), a cognitive phenomenon observed in humans where negating incorrect attributes of an object or event leads to diminished recall of this object…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-27 Francesca Capuano , Ellen Boschert , Barbara Kaup

Although large language models (LLMs) have apparently acquired a certain level of grammatical knowledge and the ability to make generalizations, they fail to interpret negation, a crucial step in Natural Language Processing. We try to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-25 Iker García-Ferrero , Begoña Altuna , Javier Álvez , Itziar Gonzalez-Dios , German Rigau

Many practical vision-language applications require models that understand negation, e.g., when using natural language to retrieve images which contain certain objects but not others. Despite advancements in vision-language models (VLMs)…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-05-14 Kumail Alhamoud , Shaden Alshammari , Yonglong Tian , Guohao Li , Philip Torr , Yoon Kim , Marzyeh Ghassemi

Negation is a common linguistic feature that is crucial in many language understanding tasks, yet it remains a hard problem due to diversity in its expression in different types of text. Recent work has shown that state-of-the-art NLP…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-05-10 Thinh Hung Truong , Timothy Baldwin , Trevor Cohn , Karin Verspoor

Negation is a core construction in natural language. Despite being very successful on many tasks, state-of-the-art pre-trained language models often handle negation incorrectly. To improve language models in this regard, we propose to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-05-11 Arian Hosseini , Siva Reddy , Dzmitry Bahdanau , R Devon Hjelm , Alessandro Sordoni , Aaron Courville

Negation is a common linguistic skill that allows human to express what we do NOT want. Naturally, one might expect video retrieval to support natural-language queries with negation, e.g., finding shots of kids sitting on the floor and not…

Multimedia · Computer Science 2022-07-14 Ziyue Wang , Aozhu Chen , Fan Hu , Xirong Li

When a user tells an AI system that someone "should not" take an action, the system ought to treat this as a prohibition. Yet many large language models do the opposite: they interpret negated instructions as affirmations. We audited 16…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Katherine Elkins , Jon Chun

Large language models underestimate the impact of negations on how much they change the meaning of a sentence. Therefore, learned evaluation metrics based on these models are insensitive to negations. In this paper, we propose NegBLEURT, a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-07-27 Miriam Anschütz , Diego Miguel Lozano , Georg Groh

Negation is a common everyday phenomena and has been a consistent area of weakness for language models (LMs). Although the Information Retrieval (IR) community has adopted LMs as the backbone of modern IR architectures, there has been…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2024-02-28 Orion Weller , Dawn Lawrie , Benjamin Van Durme

In this paper, we evaluate the translation of negation both automatically and manually, in English--German (EN--DE) and English--Chinese (EN--ZH). We show that the ability of neural machine translation (NMT) models to translate negation has…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-07-27 Gongbo Tang , Philipp Rönchen , Rico Sennrich , Joakim Nivre

Negation has been shown to be a major bottleneck for masked language models, such as BERT. However, whether this finding still holds for larger-sized auto-regressive language models (``LLMs'') has not been studied comprehensively. With the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-06-16 Thinh Hung Truong , Timothy Baldwin , Karin Verspoor , Trevor Cohn

In this work, we measure the impact of affixal negation on modern English large language models (LLMs). In affixal negation, the negated meaning is expressed through a negative morpheme, which is potentially challenging for LLMs as their…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-05 Thinh Hung Truong , Yulia Otmakhova , Karin Verspoor , Trevor Cohn , Timothy Baldwin

Negation instructions such as 'do not mention $X$' can paradoxically increase the accessibility of $X$ in human thought, a phenomenon known as ironic rebound. Large language models (LLMs) face the same challenge: suppressing a concept…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Logan Mann , Nayan Saxena , Sarah Tandon , Chenhao Sun , Savar Toteja , Kevin Zhu

Multimodal learning can benefit from the representation power of pretrained Large Language Models (LLMs). However, state-of-the-art transformer based LLMs often ignore negations in natural language and there is no existing benchmark to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-01-10 Judith Yue Li , Aren Jansen , Qingqing Huang , Joonseok Lee , Ravi Ganti , Dima Kuzmin

Understanding and solving complex reasoning tasks is vital for addressing the information needs of a user. Although dense neural models learn contextualised embeddings, they still underperform on queries containing negation. To understand…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-15 Roxana Petcu , Samarth Bhargav , Maarten de Rijke , Evangelos Kanoulas

In this paper, we study a practical but less-touched problem in Vision-Language Models (VLMs), \ie, negation understanding. Specifically, many real-world applications require models to explicitly identify what is false or non-existent, \eg,…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-08-06 Haochen Han , Alex Jinpeng Wang , Fangming Liu , Jun Zhu

As Large Language Models (LLMs) transition into autonomous agentic roles, the risk of deception-defined behaviorally as the systematic provision of false information to satisfy external incentives-poses a significant challenge to AI safety.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Arash Marioriyad , Ali Nouri , Mohammad Hossein Rohban , Mahdieh Soleymani Baghshah

As the number of large language models (LLMs) released to the public grows, there is a pressing need to understand the safety implications associated with these models learning from third-party custom finetuning data. We explore the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-04 Jiachen Zhao , Zhun Deng , David Madras , James Zou , Mengye Ren

When language models (LMs) are trained to forget (or "unlearn'') a skill, how precisely does their behavior change? We study the behavior of transformer LMs in which tasks have been forgotten via fine-tuning on randomized labels. Such LMs…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-05 Eric Zhang , Leshem Chosen , Jacob Andreas
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