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A sleep-like consolidation mechanism for LLMs

arxiv.org

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Re: A sleep-like consolidation mechanism for LLMs

#41

Post by palmotea »

Windchaser wrote: post #30
pcrh wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The function of sleep in animals is largely obscure. One thing we do know for certain is that it is necessary, it is needed in "dumb" animals as well as in you and I. If an animal can't sleep it will eventually die. I don't think that applies to the activity described in the OP. Does their LLM "die" if it can't perform the function described?

I don't think it's necessarily correct to think of sleep in terms of "it is necessary for animals or they will die". It might be more useful to think of it as "it was so useful that animals who slept outcompeted all the animals who didn't". Meaning: it might just provide a big advantage. I don't want to overextend and assume that any advantage extends to LLMs. That rest-and-recuperate advantage might also extend to L…

> I don't think it's necessarily correct to think of sleep in terms of "it is necessary for animals or they will die". It might be more useful to think of it as "it was so useful that animals who slept outcompeted all the animals who didn't".

You're talking about different things: biological necessity and evolutionary benefit.

You can find out about the former by preventing an animal from sleeping (but otherwise provide all other needed things), and seeing if it will eventually die.

Re: A sleep-like consolidation mechanism for LLMs

#43

Post by sillysaurusx »

pcrh wrote: post #20
djeastm wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They provide an explanation for using the term "sleep": > In animals, the transfer from short-term memory to long-term memory is thought to be supported by hippocampal replay [33], especially during sleep [41]; in this phase, short-term hippocampal memories are reactivated and consolidated into cortical synaptic weights. Sleep makes animals unable to respond to external stimuli, suggesting that it must provide enough…

The function of sleep in animals is largely obscure. One thing we do know for certain is that it is necessary, it is needed in "dumb" animals as well as in you and I. If an animal can't sleep it will eventually die. I don't think that applies to the activity described in the OP. Does their LLM "die" if it can't perform the function described?

> If an animal can't sleep it will eventually die.

That turns out to be un-settled science. No human has ever died from lack of sleep.

People point to “fatal familial insomnia” as a counterexample. But they die to the disease, not the lack of sleep.

In a series of controlled experiments, rats and fruit flies did die from lack of sleep. But no one has yet proven that it holds true for vertebrates except for rats.

In other words, it could be true that “among vertebrates, only rats die of sleep deprivation.”

So “if an animal can’t sleep, it will eventually die” is actually quite hard to prove, and depending on how you look at it, somewhat easy to disprove by the fact that rats and fruit flies were so difficult to kill from sleep depravation alone.

Personally I’m skeptical of the rat study too. Claude amends this:

> What they did not establish: the mechanism. On autopsy, “no anatomical cause of death was identified.” The rats showed weight loss despite eating more, body temperature problems, and skin lesions, but nothing that pointed to a clean cause. So no, they could not say a rat “died from sleep deprivation alone” in the sense of identifying what sleep loss did to the body to kill it. They showed a strong association under tight controls, not a proven causal pathway.

Re: A sleep-like consolidation mechanism for LLMs

#44

Post by aaroninsf »

pcrh wrote: post #4

I can't pretend to understand how LLMs work, but I can be sure that anthropomorphizing their functions is not helpful to an objective debate over their abilities. Does a motor vehicle get "sleep" when it is serviced? When I reboot a computer, is that equivalent to a nap?

Very much agree that while it is is useful in description of motivation and inspiration,

it is very non-helpful—or worse—to use this language, this way.

One might as well say "need neural plasticity" which is as much an analogy and equally misleading and counterproductive in shaping the right model of the system.

One might even call this pernicious, what it encourages is already a social problem; and it doesn't aid understanding, it confounds it.

Re: A sleep-like consolidation mechanism for LLMs

#46

Post by sillysaurusx »

palmotea wrote: post #41
Windchaser wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's necessarily correct to think of sleep in terms of "it is necessary for animals or they will die". It might be more useful to think of it as "it was so useful that animals who slept outcompeted all the animals who didn't". Meaning: it might just provide a big advantage. I don't want to overextend and assume that any advantage extends to LLMs. That rest-and-recuperate advantage might also extend to L…

> I don't think it's necessarily correct to think of sleep in terms of "it is necessary for animals or they will die". It might be more useful to think of it as "it was so useful that animals who slept outcompeted all the animals who didn't". You're talking about different things: biological necessity and evolutionary benefit. You can find out about the former by preventing an animal from sleeping (but otherwise prov…

> You can find out about the former by preventing an animal from sleeping (but otherwise provide all other needed things), and seeing if it will eventually die.

That is actually almost impossible to do. The rat study was as close as we’ve ever come, and it’s still debated whether the rats died due to lack of sleep or some other mechanism, since the autopsy couldn’t confirm a cause of death. (It could have been due to the way the experiment ran, for example, not the lack of sleep.)

Re: A sleep-like consolidation mechanism for LLMs

#48

Post by [deleted] »

djeastm wrote: post #14
pcrh wrote: post #4

I can't pretend to understand how LLMs work, but I can be sure that anthropomorphizing their functions is not helpful to an objective debate over their abilities. Does a motor vehicle get "sleep" when it is serviced? When I reboot a computer, is that equivalent to a nap?

They provide an explanation for using the term "sleep": > In animals, the transfer from short-term memory to long-term memory is thought to be supported by hippocampal replay [33], especially during sleep [41]; in this phase, short-term hippocampal memories are reactivated and consolidated into cortical synaptic weights. Sleep makes animals unable to respond to external stimuli, suggesting that it must provide enough…

[deleted]

Re: A sleep-like consolidation mechanism for LLMs

#49

Post by ambicapter »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #43
pcrh wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The function of sleep in animals is largely obscure. One thing we do know for certain is that it is necessary, it is needed in "dumb" animals as well as in you and I. If an animal can't sleep it will eventually die. I don't think that applies to the activity described in the OP. Does their LLM "die" if it can't perform the function described?

> If an animal can't sleep it will eventually die. That turns out to be un-settled science. No human has ever died from lack of sleep. People point to “fatal familial insomnia” as a counterexample. But they die to the disease, not the lack of sleep. In a series of controlled experiments, rats and fruit flies did die from lack of sleep. But no one has yet proven that it holds true for vertebrates except for rats. In o…

So? You don't need a proven causal pathway to state that a glass heads towards the ground every time you brush it off a table.

Re: A sleep-like consolidation mechanism for LLMs

#50

Post by sillysaurusx »

DonHopkins wrote: post #31
famouswaffles wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anthropomorphization is not inherently wrong, and in some instances, it actually lets you reason better about about complex behavior than whatever convoluted (and often wrong, especially in the case of giant neural networks) mechanistic description one might conjure. Here the analogy isn't without reason.

Is it "Anthropicmorphization" when Claud treats human beings like LLMs?

Interesting question. Is there an actual term for that? It’s like inverse anthropomorphization, but not quite.
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