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Recent benchmark studies have claimed that AI has approached or even surpassed human-level performances on various cognitive tasks. However, this position paper argues that current AI evaluation paradigms are insufficient for assessing human-like cognitive capabilities. We identify a set of key shortcomings: a lack of human-validated labels, inadequate representation of human response variability and uncertainty, and reliance on simplified and ecologically-invalid tasks. We support our claims by conducting a human evaluation study on ten existing AI benchmarks, suggesting significant biases and flaws in task and label designs. To address these limitations, we propose five concrete recommendations for developing future benchmarks that will enable more rigorous and meaningful evaluations of human-like cognitive capacities in AI with various implications for such AI applications., Comment: 18 pages, 5 figures

Numbers are a basic part of how humans represent and describe the world around them. As a consequence, learning effective representations of numbers is critical for the success of large language models as they become more integrated into everyday decisions. However, these models face a challenge: depending on context, the same sequence of digit tokens, e.g., 911, can be treated as a number or as a string. What kind of representations arise from this duality, and what are its downstream implications? Using a similarity-based prompting technique from cognitive science, we show that LLMs learn representational spaces that blend string-like and numerical representations. In particular, we show that elicited similarity judgments from these models over integer pairs can be captured by a combination of Levenshtein edit distance and numerical Log-Linear distance, suggesting an entangled representation. In a series of experiments we show how this entanglement is reflected in the latent embeddings, how it can be reduced but not entirely eliminated by context, and how it can propagate into a realistic decision scenario. These results shed light on a representational tension in transformer models that must learn what a number is from text input., Comment: 16 pages, 8 figures

Benchmarks are important tools for tracking the rapid advancements in large language model (LLM) capabilities. However, benchmarks are not keeping pace in difficulty: LLMs now achieve over 90\% accuracy on popular benchmarks like MMLU, limiting informed measurement of state-of-the-art LLM capabilities. In response, we introduce Humanity's Last Exam (HLE), a multi-modal benchmark at the frontier of human knowledge, designed to be the final closed-ended academic benchmark of its kind with broad subject coverage. HLE consists of 2,700 questions across dozens of subjects, including mathematics, humanities, and the natural sciences. HLE is developed globally by subject-matter experts and consists of multiple-choice and short-answer questions suitable for automated grading. Each question has a known solution that is unambiguous and easily verifiable, but cannot be quickly answered via internet retrieval. State-of-the-art LLMs demonstrate low accuracy and calibration on HLE, highlighting a significant gap between current LLM capabilities and the expert human frontier on closed-ended academic questions. To inform research and policymaking upon a clear understanding of model capabilities, we publicly release HLE at https://lastexam.ai., Comment: 27 pages, 6 figures

Humans learn about the world, and how to act in the world, in many ways: from individually conducting experiments to observing and reproducing others' behavior. Different learning strategies come with different costs and likelihoods of successfully learning more about the world. The choice that any one individual makes of how to learn can have an impact on the collective understanding of a whole population if people learn from each other. Alan Rogers developed simulations of a population of agents to study these network phenomena where agents could individually or socially learn amidst a dynamic, uncertain world and uncovered a confusing result: the availability of cheap social learning yielded no benefit to population fitness over individual learning. This paradox spawned decades of work trying to understand and uncover factors that foster the relative benefit of social learning that centuries of human behavior suggest exists. What happens in such network models now that humans can socially learn from AI systems that are themselves socially learning from us? We revisit Rogers' Paradox in the context of human-AI interaction to probe a simplified network of humans and AI systems learning together about an uncertain world. We propose and examine the impact of several learning strategies on the quality of the equilibrium of a society's 'collective world model'. We consider strategies that can be undertaken by various stakeholders involved in a single human-AI interaction: human, AI model builder, and society or regulators around the interaction. We then consider possible negative feedback loops that may arise from humans learning socially from AI: that learning from the AI may impact our own ability to learn about the world. We close with open directions into studying networks of human and AI systems that can be explored in enriched versions of our simulation framework., Comment: Pre-print

Knowledge distillation provides an effective method for deploying complex machine learning models in resource-constrained environments. It typically involves training a smaller student model to emulate either the probabilistic outputs or the internal feature representations of a larger teacher model. By doing so, the student model often achieves substantially better performance on a downstream task compared to when it is trained independently. Nevertheless, the teacher's internal representations can also encode noise or additional information that may not be relevant to the downstream task. This observation motivates our primary question: What are the information-theoretic limits of knowledge transfer? To this end, we leverage a body of work in information theory called Partial Information Decomposition (PID) to quantify the distillable and distilled knowledge of a teacher's representation corresponding to a given student and a downstream task. Moreover, we demonstrate that this metric can be practically used in distillation to address challenges caused by the complexity gap between the teacher and the student representations., Comment: Accepted at NeurIPS 2024 Machine Learning and Compression Workshop

