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, specifically the impact of visual information -- which humans can usually rely on but LMs largely do not have access to during language acquisition -- on syntactic generalization in LMs. Our experiments, following the poverty of stimulus paradigm under two scenarios (using artificial vs. naturalistic images), demonstrate that if the alignments between the linguistic and visual components are clear in the input, access to vision data does help with the syntactic generalization of LMs, but if not, visual input does not help. This highlights the need for additional biases or signals, such as mutual gaze, to enhance cross-modal alignment and enable efficient syntactic generalization in multimodal LMs.
While large language models (LLMs) have advanced the field of natural language processing (NLP), their "black box" nature obscures their decision-making processes. To address this, researchers developed structured approaches using higher order tensors. These are able to model linguistic relations, but stall when training on classical computers due to their excessive size. Tensors are natural inhabitants of quantum systems and training on quantum computers provides a solution by translating text to variational quantum circuits. In this paper, we develop MultiQ-NLP: a framework for structure-aware data processing with multimodal text+image data. Here, "structure" refers to syntactic and grammatical relationships in language, as well as the hierarchical organization of visual elements in images. We enrich the translation with new types and type homomorphisms and develop novel architectures to represent structure. When tested on a main stream image classification task (SVO Probes), our best model showed a par performance with the state of the art classical models; moreover the best model was fully structured.
The success of large-scale language models like GPT can be attributed to their ability to efficiently predict the next token in a sequence. However, these models rely on constant computational effort regardless of the complexity of the token they are predicting, lacking the capacity for iterative refinement. In this paper, we introduce a novel Loop Neural Network, which achieves better performance by utilizing longer computational time without increasing the model size. Our approach revisits the input multiple times, refining the prediction by iteratively looping over a subset of the model with residual connections. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this method through experiments comparing versions of GPT-2 with our loop models, showing improved performance in language modeling tasks while maintaining similar parameter counts. Importantly, these improvements are achieved without the need for extra training data.
Despite their widespread use, the mechanisms by which large language models (LLMs) represent and regulate uncertainty in next-token predictions remain largely unexplored. This study investigates two critical components believed to influence this uncertainty: the recently discovered entropy neurons and a new set of components that we term token frequency neurons. Entropy neurons are characterized by an unusually high weight norm and influence the final layer normalization (LayerNorm) scale to effectively scale down the logits. Our work shows that entropy neurons operate by writing onto an unembedding null space, allowing them to impact the residual stream norm with minimal direct effect on the logits themselves. We observe the presence of entropy neurons across a range of models, up to 7 billion parameters. On the other hand, token frequency neurons, which we discover and describe here for the first time, boost or suppress each token's logit proportionally to its log frequency, thereby shifting the output distribution towards or away from the unigram distribution. Finally, we present a detailed case study where entropy neurons actively manage confidence in the setting of induction, i.e. detecting and continuing repeated subsequences.
Large language models (LLMs) have significantly advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks in recent years. However, their universal nature poses limitations in scenarios requiring personalized responses, such as recommendation systems and chatbots. This paper investigates methods to personalize LLMs, comparing fine-tuning and zero-shot reasoning approaches on subjective tasks. Results demonstrate that personalized fine-tuning improves model reasoning compared to non-personalized models. Experiments on datasets for emotion recognition and hate speech detection show consistent performance gains with personalized methods across different LLM architectures. These findings underscore the importance of personalization for enhancing LLM capabilities in subjective text perception tasks.
Following the milestones in large language models (LLMs) and multimodal models, we have seen a surge in applying LLMs to biochemical tasks. Leveraging graph features and molecular text representations, LLMs can tackle various tasks, such as predicting chemical reaction outcomes and describing molecular properties. However, most current work overlooks the multi-level nature of graph features. The impact of different feature levels on LLMs and the importance of each level remain unexplored, and it is possible that different chemistry tasks require different feature levels. In this work, we first investigate the effect of feature granularity by fusing GNN-generated feature tokens, discovering that even reducing all tokens to a single token does not significantly impact performance. We then explore the effect of various feature levels on performance, finding that both the quality of LLM-generated molecules and performance on different tasks benefit from different feature levels. We conclude with two key insights: (1) current molecular Multimodal LLMs(MLLMs) lack a comprehensive understanding of graph features, and (2) static processing is not sufficient for hierarchical graph feature. Our code will be publicly available soon.
