In plain words: They took a task where a language model seemed to read people's beliefs and made tiny changes that kept the puzzle exactly the same in spirit. The model's answers flipped, showing that high average scores can hide basic failures.
Abstract
Intuitive psychology is a pillar of common-sense reasoning. The replication of this reasoning in machine intelligence is an important stepping-stone on the way to human-like artificial intelligence. Several recent tasks and benchmarks for examining this reasoning in Large-Large Models have focused in particular on belief attribution in Theory-of-Mind tasks. These tasks have shown both successes and failures. We consider in particular a recent purported success case, and show that small variations that maintain the principles of ToM turn the results on their head. We argue that in general, the zero-hypothesis for model evaluation in intuitive psychology should be skeptical, and that outlying failure cases should outweigh average success rates. We also consider what possible future successes on Theory-of-Mind tasks by more powerful LLMs would mean for ToM tasks with people.
Tomer Ullman
arXiv:2302.08399 · cs.AI, cs.CL · submitted Feb 16, 2023 · updated Mar 14, 2023
abstract · pdf · html · 11 pages, 2 figures