Top
Best
New

Posted by adunk 3 hours ago

Can we understand how large language models reason?(cacm.acm.org)
56 points | 54 comments
antleys 1 hour ago|
This article is not about "reasoning" in the abstract, philosophical sense but is talking about "mechanistic interpretability" research. The title is more like, "can we understand if the 'knowledge' encoded into a neural networks actually corresponds to reasoning-like concepts" and doing that with actual experiments like tweaking weights and activations.

There's an interesting example where researchers saw a model approached clock time calculations and calendar month-day calculations using the same methodology. So then is this because an underlying concept of "cyclical measures" has emerged in the network?

warumdarum 2 hours ago||
They dont. They have input that runs through a invisible stochastic canyon. As long as there is previous experience the stochastic canyon never ends. If there is none or isignificant one, or it runs out of tokkens, it hallucinates and the illusion falls apart. There is no reasoning, just the invisible grand canyon of all of human experience and knowledge. PS: try to get it to retell you a clichee movie or book and you can see life near the end, how the delta of all the same movies opens up into wildly different endings.

To advance further it would need the ability to abstract away the general situation shape and pattern recognize similar situations.

Lomlioto 1 hour ago||
Compression is the trick. Its even philosophed about if compression = intelligence.

The LLM has to compress everyy question/prompt into its system. It does so by creating rules and ways of processing data (this can lead to AGI, world models or an architecture of sub architectures like an LLM + something else). So if it should respond in a way that only reasoning people can achieve, it might be able to learn a representation of what we call reasoning.

It read enough text in itself to even know about the concept of reasoning and how you would do that.

Even if this is only stochastic, it shouldn't be so devalued as your comment comes across.

Who says that we are doing anything more magic?

skybrian 1 hour ago|||
When a mathematician reads a hundred-year-old math paper, it seems like they are reproducing in their head the reasoning of someone who died long ago. That is, reasoning can be written down and replicated.

If that works, I think it's fair to say that LLM's are inanimate processes can generate real reasoning. You can tell when you read it and it makes sense.

There are likely some kinds of reasoning that can't be written down, as well as other forms of understanding, but they also don't replicate nearly as easily.

smokel 1 hour ago|||
It's probably helpful in this discussion to make a difference between two definitions of reasoning:

1. phenomenal reasoning, requiring consciousness and subjective experience

2. functional reasoning, transforming premises into conclusions using logic

I think you are attacking this using definition 1, whereas the article is obviously aiming at a different type of reasoning, and trying to formalize what is actually going on. It seems to be a genuine effort.

Lerc 1 hour ago||
>1. phenomenal reasoning, requiring consciousness and subjective experience

I think it is incumbent upon anyone arguing that something does not posses any given property to provide a non-circular definition of what it is that they are declaring an absence of.

All of the descriptions of experiential reasoning are usually defined in terms of rephrasing of the claim "true understanding", "conscious", "aware", "knowing" all hinge on a synonymous aspect of the words that try and shift the responsibly of explanation to the next term used in a cyclic manner.

For the weaker sense of reasoning, there simply isn't any argument that it is not happening. A calculator can perform the weaker sense. The analysis of this aspect of LLMs is purely a question of how, not what.

gus_massa 57 minutes ago|||
With that definition, computers don't play chess, they just move the pieces using some weights and backtracking.
red75prime 1 hour ago|||
Stochastic gradient descent can be likened to traveling down a billion-dimensional canyon. But inference? Hardly.
alchemist1e9 1 hour ago|||
It’s curious how they solve unsolved math problems without reasoning. Maybe I have a different definition of reasoning than you.
crewindream 1 hour ago|||
Jury is still out on this one.

