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Stress Testing Social Reasoning in Large Language Models (arxiv.org)
1 point by Jimmc414 on Jun 3, 2023 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: They tested large language models on six tasks about guessing what others think or believe, then added tricky changes meant to fool pattern-matching. The models did some tasks well but failed the tricky versions, suggesting surface shortcuts rather than real understanding of others.

Abstract · Clever Hans or Neural Theory of Mind? Stress Testing Social Reasoning in Large Language Models

The escalating debate on AI's capabilities warrants developing reliable metrics to assess machine "intelligence". Recently, many anecdotal examples were used to suggest that newer large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and GPT-4 exhibit Neural Theory-of-Mind (N-ToM); however, prior work reached conflicting conclusions regarding those abilities. We investigate the extent of LLMs' N-ToM through an extensive evaluation on 6 tasks and find that while LLMs exhibit certain N-ToM abilities, this behavior is far from being robust. We further examine the factors impacting performance on N-ToM tasks and discover that LLMs struggle with adversarial examples, indicating reliance on shallow heuristics rather than robust ToM abilities. We caution against drawing conclusions from anecdotal examples, limited benchmark testing, and using human-designed psychological tests to evaluate models.

Natalie Shapira, Mosh Levy, Seyed Hossein Alavi, Xuhui Zhou, Yejin Choi, Yoav Goldberg, Maarten Sap, Vered Shwartz
arXiv:2305.14763 · cs.CL · submitted May 24, 2023
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