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Language models still struggle with the concept of negation

quantamagazine.org

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Re: Language models still struggle with the concept of negation

#51

Post by QuadrupleA »

I'm not sure negations are the crux of it, at least in terms of simple words like "not", which ChatGPT and other recent LLMs obviously use and understand.

But there is definitely some kind of blind spot there, where the model can't or won't explore "negative space". It wants to gravitate to common things - so if you try to get it to "think of something new" or producing something random that's not like these N other things, or tell you something that's uncommon (like naming any ordinary, non-famous person), it usually trips over itself.

Re: Language models still struggle with the concept of negation

#52

Post by ilaksh »

evanwise wrote: post #45
ilaksh wrote: post #17

At this point, any article that makes claims about "LLMs" rather than specific model versions lacks credibility. The current version of GPT-4 is very different from most existing LLMs (including the previous version of ChatGPT). The next version release will also be different. Google just released PaLM 2 publicly. It is significantly better than what people saw with the initial Bard versions. They have a code-generat…

Did you read the article or just the title? They mention the specific models the researchers were testing and note that increasing model size did not seem to offer much improvement on this metric. It also ends with a discussion of research into methods for improving performance on queries involving negation.

I read the article. The main point of the article, which is in the title, is directed at LLMs in general. They drew the wrong conclusion and made the title and main point too general.

It actually would have seemed like a valid conclusion (although still too general) if the article came out some months ago. But GPT-4 and the very latest model versions from other companies show they were over-generalizing.

Also the model size isn't necessarily the determining factor.

Re: Language models still struggle with the concept of negation

#54

Post by [deleted] »

jostmey wrote: post #6
williamcotton wrote: post #5

What animals don’t have paws or lay eggs, but have wings? Work it out, step by step. ChatGPT (GPT-4): Sure, let's go through this step by step: First, you asked for animals that don't have paws. This would exclude mammals such as dogs, cats, bears, and so on, as these species have paws. Second, you specified animals that don't lay eggs. This eliminates a wide range of animals including all birds, most reptiles, and s…

From what I’ve seen, there’s a huge difference in chat GTP 4 from other LLM

[deleted]

Re: Language models still struggle with the concept of negation

#55

Post by School-Cotton »

petepete wrote: post #53

So do humans, even smart ones. I've lost count of how many times I've heard people say "I could care less" about something they don't care about.

That’s a stock phrase in colloquial American English. Using it isn’t really evidence that someone “struggles with the concept of negation”.

Re: Language models still struggle with the concept of negation

#56

Post by School-Cotton »

u_name wrote: post #39

The title of the article is kinda the answer at the same time. Chatbots don't know what stuff is. They have no ability to gain knowledge out of learned text, just counting occurences of words in texts and giving them a weight, depending on the relationship in that text. They are just putting combinations of text together. And the concept of negating something related to something else kinda needs an understanding of…

Found someone who hasn’t tried GPT4.

Re: Language models still struggle with the concept of negation

#57

Post by redox99 »

pillefitz wrote: post #49
BoiledCabbage wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm missing something, but this seems like a really poorly worded riddle. Or just a bad riddle. Given what you stated, the solution would be walk upstairs look at the 3 bulbs, walk downstairs switch one of the switches. Walk upstairs see which bulb changed on/off. Repeat for the other two switches. This takes roughly 5 mins rather than your solution which takes 3 years.

You're missing and getting the point at the same time. Your solution would be the correct one, while GPT pulls out the "only look once"-constraint out of nowhere. The riddle is perfectly fine.

Except the part about "with some changes that make it more difficult" is false. The changes make it trivial.

Edit: Omitting that part still makes GPT4 over complicate the solution

Re: Language models still struggle with the concept of negation

#58

Post by jiggawatts »

QuadrupleA wrote: post #47
williamcotton wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a sample-and-poll approach that I've used with factual question-and-answer based tools that can help with this kind of thing as well. First, you'll notice the added "work it out step by step" to encourage what is called chain-of-thought in the literature. Second, generate say, five responses from the LLM, then take all five responses and uses them in another prompt where you ask the LLM to reflect on all of t…

Then, if that's not accurate, take that entire process and repeat that 5 times, looking for the most common answer.

And then make sure to train GPT to help you trade stocks, because you’ll need those millions to pay your OpenAI bill.

Re: Language models still struggle with the concept of negation

#59

Post by leptons »

akavi wrote: post #14

Does this increase anyone else's sense that LLMs are actually modeling something similar to the way humans think? It certainly does for me. I find that negations/conjugations of negations are surprisingly difficult for to parse. Beyond two negations at most, I can feel myself having to switch into "code" mode, where I'm explicitly casing out the booleans, to understand them. Obviously the examples given in the articl…

>are actually modeling something similar to the way humans think?

Apparently humans can't think enough to write a paragraph anymore, so they have to ask ChatGPT to do it for them. At what point does ChatGPT ask ChatGPT to write it a paragraph? At that point maybe LLMs are actually thinking like humans.

Re: Language models still struggle with the concept of negation

#60

Post by oh_sigh »

marcianx wrote: post #30
oh_sigh wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, some species of bats don't lay eggs. TIL.

Actually, no species of bats lay eggs - they are mammals, and not the egg-laying kind (platypus or echidna).

Sorry, yes, I know this, I was making fun of a computer's output.
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