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Epistemology of Language Models: Do Language Models Have Holistic Knowledge? (arxiv.org)
1 point by rntn on Mar 25, 2024 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Science puzzles test whether language models treat basic scientific facts as fixed foundations and other facts as changeable, through explaining, revising, and arguing. When explaining, models avoided changing basic facts, but in other tasks they couldn't tell basic facts apart from less central ones.

Abstract

This paper investigates the inherent knowledge in language models from the perspective of epistemological holism. The purpose of this paper is to explore whether LLMs exhibit characteristics consistent with epistemological holism. These characteristics suggest that core knowledge, such as general scientific knowledge, each plays a specific role, serving as the foundation of our knowledge system and being difficult to revise. To assess these traits related to holism, we created a scientific reasoning dataset and examined the epistemology of language models through three tasks: Abduction, Revision, and Argument Generation. In the abduction task, the language models explained situations while avoiding revising the core knowledge. However, in other tasks, the language models were revealed not to distinguish between core and peripheral knowledge, showing an incomplete alignment with holistic knowledge principles.

Minsu Kim, James Thorne
arXiv:2403.12862 · cs.CL · submitted Mar 19, 2024
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