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting has become a widely used strategy for working with large language and multimodal models. While CoT has been shown to improve performance across many tasks, determining the settings in which it is effective remains an ongoing effort. In particular, it is still an open question in what settings CoT systematically reduces model performance. In this paper, we seek to identify the characteristics of tasks where CoT reduces performance by drawing inspiration from cognitive psychology, looking at cases where (i) verbal thinking or deliberation hurts performance in humans, and (ii) the constraints governing human performance generalize to language models. Three such cases are implicit statistical learning, visual recognition, and classifying with patterns containing exceptions. In extensive experiments across all three settings, we find that a diverse collection of state-of-the-art models exhibit significant drop-offs in performance (e.g., up to 36.3% absolute accuracy for OpenAI o1-preview compared to GPT-4o) when using inference-time reasoning compared to zero-shot counterparts. We also identify three tasks that satisfy condition (i) but not (ii), and find that while verbal thinking reduces human performance in these tasks, CoT retains or increases model performance. Overall, our results show that while there is not an exact parallel between the cognitive processes of models and those of humans, considering cases where thinking has negative consequences for human performance can help us identify settings where it negatively impacts models. By connecting the literature on human deliberation with evaluations of CoT, we offer a new tool that can be used in understanding the impact of prompt choices and inference-time reasoning.

Many approaches to robot learning begin by inferring a reward function from a set of human demonstrations. To learn a good reward, it is necessary to determine which features of the environment are relevant before determining how these features should be used to compute reward. End-to-end methods for joint feature and reward learning (e.g., using deep networks or program synthesis techniques) often yield brittle reward functions that are sensitive to spurious state features. By contrast, humans can often generalizably learn from a small number of demonstrations by incorporating strong priors about what features of a demonstration are likely meaningful for a task of interest. How do we build robots that leverage this kind of background knowledge when learning from new demonstrations? This paper describes a method named ALGAE (Adaptive Language-Guided Abstraction from [Contrastive] Explanations) which alternates between using language models to iteratively identify human-meaningful features needed to explain demonstrated behavior, then standard inverse reinforcement learning techniques to assign weights to these features. Experiments across a variety of both simulated and real-world robot environments show that ALGAE learns generalizable reward functions defined on interpretable features using only small numbers of demonstrations. Importantly, ALGAE can recognize when features are missing, then extract and define those features without any human input -- making it possible to quickly and efficiently acquire rich representations of user behavior., Comment: CoRL 2024

As deep learning systems are scaled up to many billions of parameters, relating their internal structure to external behaviors becomes very challenging. Although daunting, this problem is not new: Neuroscientists and cognitive scientists have accumulated decades of experience analyzing a particularly complex system - the brain. In this work, we argue that interpreting both biological and artificial neural systems requires analyzing those systems at multiple levels of analysis, with different analytic tools for each level. We first lay out a joint grand challenge among scientists who study the brain and who study artificial neural networks: understanding how distributed neural mechanisms give rise to complex cognition and behavior. We then present a series of analytical tools that can be used to analyze biological and artificial neural systems, organizing those tools according to Marr's three levels of analysis: computation/behavior, algorithm/representation, and implementation. Overall, the multilevel interpretability framework provides a principled way to tackle neural system complexity; links structure, computation, and behavior; clarifies assumptions and research priorities at each level; and paves the way toward a unified effort for understanding intelligent systems, may they be biological or artificial.

What do we want from machine intelligence? We envision machines that are not just tools for thought, but partners in thought: reasonable, insightful, knowledgeable, reliable, and trustworthy systems that think with us. Current artificial intelligence (AI) systems satisfy some of these criteria, some of the time. In this Perspective, we show how the science of collaborative cognition can be put to work to engineer systems that really can be called ``thought partners,'' systems built to meet our expectations and complement our limitations. We lay out several modes of collaborative thought in which humans and AI thought partners can engage and propose desiderata for human-compatible thought partnerships. Drawing on motifs from computational cognitive science, we motivate an alternative scaling path for the design of thought partners and ecosystems around their use through a Bayesian lens, whereby the partners we construct actively build and reason over models of the human and world.