This needs to be routine to be given asevidence…

…Unless you know exactly how the llm was trained and then how it was applied

emp17344 1 hour ago|||
Guess what? SAT solvers have also solved unsolved math problems. Do you believe they are “reasoning”?
wizzwizz4 1 hour ago||
The question of whether a SAT solver can reason is about as interesting as the question of whether a submarine can swim. (EWD867, EWD898)
Lerc 54 minutes ago||
I think you are missing the point of that statement

It is a claim that swimming is a word that defines a context. It is an explicit statement that the question of whether a submarine can swim has nothing to do with the capability of the submarine.

If you are asking which pigeon hole we are putting something into, the answer is "The one we put it into". This is what make the question uninteresting.

If you are asking what is it about this pigeon hole that people value and does that align with the criteria that people use to decide categorisation. That very much is an interesting and complicated question.

rvba 1 hour ago|||
There is a streamer who plays Diablo 2 by listening to the AI advice and it is quite funny since it is pretty clear that most of the advice is an amalgamation of random, often incorrect advicem

I wonder if it is the same for programming or not, but I vibe coded an android app just to see if I can and it just works. It required a lot of "build the code and correct the errors" pushing though. For example requested code in kotlin but received something else.

mexicojalisco 1 hour ago||
As somebody who uses Claude heavily and heavily plays D2R it’s clear he wasn’t using Claude opus…… maybe Haiku or something. Opus isn’t as brain dead as what was being displayed
dominotw 48 minutes ago||
i love how anthropic puts out some bs like this every few weeks 'we saw some red bridge lights blinking in model weights when someone mentions sfo. Arent they just like us?"
danbruc 1 hour ago||
I personally would not look for the way they reason in the weights, at least not directly. In principle I could replace a large language model with a map from all possible input strings to output token or output token distribution without any weights. I have a hard time imagining how you would even tell, at the level of weights and activations, if the next token being the is the result of some proper reasoning or a hallucination. But those weights do not exist for the sake of it, they encode a lot of text the model has seen during training, and I would imagine this is what drives the reasoning. Can you evaluate the following polynomial ... will be related to To evaluate a polynomial ... seen in the training data. This is the level at which I would look for the reasoning, memorized patterns how to do specific things, maybe with some kind of placeholder variables for generalization. Ultimately such a structure would of course also be represented in the weights but I could imagine that this makes it unnecessary hard to understand. Or maybe not, maybe the learned patterns are so complex that they do not have a simple representation.
CodeCompost 32 minutes ago||
No, talking to itself is not reasoning.
gfody 2 hours ago||
there's a 2MP about the related paper: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l72ufA-4SzE
CrzyLngPwd 2 hours ago||
My toaster doesn't reason, and neither do the current clankers.
CamperBob2 1 hour ago|
How'd your toaster do at IMO last year?
scrollaway 50 minutes ago||
I hear he got burned pretty badly.
dominotw 45 minutes ago||
>“Mechanistic interpretability will probably never reduce large language models to a few simple equations,” Icard concluded, “but it may gradually turn deep neural networks into systems whose hidden algorithms can at least partly be understood.”

what is the basis for this optimism ?

calf 2 hours ago||
One plausible reason I thought of that we may not understand neural nets is that by their nature their power grows with ever-more complex connections and weights.

So it is like the opposite of logical systems, in that the very design of neural net architecture is a mess of parameter "spaghetti code" which renders the entire thing a metaphorical encrypted black box. The more powerful an AI/AGI the more this would be the case, and this is analogous a complexity curve.

And so any effort to make sense of such black box computation would be like trying to reverse entropy, analogous to trying to recover information lost in waste heat. And that could be one fundamental barrier to understanding both human and artificial brains alike, relative to their internal complexity.

(Just thinking aloud my handwavy pet theory recently, I am not an expert and could be totally mistaken on this)

analog31 2 hours ago||
Do LLMs have Qualia?
wat10000 1 hour ago|
Do people?
emp17344 1 hour ago||
Yes.
wat10000 1 hour ago||
How do you know?
otabdeveloper4 2 hours ago|
They don't reason.
CamperBob2 1 hour ago|
What would change your mind?
More comments...