Recent comments in /f/MachineLearning

FermiAnyon t1_jebpsg3 wrote

Yeah, isotropic as in being the same in all directions. So we're probably all familiar with embedding space and the fact that the positional relationships between concepts in embedding space basically encodes information about those relationships. Isotropy in language models refers to the extent to which concepts which are actually unrelated appear unrelated in embedding space.

In other words, a model without this property might havre an embedding space that isn't large enough, but you're still teaching it things and the result is that you're cramming things into your embedding space that's too small, so unrelated concepts are no longer equidistant from other unrelated concepts, implying a relationship that doesn't really exist with the result being that the language model confuses things that shouldn't be confused.

Case in point: I asked chatgpt to give me an example build order for terrans in Broodwar and it proceeded to give me a reasonable sounding build order, except that it was mixing in units from Starcraft 2. Now no human familiar with the games would confuse units like that. I chalk that up to a lack of relevant training data, possibly mixed with an embedding space that's not large enough for the model to be isotropic.

That's my take anyway. I'm still learning ;) please someone chime in and fact check me :D

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DigThatData t1_jeb49b8 wrote

this is probably not a concern for whale vocalizations, but an issue for attempting to decode animal communications generally via LLMs is that they're probably communicating as much information (if not more) non-vocally. for example, if we wanted to train an LLM to "understand" dog communication, it'd probably be more important to provide it with signals corresponding to changes in body and face pose than vocalizations. interesting stuff in any event.

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