Spurious patterns refer to a mathematical association between two or more variables in a dataset that are not causally related. However, this notion of spuriousness, which is usually introduced due to sampling biases in the dataset, has classically lacked a formal definition. To address this gap, this work presents the first information-theoretic formalization of spuriousness in a dataset (given a split of spurious and core features) using a mathematical framework called Partial Information Decomposition (PID). Specifically, we disentangle the joint information content that the spurious and core features share about another target variable (e.g., the prediction label) into distinct components, namely unique, redundant, and synergistic information. We propose the use of unique information, with roots in Blackwell Sufficiency, as a novel metric to formally quantify dataset spuriousness and derive its desirable properties. We empirically demonstrate how higher unique information in the spurious features in a dataset could lead a model into choosing the spurious features over the core features for inference, often having low worst-group-accuracy. We also propose a novel autoencoder-based estimator for computing unique information that is able to handle high-dimensional image data. Finally, we also show how this unique information in the spurious feature is reduced across several dataset-based spurious-pattern-mitigation techniques such as data reweighting and varying levels of background mixing, demonstrating a novel tradeoff between unique information (spuriousness) and worst-group-accuracy., Comment: Accepted at ICML 2024 Workshop on Data-centric Machine Learning Research (DMLR): Datasets for Foundation Models

Language models are transforming the ways that their users engage with the world. Despite impressive capabilities, over-consumption of language model outputs risks propagating unchecked errors in the short-term and damaging human capabilities for critical thinking in the long-term. How can we develop scaffolding around language models to curate more appropriate use? We propose selective frictions for language model experiences, inspired by behavioral science interventions, to dampen misuse. Frictions involve small modifications to a user's experience, e.g., the addition of a button impeding model access and reminding a user of their expertise relative to the model. Through a user study with real humans, we observe shifts in user behavior from the imposition of a friction over LLMs in the context of a multi-topic question-answering task as a representative task that people may use LLMs for, e.g., in education and information retrieval. We find that frictions modulate over-reliance by driving down users' click rates while minimally affecting accuracy for those topics. Yet, frictions may have unintended effects. We find marked differences in users' click behaviors even on topics where frictions were not provisioned. Our contributions motivate further study of human-AI behavioral interaction to inform more effective and appropriate LLM use., Comment: NeurIPS Workshop on Behavioral ML; non-archival

In order for AI systems to communicate effectively with people, they must understand how we make decisions. However, people's decisions are not always rational, so the implicit internal models of human decision-making in Large Language Models (LLMs) must account for this. Previous empirical evidence seems to suggest that these implicit models are accurate -- LLMs offer believable proxies of human behavior, acting how we expect humans would in everyday interactions. However, by comparing LLM behavior and predictions to a large dataset of human decisions, we find that this is actually not the case: when both simulating and predicting people's choices, a suite of cutting-edge LLMs (GPT-4o & 4-Turbo, Llama-3-8B & 70B, Claude 3 Opus) assume that people are more rational than we really are. Specifically, these models deviate from human behavior and align more closely with a classic model of rational choice -- expected value theory. Interestingly, people also tend to assume that other people are rational when interpreting their behavior. As a consequence, when we compare the inferences that LLMs and people draw from the decisions of others using another psychological dataset, we find that these inferences are highly correlated. Thus, the implicit decision-making models of LLMs appear to be aligned with the human expectation that other people will act rationally, rather than with how people actually act.

A good teacher should not only be knowledgeable, but should also be able to communicate in a way that the student understands -- to share the student's representation of the world. In this work, we introduce a new controlled experimental setting, GRADE, to study pedagogy and representational alignment. We use GRADE through a series of machine-machine and machine-human teaching experiments to characterize a utility curve defining a relationship between representational alignment, teacher expertise, and student learning outcomes. We find that improved representational alignment with a student improves student learning outcomes (i.e., task accuracy), but that this effect is moderated by the size and representational diversity of the class being taught. We use these insights to design a preliminary classroom matching procedure, GRADE-Match, that optimizes the assignment of students to teachers. When designing machine teachers, our results suggest that it is important to focus not only on accuracy, but also on representational alignment with human learners., Comment: Preprint

