Language Models Don't Learn the Physical Manifestation of Language

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Lee, Bruce W., Lim, JaeHyuk
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
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author Lee, Bruce W.
Lim, JaeHyuk
author_facet Lee, Bruce W.
Lim, JaeHyuk
contents We argue that language-only models don't learn the physical manifestation of language. We present an empirical investigation of visual-auditory properties of language through a series of tasks, termed H-Test. These tasks highlight a fundamental gap between human linguistic understanding and the sensory-deprived linguistic understanding of LLMs. In support of our hypothesis, 1. deliberate reasoning (Chain-of-Thought), 2. few-shot examples, or 3. stronger LLM from the same model family (LLaMA 2 13B -> LLaMA 2 70B) has no significant effect on H-Test performance. We bring in the philosophical case of Mary, who learns about the world in a sensory-deprived environment as a useful conceptual framework to understand how language-only models learn about the world (Jackson, 1986). Our experiments show that some of the strongest proprietary LLMs stay near random chance baseline accuracy of 50%, highlighting the limitations of linguistic knowledge acquired in the absence of sensory experience. Our code and data are available at <github.com/brucewlee/h-test>.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_11349
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Language Models Don't Learn the Physical Manifestation of Language
Lee, Bruce W.
Lim, JaeHyuk
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
We argue that language-only models don't learn the physical manifestation of language. We present an empirical investigation of visual-auditory properties of language through a series of tasks, termed H-Test. These tasks highlight a fundamental gap between human linguistic understanding and the sensory-deprived linguistic understanding of LLMs. In support of our hypothesis, 1. deliberate reasoning (Chain-of-Thought), 2. few-shot examples, or 3. stronger LLM from the same model family (LLaMA 2 13B -> LLaMA 2 70B) has no significant effect on H-Test performance. We bring in the philosophical case of Mary, who learns about the world in a sensory-deprived environment as a useful conceptual framework to understand how language-only models learn about the world (Jackson, 1986). Our experiments show that some of the strongest proprietary LLMs stay near random chance baseline accuracy of 50%, highlighting the limitations of linguistic knowledge acquired in the absence of sensory experience. Our code and data are available at <github.com/brucewlee/h-test>.
title Language Models Don't Learn the Physical Manifestation of Language
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.11349