Charles Rathkopf | Searcharxiv

arXiv2025

Anthropocentric bias in language model evaluation

Evaluating the cognitive capacities of large language models (LLMs) requires overcoming not only anthropomorphic but also anthropocentric biases. This article identifies two types of anthropocentric bias that have been neglected: overlooking how auxiliary factors can impede LLM performance despite competence ("auxiliary oversight"), and dismissing LLM mechanistic strategies that differ from those of humans as not genuinely competent ("mechanistic chauvinism"). Mitigating these biases necessitates an empirically-driven, iterative approach to mapping cognitive tasks to LLM-specific capacities and mechanisms, which can be done by supplementing carefully designed behavioral experiments with mechanistic studies.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

From Hallucination to Reliability: Generative Modeling and the Structure of Scientific Inference

Generative AI is increasingly used in science, but is unavoidably prone to hallucination. I develop a reliabilist account of how generative AI nevertheless gives rise to new scientific knowledge. I analyze hallucinations as non-strategic misrepresentations of the target phenomenon, introduced by a model's generative activity, rather than inherited from training data. Through case studies of AlphaFold and SEEDS, I show how scientific workflows draw on pre-existing knowledge of target phenomena to filter or qualify hallucinatory outputs, thereby preventing their erroneous content from propagating into downstream inference. Finally, I show that workflows are units of epistemic evaluation in their own right.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2023

Beyond the Imitation Game: Quantifying and extrapolating the capabilities of language models

Language models demonstrate both quantitative improvement and new qualitative capabilities with increasing scale. Despite their potentially transformative impact, these new capabilities are as yet poorly characterized. In order to inform future research, prepare for disruptive new model capabilities, and ameliorate socially harmful effects, it is vital that we understand the present and near-future capabilities and limitations of language models. To address this challenge, we introduce the Beyond the Imitation Game benchmark (BIG-bench). BIG-bench currently consists of 204 tasks, contributed by 450 authors across 132 institutions. Task topics are diverse, drawing problems from linguistics, childhood development, math, common-sense reasoning, biology, physics, social bias, software development, and beyond. BIG-bench focuses on tasks that are believed to be beyond the capabilities of current language models. We evaluate the behavior of OpenAI's GPT models, Google-internal dense transformer architectures, and Switch-style sparse transformers on BIG-bench, across model sizes spanning millions to hundreds of billions of parameters. In addition, a team of human expert raters performed all tasks in order to provide a strong baseline. Findings include: model performance and calibration both improve with scale, but are poor in absolute terms (and when compared with rater performance); performance is remarkably similar across model classes, though with benefits from sparsity; tasks that improve gradually and predictably commonly involve a large knowledge or memorization component, whereas tasks that exhibit "breakthrough" behavior at a critical scale often involve multiple steps or components, or brittle metrics; social bias typically increases with scale in settings with ambiguous context, but this can be improved with prompting.

cs.CL↗