Conversational tones -- the manners and attitudes in which speakers communicate -- are essential to effective communication. Amidst the increasing popularization of Large Language Models (LLMs) over recent years, it becomes necessary to characterize the divergences in their conversational tones relative to humans. However, existing investigations of conversational modalities rely on pre-existing taxonomies or text corpora, which suffer from experimenter bias and may not be representative of real-world distributions for the studies' psycholinguistic domains. Inspired by methods from cognitive science, we propose an iterative method for simultaneously eliciting conversational tones and sentences, where participants alternate between two tasks: (1) one participant identifies the tone of a given sentence and (2) a different participant generates a sentence based on that tone. We run 100 iterations of this process with human participants and GPT-4, then obtain a dataset of sentences and frequent conversational tones. In an additional experiment, humans and GPT-4 annotated all sentences with all tones. With data from 1,339 human participants, 33,370 human judgments, and 29,900 GPT-4 queries, we show how our approach can be used to create an interpretable geometric representation of relations between conversational tones in humans and GPT-4. This work demonstrates how combining ideas from machine learning and cognitive science can address challenges in human-computer interactions., Comment: Accepted to Main Conference at ACL 2024

We describe a framework for using natural language to design state abstractions for imitation learning. Generalizable policy learning in high-dimensional observation spaces is facilitated by well-designed state representations, which can surface important features of an environment and hide irrelevant ones. These state representations are typically manually specified, or derived from other labor-intensive labeling procedures. Our method, LGA (language-guided abstraction), uses a combination of natural language supervision and background knowledge from language models (LMs) to automatically build state representations tailored to unseen tasks. In LGA, a user first provides a (possibly incomplete) description of a target task in natural language; next, a pre-trained LM translates this task description into a state abstraction function that masks out irrelevant features; finally, an imitation policy is trained using a small number of demonstrations and LGA-generated abstract states. Experiments on simulated robotic tasks show that LGA yields state abstractions similar to those designed by humans, but in a fraction of the time, and that these abstractions improve generalization and robustness in the presence of spurious correlations and ambiguous specifications. We illustrate the utility of the learned abstractions on mobile manipulation tasks with a Spot robot., Comment: ICLR 2024

Does language help make sense of the visual world? How important is it to actually see the world rather than having it described with words? These basic questions about the nature of intelligence have been difficult to answer because we only had one example of an intelligent system -- humans -- and limited access to cases that isolated language or vision. However, the development of sophisticated Vision-Language Models (VLMs) by artificial intelligence researchers offers us new opportunities to explore the contributions that language and vision make to learning about the world. We ablate components from the cognitive architecture of these models to identify their contributions to learning new tasks from limited data. We find that a language model leveraging all components recovers a majority of a VLM's performance, despite its lack of visual input, and that language seems to allow this by providing access to prior knowledge and reasoning., Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures

The speech-to-song illusion is a robust psychological phenomenon whereby a spoken sentence sounds increasingly more musical as it is repeated. Despite decades of research, a complete formal account of this transformation is still lacking, and some of its nuanced characteristics, namely, that certain phrases appear to transform while others do not, is not well understood. Here we provide a formal account of this phenomenon, by recasting it as a statistical inference whereby a rational agent attempts to decide whether a sequence of utterances is more likely to have been produced in a song or speech. Using this approach and analyzing song and speech corpora, we further introduce a novel prose-to-lyrics illusion that is purely text-based. In this illusion, simply duplicating written sentences makes them appear more like song lyrics. We provide robust evidence for this new illusion in both human participants and large language models., Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures

Large language models (LLMs) can pass explicit social bias tests but still harbor implicit biases, similar to humans who endorse egalitarian beliefs yet exhibit subtle biases. Measuring such implicit biases can be a challenge: as LLMs become increasingly proprietary, it may not be possible to access their embeddings and apply existing bias measures; furthermore, implicit biases are primarily a concern if they affect the actual decisions that these systems make. We address both challenges by introducing two new measures of bias: LLM Implicit Bias, a prompt-based method for revealing implicit bias; and LLM Decision Bias, a strategy to detect subtle discrimination in decision-making tasks. Both measures are based on psychological research: LLM Implicit Bias adapts the Implicit Association Test, widely used to study the automatic associations between concepts held in human minds; and LLM Decision Bias operationalizes psychological results indicating that relative evaluations between two candidates, not absolute evaluations assessing each independently, are more diagnostic of implicit biases. Using these measures, we found pervasive stereotype biases mirroring those in society in 8 value-aligned models across 4 social categories (race, gender, religion, health) in 21 stereotypes (such as race and criminality, race and weapons, gender and science, age and negativity). Our prompt-based LLM Implicit Bias measure correlates with existing language model embedding-based bias methods, but better predicts downstream behaviors measured by LLM Decision Bias. These new prompt-based measures draw from psychology's long history of research into measuring stereotype biases based on purely observable behavior; they expose nuanced biases in proprietary value-aligned LLMs that appear unbiased according to standard benchmarks.

