Using Artificial Populations to Study Psychological Phenomena in Neural Models

Fuente: arXiv
Salvato in:
Dettagli Bibliografici
Autori principali: Roberts, Jesse, Moore, Kyle, Wilenzick, Drew, Fisher, Doug
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2023
Soggetti:
Accesso online:
Tags: Aggiungi Tag
Nessun Tag, puoi essere il primo ad aggiungerne!!
_version_ 1866910390266363904
author Roberts, Jesse
Moore, Kyle
Wilenzick, Drew
Fisher, Doug
author_facet Roberts, Jesse
Moore, Kyle
Wilenzick, Drew
Fisher, Doug
contents The recent proliferation of research into transformer based natural language processing has led to a number of studies which attempt to detect the presence of human-like cognitive behavior in the models. We contend that, as is true of human psychology, the investigation of cognitive behavior in language models must be conducted in an appropriate population of an appropriate size for the results to be meaningful. We leverage work in uncertainty estimation in a novel approach to efficiently construct experimental populations. The resultant tool, PopulationLM, has been made open source. We provide theoretical grounding in the uncertainty estimation literature and motivation from current cognitive work regarding language models. We discuss the methodological lessons from other scientific communities and attempt to demonstrate their application to two artificial population studies. Through population based experimentation we find that language models exhibit behavior consistent with typicality effects among categories highly represented in training. However, we find that language models don't tend to exhibit structural priming effects. Generally, our results show that single models tend to over estimate the presence of cognitive behaviors in neural models.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2308_08032
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Using Artificial Populations to Study Psychological Phenomena in Neural Models
Roberts, Jesse
Moore, Kyle
Wilenzick, Drew
Fisher, Doug
Computation and Language
The recent proliferation of research into transformer based natural language processing has led to a number of studies which attempt to detect the presence of human-like cognitive behavior in the models. We contend that, as is true of human psychology, the investigation of cognitive behavior in language models must be conducted in an appropriate population of an appropriate size for the results to be meaningful. We leverage work in uncertainty estimation in a novel approach to efficiently construct experimental populations. The resultant tool, PopulationLM, has been made open source. We provide theoretical grounding in the uncertainty estimation literature and motivation from current cognitive work regarding language models. We discuss the methodological lessons from other scientific communities and attempt to demonstrate their application to two artificial population studies. Through population based experimentation we find that language models exhibit behavior consistent with typicality effects among categories highly represented in training. However, we find that language models don't tend to exhibit structural priming effects. Generally, our results show that single models tend to over estimate the presence of cognitive behaviors in neural models.
title Using Artificial Populations to Study Psychological Phenomena in Neural Models
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.08032