What do Large Language Models Learn beyond Language?

Avinash Madasu, Shashank Srivastava


Abstract
Large language models (LMs) have rapidly become a mainstay in Natural Language Processing. These models are known to acquire rich linguistic knowledge from training on large amounts of text. In this paper, we investigate if pre-training on text also confers these models with helpful ‘inductive biases’ for non-linguistic reasoning. On a set of 19 diverse non-linguistic tasks involving quantitative computations, recognizing regular expressions and reasoning over strings. We find that pretrained models significantly outperform comparable non-pretrained neural models. This remains true also in experiments with training non-pretrained models with fewer parameters to account for model regularization effects. We further explore the effect of text domain on LMs by pretraining models from text from different domains and provenances. Our experiments surprisingly reveal that the positive effects of pre-training persist even when pretraining on multi-lingual text or computer code, and even for text generated from synthetic languages. Our findings suggest a hithertho unexplored deep connection between pre-training and inductive learning abilities of language models
Anthology ID:
2022.findings-emnlp.516
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022
Month:
December
Year:
2022
Address:
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Editors:
Yoav Goldberg, Zornitsa Kozareva, Yue Zhang
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6940–6953
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.findings-emnlp.516
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.findings-emnlp.516
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Avinash Madasu and Shashank Srivastava. 2022. What do Large Language Models Learn beyond Language?. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022, pages 6940–6953, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
What do Large Language Models Learn beyond Language? (Madasu & Srivastava, Findings 2022)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.findings-emnlp.516.pdf