Learning from demonstrations is a common way for users to teach robots, but it is prone to spurious feature correlations. Recent work constructs state abstractions, i.e. visual representations containing task-relevant features, from language as a way to perform more generalizable learning. However, these abstractions also depend on a user's preference for what matters in a task, which may be hard to describe or infeasible to exhaustively specify using language alone. How do we construct abstractions to capture these latent preferences? We observe that how humans behave reveals how they see the world. Our key insight is that changes in human behavior inform us that there are differences in preferences for how humans see the world, i.e. their state abstractions. In this work, we propose using language models (LMs) to query for those preferences directly given knowledge that a change in behavior has occurred. In our framework, we use the LM in two ways: first, given a text description of the task and knowledge of behavioral change between states, we query the LM for possible hidden preferences; second, given the most likely preference, we query the LM to construct the state abstraction. In this framework, the LM is also able to ask the human directly when uncertain about its own estimate. We demonstrate our framework's ability to construct effective preference-conditioned abstractions in simulated experiments, a user study, as well as on a real Spot robot performing mobile manipulation tasks., Comment: HRI 2024

How can we build AI systems that can learn any set of individual human values both quickly and safely, avoiding causing harm or violating societal standards for acceptable behavior during the learning process? We explore the effects of representational alignment between humans and AI agents on learning human values. Making AI systems learn human-like representations of the world has many known benefits, including improving generalization, robustness to domain shifts, and few-shot learning performance. We demonstrate that this kind of representational alignment can also support safely learning and exploring human values in the context of personalization. We begin with a theoretical prediction, show that it applies to learning human morality judgments, then show that our results generalize to ten different aspects of human values -- including ethics, honesty, and fairness -- training AI agents on each set of values in a multi-armed bandit setting, where rewards reflect human value judgments over the chosen action. Using a set of textual action descriptions, we collect value judgments from humans, as well as similarity judgments from both humans and multiple language models, and demonstrate that representational alignment enables both safe exploration and improved generalization when learning human values., Comment: NeurIPS 2024

Value alignment is essential for building AI systems that can safely and reliably interact with people. However, what a person values -- and is even capable of valuing -- depends on the concepts that they are currently using to understand and evaluate what happens in the world. The dependence of values on concepts means that concept alignment is a prerequisite for value alignment -- agents need to align their representation of a situation with that of humans in order to successfully align their values. Here, we formally analyze the concept alignment problem in the inverse reinforcement learning setting, show how neglecting concept alignment can lead to systematic value mis-alignment, and describe an approach that helps minimize such failure modes by jointly reasoning about a person's concepts and values. Additionally, we report experimental results with human participants showing that humans reason about the concepts used by an agent when acting intentionally, in line with our joint reasoning model.

Biological and artificial information processing systems form representations of the world that they can use to categorize, reason, plan, navigate, and make decisions. How can we measure the similarity between the representations formed by these diverse systems? Do similarities in representations then translate into similar behavior? If so, then how can a system's representations be modified to better match those of another system? These questions pertaining to the study of representational alignment are at the heart of some of the most promising research areas in contemporary cognitive science, neuroscience, and machine learning. In this Perspective, we survey the exciting recent developments in representational alignment research in the fields of cognitive science, neuroscience, and machine learning. Despite their overlapping interests, there is limited knowledge transfer between these fields, so work in one field ends up duplicated in another, and useful innovations are not shared effectively. To improve communication, we propose a unifying framework that can serve as a common language for research on representational alignment, and map several streams of existing work across fields within our framework. We also lay out open problems in representational alignment where progress can benefit all three of these fields. We hope that this paper will catalyze cross-disciplinary collaboration and accelerate progress for all communities studying and developing information processing systems., Comment: 51 pages; Working paper (changes to be made in upcoming revisions)

The increasing prevalence of artificial agents creates a correspondingly increasing need to manage disagreements between humans and artificial agents, as well as between artificial agents themselves. Considering this larger space of possible agents exposes an opportunity for furthering our understanding of the nature of disagreement: past studies in psychology have often cast disagreement as two agents forming diverging evaluations of the same object, but disagreement can also arise from differences in how agents represent that object. AI research on human-machine alignment and recent work in computational cognitive science have focused on this latter kind of disagreement, and have developed tools that can be used to quantify the extent of representational overlap between agents. Understanding how divergence and misalignment interact to produce disagreement, and how resolution strategies depend on this interaction, is key to promoting effective collaboration between diverse types of agents., Comment: Currently under review

