Connectionists: ChatGPT’s “understanding” of maps and infographics

[Dietterich, Thomas]

I favor a functional definition: A system understands if it responds appropriately. However, understanding can be pointwise (i.e., it works only for specific situations) or systematic (i.e., it works across an entire “region” of situations). Current LLMs “play the odds”. They can deliver pointwise understanding for frequent cases. But for rare cases, they often try to “autocorrect reality” and end up answering the wrong question. This is beautifully discussed in
McCoy, R. T., Yao, S., Friedman, D., Hardy, M., & Griffiths, T. L. (2023). Embers of Autoregression: Understanding Large Language Models Through the Problem They are Trained to Solve. ArXiv, 2309.13638(v1). http://arxiv.org/abs/2309.13638
I expect that systems whose internal representations are causally connected to the world will be more likely to understand systematically, but the evidence is not yet clear.  In the last week, these two papers appeared:

Vivian Y. Nastl, Moritz Hardt. Predictors from causal features do not generalize better to new domains. https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.09891

Jonathan Richens, Tom Everitt. Robust Agents Learn Causal World Models. ICLR 2024 https://openreview.net/forum?id=pOoKI3ouv1
--Tom
Thomas G. Dietterich, Distinguished Professor (Emeritus)
School of EECS, Oregon State University
US Mail: 1148 Kelley Engineering Center, Corvallis, OR 97331-5501 USA
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https://web.engr.oregonstate.edu/~tgd/

From: Connectionists <connectionists-bounces at mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu> On Behalf Of Iam Palatnik
Sent: Thursday, February 15, 2024 21:26
To: Gary Marcus <gary.marcus at nyu.edu>
Cc: connectionists at mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu
Subject: Re: Connectionists: ChatGPT’s “understanding” of maps and infographics

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I understand why using the word 'understanding' might seem too generous when models still have the failure modes mentioned. Some of the failure modes (like the reversal curse<https://arxiv.org/pdf/2309.12288.pdf>) can be remedied with access to tools, external context, self-reflection prompts, but there are failures that cannot yet be remedied.

I just don't know what better word to use in the sentence "GPT-4 can ___ that scrambled text better than I can". 'Understand' just flows very naturally in how we commonly use this word, even if it turns out that what GPT-4 is doing is shallower or less general than what my brain is doing. 'Parse' or 'process' doesn't seem enough because the scrambled text contains an instruction and GPT-4 does follow through with it. What word should we use for this?


On Thu, Feb 15, 2024 at 12:20 PM Gary Marcus <gary.marcus at nyu.edu<mailto:gary.marcus at nyu.edu>> wrote:
Selectively looking at a single example (which happens to involve images) and ignoring all the other language-internal failures that I and others have presented is not a particularly effective way of getting to a general truth.

More broadly, you are, in my judgement, mistaking correlation for a deeper level of understanding.

Gary


On Feb 15, 2024, at 07:05, Iam Palatnik <iam.palat at gmail.com<mailto:iam.palat at gmail.com>> wrote:

Dear all,

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Copy pasting just the above paragraph onto GPT-4 should show the kind of behavior that makes some researchers say LLMs understand something, in some form.
We already use words such as 'intelligence' in AI and 'learning' in ML. This is not to say it's the same as human intelligence/learning. It is to say it's a similar enough behavior that the same word fits, while specifically qualifying the machine word-counterpart as something different (artificial/machine).

Can this debate be solved by coining a concept such as 'artificial/machine understanding'? GPT-4 then 'machine understands' the paragraph above. It 'machine understands' arbitrary scrambled text better than humans 'human understand' it. Matrix multiplying rotational semantic embeddings of byte pair encoded tokens is part of 'machine understanding' but not of 'human understanding'. At the same time, there are plenty of examples of things we 'human understand' and GPT-4 doesn't 'machine understand', or doesn't understand without tool access and self reflective prompts.

As to the map generation example, there are multiple tasks overlaid there. The language component of GPT-4 seems to have 'machine understood' it has to generate an image, and what the contents of the image have to be. It understood what tool it has to call to create the image. The tool generated an infograph style map of the correct country, but the states and landmarks are wrong. The markers are on the wrong cities and some of the drawings are bad. Is it too far fetched to say GPT-4 'machine understood' the assignment (generating a map with markers in the style of infograph), but its image generation component (Dall-E) is bad at detailed accurate geography knowledge?

I'm also confused why the linguistic understanding capabilities of GPT-4 are being tested by asking Dall-E 3 to generate images. Aren't these two completely separate models, and GPT-4 just function-calls Dall-E3 for image generation? Isn't this actually a sign GPT-4 did its job by 'machine understanding' what the user wanted, making the correct function call, creating and sending the correct prompt to Dall-E 3, but Dall-E 3 fumbled it because it's not good at generating detailed accurate maps?

Cheers,

Iam

On Thu, Feb 15, 2024 at 5:20 AM Gary Marcus <gary.marcus at nyu.edu<mailto:gary.marcus at nyu.edu>> wrote:
I am having a genuinely hard time comprehending some of the claims recently made in this forum. (Not one of which engaged with any of the specific examples or texts I linked.)

Here’s yet another example, a dialog about geography that was just sent to me by entrepreneur Phil Libin. Do we really want to call outputs like these (to two prompts, with three generated responses zoomed in below) understanding?

In what sense do these responses exemplify the word “understanding”?

I am genuinely baffled. To me a better word would be “approximations”, and poor approximations at that.

Worse, I don’t see any AI system on the horizon that could reliably do better, across a broad range of related questions. If these kinds of outputs are any indication at all, we are still a very long away from reliable general-purpose AI.

Gary




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