Summary of Beyond Surface Structure: a Causal Assessment Of Llms’ Comprehension Ability, by Yujin Han et al.
Beyond Surface Structure: A Causal Assessment of LLMs’ Comprehension Ability
by Yujin Han, Lei Xu, Sirui Chen, Difan Zou, Chaochao Lu
First submitted to arxiv on: 29 Nov 2024
Categories
- Main: Computation and Language (cs.CL)
- Secondary: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)
GrooveSquid.com Paper Summaries
GrooveSquid.com’s goal is to make artificial intelligence research accessible by summarizing AI papers in simpler terms. Each summary below covers the same AI paper, written at different levels of difficulty. The medium difficulty and low difficulty versions are original summaries written by GrooveSquid.com, while the high difficulty version is the paper’s original abstract. Feel free to learn from the version that suits you best!
| Summary difficulty | Written by | Summary |
|---|---|---|
| High | Paper authors | High Difficulty Summary Read the original abstract here |
| Medium | GrooveSquid.com (original content) | Medium Difficulty Summary Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive performance in natural language tasks, but the debate persists on whether they truly comprehend deep structure or rely on surface structure. To rigorously evaluate their capabilities, we propose a causal mediation analysis to assess both deep and surface structures. We develop quantifiable surrogates for direct and indirect causal effects, and apply them to mainstream LLMs, showing that most exhibit deep structure comprehension ability, which grows with prediction accuracy. |
| Low | GrooveSquid.com (original content) | Low Difficulty Summary Large language models are super smart computers that can understand and generate human-like text. But scientists wonder if they really get what’s going on beneath the surface or just rely on how things are presented. To figure this out, researchers came up with a new way to test how well these models truly comprehend language. They tested many popular language models and found that most of them can actually understand deep meanings, but some are better than others at doing so. |