Placing a human in the loop may abate the risks of deploying AI systems in safety-critical settings (e.g., a clinician working with a medical AI system). However, mitigating risks arising from human error and uncertainty within such human-AI interactions is an important and understudied issue. In this work, we study human uncertainty in the context of concept-based models, a family of AI systems that enable human feedback via concept interventions where an expert intervenes on human-interpretable concepts relevant to the task. Prior work in this space often assumes that humans are oracles who are always certain and correct. Yet, real-world decision-making by humans is prone to occasional mistakes and uncertainty. We study how existing concept-based models deal with uncertain interventions from humans using two novel datasets: UMNIST, a visual dataset with controlled simulated uncertainty based on the MNIST dataset, and CUB-S, a relabeling of the popular CUB concept dataset with rich, densely-annotated soft labels from humans. We show that training with uncertain concept labels may help mitigate weaknesses of concept-based systems when handling uncertain interventions. These results allow us to identify several open challenges, which we argue can be tackled through future multidisciplinary research on building interactive uncertainty-aware systems. To facilitate further research, we release a new elicitation platform, UElic, to collect uncertain feedback from humans in collaborative prediction tasks.

Conducting experiments with diverse participants in their native languages can uncover insights into culture, cognition, and language that may not be revealed otherwise. However, conducting these experiments online makes it difficult to validate self-reported language proficiency. Furthermore, existing proficiency tests are small and cover only a few languages. We present an automated pipeline to generate vocabulary tests using text from Wikipedia. Our pipeline samples rare nouns and creates pseudowords with the same low-level statistics. Six behavioral experiments (N=236) in six countries and eight languages show that (a) our test can distinguish between native speakers of closely related languages, (b) the test is reliable ($r=0.82$), and (c) performance strongly correlates with existing tests (LexTale) and self-reports. We further show that test accuracy is negatively correlated with the linguistic distance between the tested and the native language. Our test, available in eight languages, can easily be extended to other languages.

Determining the extent to which the perceptual world can be recovered from language is a longstanding problem in philosophy and cognitive science. We show that state-of-the-art large language models can unlock new insights into this problem by providing a lower bound on the amount of perceptual information that can be extracted from language. Specifically, we elicit pairwise similarity judgments from GPT models across six psychophysical datasets. We show that the judgments are significantly correlated with human data across all domains, recovering well-known representations like the color wheel and pitch spiral. Surprisingly, we find that a model (GPT-4) co-trained on vision and language does not necessarily lead to improvements specific to the visual modality. To study the influence of specific languages on perception, we also apply the models to a multilingual color-naming task. We find that GPT-4 replicates cross-linguistic variation in English and Russian illuminating the interaction of language and perception., Comment: 9 pages, 3 figures

Should we care whether AI systems have representations of the world that are similar to those of humans? We provide an information-theoretic analysis that suggests that there should be a U-shaped relationship between the degree of representational alignment with humans and performance on few-shot learning tasks. We confirm this prediction empirically, finding such a relationship in an analysis of the performance of 491 computer vision models. We also show that highly-aligned models are more robust to both natural adversarial attacks and domain shifts. Our results suggest that human-alignment is often a sufficient, but not necessary, condition for models to make effective use of limited data, be robust, and generalize well., Comment: Spotlight at NeurIPS 2023

Supervised learning typically focuses on learning transferable representations from training examples annotated by humans. While rich annotations (like soft labels) carry more information than sparse annotations (like hard labels), they are also more expensive to collect. For example, while hard labels only provide information about the closest class an object belongs to (e.g., "this is a dog"), soft labels provide information about the object's relationship with multiple classes (e.g., "this is most likely a dog, but it could also be a wolf or a coyote"). We use information theory to compare how a number of commonly-used supervision signals contribute to representation-learning performance, as well as how their capacity is affected by factors such as the number of labels, classes, dimensions, and noise. Our framework provides theoretical justification for using hard labels in the big-data regime, but richer supervision signals for few-shot learning and out-of-distribution generalization. We validate these results empirically in a series of experiments with over 1 million crowdsourced image annotations and conduct a cost-benefit analysis to establish a tradeoff curve that enables users to optimize the cost of supervising representation learning on their own datasets., Comment: Proceedings of UAI 2023

Aligning model representations to humans has been found to improve robustness and generalization. However, such methods often focus on standard observational data. Synthetic data is proliferating and powering many advances in machine learning; yet, it is not always clear whether synthetic labels are perceptually aligned to humans -- rendering it likely model representations are not human aligned. We focus on the synthetic data used in mixup: a powerful regularizer shown to improve model robustness, generalization, and calibration. We design a comprehensive series of elicitation interfaces, which we release as HILL MixE Suite, and recruit 159 participants to provide perceptual judgments along with their uncertainties, over mixup examples. We find that human perceptions do not consistently align with the labels traditionally used for synthetic points, and begin to demonstrate the applicability of these findings to potentially increase the reliability of downstream models, particularly when incorporating human uncertainty. We release all elicited judgments in a new data hub we call H-Mix.

