Neural Correlates of Language Models Are Specific to Human Language

Fuente: arXiv
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Autor principal: Parra, Iñigo
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Parra, Iñigo
author_facet Parra, Iñigo
contents Previous work has shown correlations between the hidden states of large language models and fMRI brain responses, on language tasks. These correlations have been taken as evidence of the representational similarity of these models and brain states. This study tests whether these previous results are robust to several possible concerns. Specifically this study shows: (i) that the previous results are still found after dimensionality reduction, and thus are not attributable to the curse of dimensionality; (ii) that previous results are confirmed when using new measures of similarity; (iii) that correlations between brain representations and those from models are specific to models trained on human language; and (iv) that the results are dependent on the presence of positional encoding in the models. These results confirm and strengthen the results of previous research and contribute to the debate on the biological plausibility and interpretability of state-of-the-art large language models.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_03156
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Neural Correlates of Language Models Are Specific to Human Language
Parra, Iñigo
Computation and Language
Previous work has shown correlations between the hidden states of large language models and fMRI brain responses, on language tasks. These correlations have been taken as evidence of the representational similarity of these models and brain states. This study tests whether these previous results are robust to several possible concerns. Specifically this study shows: (i) that the previous results are still found after dimensionality reduction, and thus are not attributable to the curse of dimensionality; (ii) that previous results are confirmed when using new measures of similarity; (iii) that correlations between brain representations and those from models are specific to models trained on human language; and (iv) that the results are dependent on the presence of positional encoding in the models. These results confirm and strengthen the results of previous research and contribute to the debate on the biological plausibility and interpretability of state-of-the-art large language models.
title Neural Correlates of Language Models Are Specific to Human Language
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.03156