Bayesian Statistical Modeling with Predictors from LLMs

Fuente: arXiv
Guardado en:
Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Franke, Michael, Tsvilodub, Polina, Carcassi, Fausto
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
Materias:
Acceso en línea:
Etiquetas: Agregar Etiqueta
Sin Etiquetas, Sea el primero en etiquetar este registro!
_version_ 1866929385145106432
author Franke, Michael
Tsvilodub, Polina
Carcassi, Fausto
author_facet Franke, Michael
Tsvilodub, Polina
Carcassi, Fausto
contents State of the art large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive performance on a variety of benchmark tasks and are increasingly used as components in larger applications, where LLM-based predictions serve as proxies for human judgements or decision. This raises questions about the human-likeness of LLM-derived information, alignment with human intuition, and whether LLMs could possibly be considered (parts of) explanatory models of (aspects of) human cognition or language use. To shed more light on these issues, we here investigate the human-likeness of LLMs' predictions for multiple-choice decision tasks from the perspective of Bayesian statistical modeling. Using human data from a forced-choice experiment on pragmatic language use, we find that LLMs do not capture the variance in the human data at the item-level. We suggest different ways of deriving full distributional predictions from LLMs for aggregate, condition-level data, and find that some, but not all ways of obtaining condition-level predictions yield adequate fits to human data. These results suggests that assessment of LLM performance depends strongly on seemingly subtle choices in methodology, and that LLMs are at best predictors of human behavior at the aggregate, condition-level, for which they are, however, not designed to, or usually used to, make predictions in the first place.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_09012
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Bayesian Statistical Modeling with Predictors from LLMs
Franke, Michael
Tsvilodub, Polina
Carcassi, Fausto
Computation and Language
State of the art large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive performance on a variety of benchmark tasks and are increasingly used as components in larger applications, where LLM-based predictions serve as proxies for human judgements or decision. This raises questions about the human-likeness of LLM-derived information, alignment with human intuition, and whether LLMs could possibly be considered (parts of) explanatory models of (aspects of) human cognition or language use. To shed more light on these issues, we here investigate the human-likeness of LLMs' predictions for multiple-choice decision tasks from the perspective of Bayesian statistical modeling. Using human data from a forced-choice experiment on pragmatic language use, we find that LLMs do not capture the variance in the human data at the item-level. We suggest different ways of deriving full distributional predictions from LLMs for aggregate, condition-level data, and find that some, but not all ways of obtaining condition-level predictions yield adequate fits to human data. These results suggests that assessment of LLM performance depends strongly on seemingly subtle choices in methodology, and that LLMs are at best predictors of human behavior at the aggregate, condition-level, for which they are, however, not designed to, or usually used to, make predictions in the first place.
title Bayesian Statistical Modeling with Predictors from LLMs
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.09012