Thailand

Emergent language games are experimental protocols designed to model how communication may arise among a group of agents. In this paper, we focus on how to improve performances of neural agents playing a signaling game: a sender is exposed to an image and generates a sequence of symbols that is transmitted to a receiver, which uses it to distinguish between two images, one that is semantically related to the original image, and one that is not. We consider multiple design choices, such as pretraining the visual components of the agents, introducing regularization terms, how to sample training items from the dataset, and we study how these different choices impact the behavior and performances of the agents. To that end, we introduce a number of automated metrics to measure the properties of the emergent language. We find that some implementation choices are always beneficial, and that the information that is conveyed by the agents’ messages is shaped not only by the game, but also by the overall design of the agents as well as seemingly unrelated implementation choices.

ACL 2024

So many design choices: Improving and interpreting neural agent communication in signaling games

signalling games

emergent communication

workshop paper

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The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. More information will be announced soon.

The symbol grounding problem---how to connect a symbolic system to the outer world---is a longstanding question in AI that has recently gained prominence with the progress made in NLP in general and surrounding large language models in particular. In this article, we study the emergence of semantic categories in the communication protocol developed by neural agents involved in a well-established type of signaling game. In its basic form, the game requires one agent to retrieve an image based on a message produced by a second agent. We first show that the agents are able to, and do, learn to communicate high-level semantic concepts rather than low-level features of the images even from very indirect training signal to that end. Second, we demonstrate that the introduction of an adversarial agent in the game fosters the emergence of semantics by producing an appropriate training signal when no other method is available.

The Emergence of High-Level Semantics in a Signaling Game

We develop a multilingual version of the Wug Test, an artificial word completion experiment that is typically used to test the morphological knowledge of children, and apply it to the GPT family of large language models (LLMs). LLMs' performance on this test was evaluated by native speakers of six different languages, who judged whether the inflected and derived forms generated by the models conform to the morphological rules of their language. Our results show that LLMs can generalize their morphological knowledge to new, unfamiliar words, but that their success in generating the "correct" generalization (as judged by native human speakers) is predicted by a language's morphological complexity (specifically, integrative complexity). We further find that the amount of training data has surprisingly little on LLMs' morphological generalization abilities within the scope of the analyzed languages. These findings highlight that ``morphology matters'', and have important implications for improving low-resource language modeling.

Morphology Matters: Probing the Cross-linguistic Morphological Generalization Abilities of Large Language Models through a Wug Test

Research in artificial intelligence has witnessed the surge of large language models (LLMs) demonstrating improved performance in various natural language processing tasks. This has sparked significant discussions about the extent to which large language models emulate human linguistic cognition and usage. This study delves into the representation of grammatical well-formedness in LLMs, which is a critical aspect of linguistic knowledge. In three preregistered experiments, we collected grammaticality judgment data for over 2400 English sentences with varying structures from ChatGPT and Vicuna, comparing them with human judgment data. The results reveal substantial alignment in the assessment of grammatical correctness between LLMs and human judgments, albeit with LLMs often showing more conservative judgments for grammatical correctness or incorrectness.

Evaluating Grammatical Well-Formedness in Large Language Models: A Comparative Study with Human Judgments

Humans have clear cross-modal preferences when matching certain novel words to visual shapes. Evidence suggests that these preferences play a prominent role in our linguistic processing, language learning, and the origins of signal-meaning mappings. With the rise of multimodal models in AI, such as vision-and-language (VLM) models, it becomes increasingly important to uncover the kinds of visio-linguistic associations these models encode and whether they align with human representations. Informed by experiments with humans, we probe and compare four VLMs for a well-known human cross-modal preference, the bouba-kiki effect. We do not find conclusive evidence for this effect but suggest that results may depend on features of the models, such as architecture design, model size, and training details. Our findings inform discussions on the origins of the bouba-kiki effect in human cognition and future developments of VLMs that align well with human cross-modal associations.

What does Kiki look like? Cross-modal associations between speech sounds and visual shapes in vision-and-language models

This study investigates the performance of SigLIP, a state-of-the-art Vision-Language Model (VLM), in predicting labels for images depicting 1,278 concepts. Our analysis across 300 images per concept shows that the model frequently predicts the exact user-tagged labels, but similarly, it often predicts labels that are semantically related to the exact labels in various ways: synonyms, hypernyms, co-hyponyms, and associated words, particularly for abstract concepts. We then zoom into the diversity of the user tags of images and word associations for abstract versus concrete concepts. Surprisingly, not only abstract but also concrete concepts exhibit significant variability, thus challenging the traditional view that representations of concrete concepts are less diverse.

