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Summary of Language Models Need Inductive Biases to Count Inductively, by Yingshan Chang and Yonatan Bisk


Language Models Need Inductive Biases to Count Inductively

by Yingshan Chang, Yonatan Bisk

First submitted to arxiv on: 30 May 2024

Categories

  • Main: Machine Learning (cs.LG)
  • Secondary: Computation and Language (cs.CL)

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Summary difficulty Written by Summary
High Paper authors High Difficulty Summary
Read the original abstract here
Medium GrooveSquid.com (original content) Medium Difficulty Summary
A machine learning paper investigates the ability of various architectures to generalize counting, a fundamental example of inductive reasoning. The study focuses on transformer models and their reliance on positional embeddings for out-of-domain (OOD) counting. The authors experiment with different architectures, including RNNs, transformers, state-space models, and RWKV, and design task formats and auxiliary tasks to avoid limitations in generalization. The results show that traditional RNNs trivially achieve inductive counting, while transformers require positional embeddings for OOD counting. This finding has implications for the application scope of primitive functions defined in formal characterizations.
Low GrooveSquid.com (original content) Low Difficulty Summary
Counting is a basic skill that involves learning to recognize and remember numbers in sequence. In this paper, researchers looked at how well different machine learning models can learn to count and generalize it to new situations. They used various models like RNNs (recurrent neural networks), transformers, and others to test their abilities. The results showed that some models are better than others at counting and generalizing it. This is important because it affects how we use these models in real-life applications.

Keywords

» Artificial intelligence  » Generalization  » Machine learning  » Transformer