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant progress in various natural language generation and understanding tasks. However, their linguistic generalization capabilities remain questionable, raising doubts about whether these models learn language similarly to humans. While humans exhibit compositional generalization and linguistic creativity in language use, the extent to which LLMs replicate these abilities, particularly in morphology, is under-explored. In this work, we systematically investigate the morphological generalization abilities of LLMs through the lens of compositionality. We define morphemes as compositional primitives and design a novel suite of generative and discriminative tasks to assess morphological productivity and systematicity. Focusing on agglutinative languages such as Turkish and Finnish, we evaluate several state-of-the-art instruction-finetuned multilingual models, including GPT-4 and Gemini. Our analysis shows that LLMs struggle with morphological compositional generalization particularly when applied to novel word roots, with performance declining sharply as morphological complexity increases. While models can identify individual morphological combinations better than chance, their performance lacks systematicity, leading to significant accuracy gaps compared to humans.
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in natural language processing. However, their internal mechanisms are still unclear and this lack of transparency poses unwanted risks for downstream applications. Therefore, understanding and explaining these models is crucial for elucidating their behaviors, limitations, and social impacts. In this paper, we introduce a taxonomy of explainability techniques and provide a structured overview of methods for explaining Transformer-based language models. We categorize techniques based on the training paradigms of LLMs: traditional fine-tuning-based paradigm and prompting-based paradigm. For each paradigm, we summarize the goals and dominant approaches for generating local explanations of individual predictions and global explanations of overall model knowledge. We also discuss metrics for evaluating generated explanations, and discuss how explanations can be leveraged to debug models and improve performance. Lastly, we examine key challenges and emerging opportunities for explanation techniques in the era of LLMs in comparison to conventional machine learning models.
Feature attribution methods are popular in interpretable machine learning. These methods compute the attribution of each input feature to represent its importance, but there is no consensus on the definition of "attribution", leading to many competing methods with little systematic evaluation, complicated in particular by the lack of ground truth attribution. To address this, we propose a dataset modification procedure to induce such ground truth. Using this procedure, we evaluate three common methods: saliency maps, rationales, and attentions. We identify several deficiencies and add new perspectives to the growing body of evidence questioning the correctness and reliability of these methods applied on datasets in the wild. We further discuss possible avenues for remedy and recommend new attribution methods to be tested against ground truth before deployment. The code is available at \url{//github.com/YilunZhou/feature-attribution-evaluation}.
Language model pre-training has proven to be useful in learning universal language representations. As a state-of-the-art language model pre-training model, BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) has achieved amazing results in many language understanding tasks. In this paper, we conduct exhaustive experiments to investigate different fine-tuning methods of BERT on text classification task and provide a general solution for BERT fine-tuning. Finally, the proposed solution obtains new state-of-the-art results on eight widely-studied text classification datasets.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) for representation learning of graphs broadly follow a neighborhood aggregation framework, where the representation vector of a node is computed by recursively aggregating and transforming feature vectors of its neighboring nodes. Many GNN variants have been proposed and have achieved state-of-the-art results on both node and graph classification tasks. However, despite GNNs revolutionizing graph representation learning, there is limited understanding of their representational properties and limitations. Here, we present a theoretical framework for analyzing the expressive power of GNNs in capturing different graph structures. Our results characterize the discriminative power of popular GNN variants, such as Graph Convolutional Networks and GraphSAGE, and show that they cannot learn to distinguish certain simple graph structures. We then develop a simple architecture that is provably the most expressive among the class of GNNs and is as powerful as the Weisfeiler-Lehman graph isomorphism test. We empirically validate our theoretical findings on a number of graph classification benchmarks, and demonstrate that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance.