A Language Model with Limited Memory Capacity Captures Interference in Human Sentence Processing
Two of the central factors believed to underpin human sentence processing difficulty are expectations and retrieval from working memory. A recent attempt to create a unified cognitive model integrating these two factors relied on the parallels between the self-attention mechanism of transformer language models and cue-based retrieval theories of working memory in human sentence processing (Ryu and Lewis 2021). While Ryu and Lewis show that attention patterns in specialized attention heads of GPT-2 are consistent with similarity-based interference, a key prediction of cue-based retrieval models, their method requires identifying syntactically specialized attention heads, and makes the cognitively implausible assumption that hundreds of memory retrieval operations take place in parallel. In the present work, we develop a recurrent neural language model with a single self-attention head, which more closely parallels the memory system assumed by cognitive theories. We show that our model's single attention head captures semantic and syntactic interference effects observed in human experiments.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Tasks
Language ModelingLanguage ModellingRetrievalSentenceMethods 이 논문이 사용한 방법론
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Unable to Forget: Proactive lnterference Reveals Working Memory Limits in LLMs Beyond Context Length
Information retrieval in Large Language Models (LLMs) is increasingly recognized as intertwined with generation capabilities rather than mere lookup. While longer contexts are often assumed to improve retrieval, the effe…
Information RetrievalPrompt EngineeringRetrievalIn-context superposition: human-like working memory interference in large language models
Intelligent systems must maintain and manipulate task-relevant information online to adapt to dynamic environments. This capacity, known as working memory, is fundamental to human reasoning. Yet, human working memory is …
Sequential Processing in Cell-free Massive MIMO Uplink with Limited Memory Access Points
Cell-free massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) is an emerging technology that will reshape the architecture of next-generation networks. This paper considers the sequential fronthaul, whereby the access points (…
Transformers Remember First, Forget Last: Dual-Process Interference in LLMs
When large language models encounter conflicting information in context, which memories survive -- early or recent? We adapt classical interference paradigms from cognitive psychology to answer this question, testing 39 …
Proteus: Incremental Memory Activation for Long-Context Sequence Modeling
The quadratic cost of attention-based sequence models for long contexts has motivated a growing line of research on memory-based models that can compress context into a compact state. However, most existing memory models…