Diffusion models are a class of generative models that learn to synthesize samples by inverting a diffusion process that gradually maps data into noise. While these models have enjoyed great success recently, a full theoretical understanding of their observed properties is still lacking, in particular, their weak sensitivity to the choice of noise family and the role of adequate scheduling of noise levels for good synthesis. By identifying a correspondence between diffusion models and a well-known paradigm in cognitive science known as serial reproduction, whereby human agents iteratively observe and reproduce stimuli from memory, we show how the aforementioned properties of diffusion models can be explained as a natural consequence of this correspondence. We then complement our theoretical analysis with simulations that exhibit these key features. Our work highlights how classic paradigms in cognitive science can shed light on state-of-the-art machine learning problems., Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures

Human similarity judgments are a powerful supervision signal for machine learning applications based on techniques such as contrastive learning, information retrieval, and model alignment, but classical methods for collecting human similarity judgments are too expensive to be used at scale. Recent methods propose using pre-trained deep neural networks (DNNs) to approximate human similarity, but pre-trained DNNs may not be available for certain domains (e.g., medical images, low-resource languages) and their performance in approximating human similarity has not been extensively tested. We conducted an evaluation of 611 pre-trained models across three domains -- images, audio, video -- and found that there is a large gap in performance between human similarity judgments and pre-trained DNNs. To address this gap, we propose a new class of similarity approximation methods based on language. To collect the language data required by these new methods, we also developed and validated a novel adaptive tag collection pipeline. We find that our proposed language-based methods are significantly cheaper, in the number of human judgments, than classical methods, but still improve performance over the DNN-based methods. Finally, we also develop `stacked' methods that combine language embeddings with DNN embeddings, and find that these consistently provide the best approximations for human similarity across all three of our modalities. Based on the results of this comprehensive study, we provide a concise guide for researchers interested in collecting or approximating human similarity data. To accompany this guide, we also release all of the similarity and language data, a total of 206,339 human judgments, that we collected in our experiments, along with a detailed breakdown of all modeling results., Comment: Accepted to ICLR 2023, final revision. https://openreview.net/forum?id=O-G91-4cMdv

Similarity judgments provide a well-established method for accessing mental representations, with applications in psychology, neuroscience and machine learning. However, collecting similarity judgments can be prohibitively expensive for naturalistic datasets as the number of comparisons grows quadratically in the number of stimuli. One way to tackle this problem is to construct approximation procedures that rely on more accessible proxies for predicting similarity. Here we leverage recent advances in language models and online recruitment, proposing an efficient domain-general procedure for predicting human similarity judgments based on text descriptions. Intuitively, similar stimuli are likely to evoke similar descriptions, allowing us to use description similarity to predict pairwise similarity judgments. Crucially, the number of descriptions required grows only linearly with the number of stimuli, drastically reducing the amount of data required. We test this procedure on six datasets of naturalistic images and show that our models outperform previous approaches based on visual information., Comment: 7 pages, 6 figures

Being able to learn from small amounts of data is a key characteristic of human intelligence, but exactly {\em how} small? In this paper, we introduce a novel experimental paradigm that allows us to examine classification in an extremely data-scarce setting, asking whether humans can learn more categories than they have exemplars (i.e., can humans do "less-than-one shot" learning?). An experiment conducted using this paradigm reveals that people are capable of learning in such settings, and provides several insights into underlying mechanisms. First, people can accurately infer and represent high-dimensional feature spaces from very little data. Second, having inferred the relevant spaces, people use a form of prototype-based categorization (as opposed to exemplar-based) to make categorical inferences. Finally, systematic, machine-learnable patterns in responses indicate that people may have efficient inductive biases for dealing with this class of data-scarce problems., Comment: 7 pages, 7 figures