Evaluating Semantic Relations in Predicting Textual Labels for Images of Abstract and Concrete Concepts

Diachronic corpus analyses reveal that syntactic usage patterns change over time. Are these changes reflected in differences in language processing across the human lifespan? We use the attachment of with-prepositional phrases (PPs) as a case study for investigating this question: a with-PP can attach to a verb, describing an instrument with which to perform the action (e.g., Slice the cake [with a knife]), or to a direct object (DO), modifying the noun (e.g., Slice the cake [with the pink frosting]). The relative frequencies of the instrument and modifier constructions differ depending on the verb in the sentence --- the `verb bias''. Using two diachronic corpora, Syntgram and CCOHA, we analyzed the co-occurrence statistics of 27 verbs and instrument vs. modifier with-PPs. Between the 1940s and the 2000s, some verbs were more instrument-biased (i.e., more likely to co-occur with with-PPs that attach to the verb than the DO) than others and co-occurrence patterns were more similar for temporally close decades, suggesting subtle diachronic changes in usage patterns. We collected sentence interpretation data probing with-PP attachment preferences in participants ranging in age from 25 to 75. Interpretations of globally ambiguous sentences (e.g., Pet the rabbit with the towel) differed depending on the verb (i.e., some verbs elicit more instrument than modifier interpretations of the PP than others and vice versa) and on the age of the participant. In particular, verbs which became less instrument-biased over time elicited more instrument interpretations among older adults than young adults, suggesting that variation in language comprehension can be in part predicted from the corpus statistics of the time periods that an individual experienced.

Diachronic change in verb usage statistics predicts differences in sentence processing across the lifespan

This paper investigates the adverbial discourse particle actually. We compare LLM and human performance on cloze tests involving actually on examples sourced from the Providence Corpus of speech around children. We explore the impact of utterance context on cloze test performance. We find that context is always helpful, though the extent to which additional context is helpful, and what relative placement of context (i.e. before or after the masked word) is most helpful differs for individual models and humans. The best-performing LLM, GPT-4, narrowly outperforms humans. In an additional experiment, we explore cloze performance on synthetic LLM-generated examples, and find that several models vastly outperform humans.

How Useful is Context, Actually? Comparing LLMs and Humans on Discourse Marker Prediction

Rule-based language processing systems have been overshadowed by neural systems in terms of utility, but it remains unclear whether neural NLP systems, in practice, learn the grammar rules that humans use. This work aims to shed light on the issue by evaluating state-of-the-art LLMs in a task of morphological analysis of complex Finnish noun forms. We generate the forms using an FST tool, and they are unlikely to have occurred in the training sets of the LLMs, therefore requiring morphological generalisation capacity. We find that GPT-4-turbo has some difficulties in the task while GPT-3.5-turbo struggles and smaller models Llama2-70B and Poro-34B fail nearly completely.

Rules in nets? LLMs’ morphological analyses of rare and complex FST-generated Finnish word forms

Application of LLM to database queries on natural language sentences has demonstrated impressive results in both single and multi-hop scenarios.
In the existing methodologies, the requirement to re-encode query vectors at each stage for processing multi-hop queries presents a significant bottleneck to the inference speed.
This paper proposes VKGFR (Virtual Knowledge Graph based Fact Retriever) that leverages large language models to extract representations corresponding to a sentence's knowledge graph, significantly enhancing inference speed for multi-hop reasoning without performance loss.
Given that both the queries and natural language database sentences can be structured as a knowledge graph, we suggest extracting a Virtual Knowledge Graph (VKG) representation from sentences with LLM.
Over the pre-constructed VKG, our VKGFR conducts retrieval with a tiny model structure, showing performance improvements with higher computational efficiency. 
We evaluate VKGFR on the WikiNLDB and MetaQA dataset, designed for multi-hop database reasoning over text. 
The results indicate 13x faster inference speed on the WikiNLDB dataset without performance loss.

Multi-hop Database Reasoning with Virtual Knowledge Graph

In this work, we tested the Triplet Extraction (TE) capabilities of a variety of Large Language Models (LLMs) of different sizes in the Zero- and Few-Shots settings. In detail, we proposed a pipeline that dynamically gathers contextual information from a Knowledge Base (KB), both in the form of context triplets and of (sentence, triplets) pairs as examples, and provides it to the LLM through a prompt. The additional context allowed the LLMs to be competitive with all the older fully trained baselines based on the Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) Network architecture. 
We further conducted a detailed analysis of the quality of the gathered KB context, finding it to be strongly correlated with the final TE performance of the model. In contrast, the size of the model appeared to only logarithmically improve the TE capabilities of the LLMs. We release the code on GitHub for reproducibility.

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So many design choices: Improving and interpreting neural agent communication in signaling games

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