Entity Tracking in Language Models
Keeping track of how states of entities change as a text or dialog unfolds is a key prerequisite to discourse understanding. Yet, there have been few systematic investigations into the ability of large language models (LLMs) to track discourse entities. In this work, we present a task probing to what extent a language model can infer the final state of an entity given an English description of the initial state and a series of state-changing operations. We use this task to first investigate whether Flan-T5, GPT-3 and GPT-3.5 can track the state of entities, and find that only GPT-3.5 models, which have been pretrained on large amounts of code, exhibit this ability. We then investigate whether smaller models pretrained primarily on text can learn to track entities, through finetuning T5 on several training/evaluation splits. While performance degrades for more complex splits, we find that even when evaluated on a different set of entities from training or longer operation sequences, a finetuned model can perform non-trivial entity tracking. Taken together, these results suggest that language models can learn to track entities but pretraining on text corpora alone does not make this capacity surface.
Code (1)
Tasks
Language ModelingLanguage ModellingMethods 이 논문이 사용한 방법론
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Efficient and Interpretable Neural Models for Entity Tracking
What would it take for a natural language model to understand a novel, such as The Lord of the Rings? Among other things, such a model must be able to: (a) identify and record new characters (entities) and their attribut…
Coreference ResolutionLanguage ModelingLanguage ModellingQuestion AnsweringMET-Bench: Multimodal Entity Tracking for Evaluating the Limitations of Vision-Language and Reasoning Models
Entity tracking is a fundamental challenge in natural language understanding, requiring models to maintain coherent representations of entities. Previous work has benchmarked entity tracking performance in purely text-ba…
Natural Language UnderstandingVisual ReasoningFine-Tuning Enhances Existing Mechanisms: A Case Study on Entity Tracking
Fine-tuning on generalized tasks such as instruction following, code generation, and mathematics has been shown to enhance language models' performance on a range of tasks. Nevertheless, explanations of how such fine-tun…
Code GenerationInstruction FollowingChain and Causal Attention for Efficient Entity Tracking
This paper investigates the limitations of transformers for entity-tracking tasks in large language models. We identify a theoretical constraint, showing that transformers require at least $\log_2 (n+1)$ layers to handle…
Language ModelingLanguage ModellingEffective Use of Transformer Networks for Entity Tracking
Tracking entities in procedural language requires understanding the transformations arising from actions on entities as well as those entities' interactions. While self-attention-based pre-trained language encoders like …
Natural Language Understanding