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Main Authors: Yuan, Yifei, Søgaard, Anders
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.04421
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author Yuan, Yifei
Søgaard, Anders
author_facet Yuan, Yifei
Søgaard, Anders
contents Li et al. (2023) used the Othello board game as a test case for the ability of GPT-2 to induce world models, and were followed up by Nanda et al. (2023b). We briefly discuss the original experiments, expanding them to include more language models with more comprehensive probing. Specifically, we analyze sequences of Othello board states and train the model to predict the next move based on previous moves. We evaluate seven language models (GPT-2, T5, Bart, Flan-T5, Mistral, LLaMA-2, and Qwen2.5) on the Othello task and conclude that these models not only learn to play Othello, but also induce the Othello board layout. We find that all models achieve up to 99% accuracy in unsupervised grounding and exhibit high similarity in the board features they learned. This provides considerably stronger evidence for the Othello World Model Hypothesis than previous works.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_04421
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Revisiting the Othello World Model Hypothesis
Yuan, Yifei
Søgaard, Anders
Computation and Language
Li et al. (2023) used the Othello board game as a test case for the ability of GPT-2 to induce world models, and were followed up by Nanda et al. (2023b). We briefly discuss the original experiments, expanding them to include more language models with more comprehensive probing. Specifically, we analyze sequences of Othello board states and train the model to predict the next move based on previous moves. We evaluate seven language models (GPT-2, T5, Bart, Flan-T5, Mistral, LLaMA-2, and Qwen2.5) on the Othello task and conclude that these models not only learn to play Othello, but also induce the Othello board layout. We find that all models achieve up to 99% accuracy in unsupervised grounding and exhibit high similarity in the board features they learned. This provides considerably stronger evidence for the Othello World Model Hypothesis than previous works.
title Revisiting the Othello World Model Hypothesis
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.04421