Increasingly large datasets are rapidly driving up the computational costs of machine learning. Prototype generation methods aim to create a small set of synthetic observations that accurately represent a training dataset but greatly reduce the computational cost of learning from it. Assigning soft labels to prototypes can allow increasingly small sets of prototypes to accurately represent the original training dataset. Although foundational work on `less than one'-shot learning has proven the theoretical plausibility of learning with fewer than one observation per class, developing practical algorithms for generating such prototypes remains an unexplored territory. We propose a novel, modular method for generating soft-label prototypical lines that still maintains representational accuracy even when there are fewer prototypes than the number of classes in the data. In addition, we propose the Hierarchical Soft-Label Prototype k-Nearest Neighbor classification algorithm based on these prototypical lines. We show that our method maintains high classification accuracy while greatly reducing the number of prototypes required to represent a dataset, even when working with severely imbalanced and difficult data. Our code is available at https://github.com/ilia10000/SLkNN., Comment: 8 pages

Using prototype methods to reduce the size of training datasets can drastically reduce the computational cost of classification with instance-based learning algorithms like the k-Nearest Neighbour classifier. The number and distribution of prototypes required for the classifier to match its original performance is intimately related to the geometry of the training data. As a result, it is often difficult to find the optimal prototypes for a given dataset, and heuristic algorithms are used instead. However, we consider a particularly challenging setting where commonly used heuristic algorithms fail to find suitable prototypes and show that the optimal prototypes can instead be found analytically. We also propose an algorithm for finding nearly-optimal prototypes in this setting, and use it to empirically validate the theoretical results., Comment: 8 pages

We leverage what are typically considered the worst qualities of deep learning algorithms - high computational cost, requirement for large data, no explainability, high dependence on hyper-parameter choice, overfitting, and vulnerability to adversarial perturbations - in order to create a method for the secure and efficient training of remotely deployed neural networks over unsecured channels., Comment: 2 pages, 1 figure

Deep neural networks require large training sets but suffer from high computational cost and long training times. Training on much smaller training sets while maintaining nearly the same accuracy would be very beneficial. In the few-shot learning setting, a model must learn a new class given only a small number of samples from that class. One-shot learning is an extreme form of few-shot learning where the model must learn a new class from a single example. We propose the `less than one'-shot learning task where models must learn $N$ new classes given only $M

Dataset distillation is a method for reducing dataset sizes by learning a small number of synthetic samples containing all the information of a large dataset. This has several benefits like speeding up model training, reducing energy consumption, and reducing required storage space. Currently, each synthetic sample is assigned a single `hard' label, and also, dataset distillation can currently only be used with image data. We propose to simultaneously distill both images and their labels, thus assigning each synthetic sample a `soft' label (a distribution of labels). Our algorithm increases accuracy by 2-4% over the original algorithm for several image classification tasks. Using `soft' labels also enables distilled datasets to consist of fewer samples than there are classes as each sample can encode information for multiple classes. For example, training a LeNet model with 10 distilled images (one per class) results in over 96% accuracy on MNIST, and almost 92% accuracy when trained on just 5 distilled images. We also extend the dataset distillation algorithm to distill sequential datasets including texts. We demonstrate that text distillation outperforms other methods across multiple datasets. For example, models attain almost their original accuracy on the IMDB sentiment analysis task using just 20 distilled sentences. Our code can be found at $\href{https://github.com/ilia10000/dataset-distillation}{\text{https://github.com/ilia10000/dataset-distillation}}$.

Most real-world datasets, and particularly those collected from physical systems, are full of noise, packet loss, and other imperfections. However, most specification mining, anomaly detection and other such algorithms assume, or even require, perfect data quality to function properly. Such algorithms may work in lab conditions when given clean, controlled data, but will fail in the field when given imperfect data. We propose a method for accurately reconstructing discrete temporal or sequential system traces affected by data loss, using Long Short-Term Memory Networks (LSTMs). The model works by learning to predict the next event in a sequence of events, and uses its own output as an input to continue predicting future events. As a result, this method can be used for data restoration even with streamed data. Such a method can reconstruct even long sequence of missing events, and can also help validate and improve data quality for noisy data. The output of the model will be a close reconstruction of the true data, and can be fed to algorithms that rely on clean data. We demonstrate our method by reconstructing automotive CAN traces consisting of long sequences of discrete events. We show that given even small parts of a CAN trace, our LSTM model can predict future events with an accuracy of almost 90%, and can successfully reconstruct large portions of the original trace, greatly outperforming a Markov Model benchmark. We separately feed the original, lossy, and reconstructed traces into a specification mining framework to perform downstream analysis of the effect of our method on state-of-the-art models that use these traces for understanding the behavior of complex systems., Comment: Pre-print (accepted to IJCNN 2019)