Babysit A Language Model From Scratch: Interactive Language Learning by Trials and Demonstrations

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Ma, Ziqiao, Wang, Zekun, Chai, Joyce
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
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author Ma, Ziqiao
Wang, Zekun
Chai, Joyce
author_facet Ma, Ziqiao
Wang, Zekun
Chai, Joyce
contents Humans are efficient language learners and inherently social creatures. Our language development is largely shaped by our social interactions, for example, the demonstration and feedback from caregivers. Contrary to human language learning, recent advancements in large language models have primarily adopted a non-interactive training paradigm, and refined pre-trained models through feedback afterward. In this work, we explore how corrective feedback from interactions influences neural language acquisition from scratch through systematically controlled experiments, assessing whether it contributes to word learning efficiency in language models. We introduce a trial-and-demonstration (TnD) learning framework that incorporates three distinct components: student trials, teacher demonstrations, and a reward conditioned on language competence at various developmental stages. Our experiments reveal that the TnD approach accelerates word acquisition for student models of equal and smaller numbers of parameters, and we highlight the significance of both trials and demonstrations. We further show that the teacher's choices of words influence students' word-specific learning efficiency, and a practice-makes-perfect effect is evident by a strong correlation between the frequency of words in trials and their respective learning curves. Our findings suggest that interactive language learning, with teacher demonstrations and active trials, can facilitate efficient word learning in language models.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_13828
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Babysit A Language Model From Scratch: Interactive Language Learning by Trials and Demonstrations
Ma, Ziqiao
Wang, Zekun
Chai, Joyce
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Humans are efficient language learners and inherently social creatures. Our language development is largely shaped by our social interactions, for example, the demonstration and feedback from caregivers. Contrary to human language learning, recent advancements in large language models have primarily adopted a non-interactive training paradigm, and refined pre-trained models through feedback afterward. In this work, we explore how corrective feedback from interactions influences neural language acquisition from scratch through systematically controlled experiments, assessing whether it contributes to word learning efficiency in language models. We introduce a trial-and-demonstration (TnD) learning framework that incorporates three distinct components: student trials, teacher demonstrations, and a reward conditioned on language competence at various developmental stages. Our experiments reveal that the TnD approach accelerates word acquisition for student models of equal and smaller numbers of parameters, and we highlight the significance of both trials and demonstrations. We further show that the teacher's choices of words influence students' word-specific learning efficiency, and a practice-makes-perfect effect is evident by a strong correlation between the frequency of words in trials and their respective learning curves. Our findings suggest that interactive language learning, with teacher demonstrations and active trials, can facilitate efficient word learning in language models.
title Babysit A Language Model From Scratch: Interactive Language Learning by Trials and Demonstrations
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.13828