Phuket
The Dragon Hatchling: The Missing Link between the Transformer and Models of the Brain
Kosowski, Adrian, Uznański, Przemysław, Chorowski, Jan, Stamirowska, Zuzanna, Bartoszkiewicz, Michał
The relationship between computing systems and the brain has served as motivation for pioneering theoreticians since John von Neumann and Alan Turing. Uniform, scale-free biological networks, such as the brain, have powerful properties, including generalizing over time, which is the main barrier for Machine Learning on the path to Universal Reasoning Models. We introduce `Dragon Hatchling' (BDH), a new Large Language Model architecture based on a scale-free biologically inspired network of \$n\$ locally-interacting neuron particles. BDH couples strong theoretical foundations and inherent interpretability without sacrificing Transformer-like performance. BDH is a practical, performant state-of-the-art attention-based state space sequence learning architecture. In addition to being a graph model, BDH admits a GPU-friendly formulation. It exhibits Transformer-like scaling laws: empirically BDH rivals GPT2 performance on language and translation tasks, at the same number of parameters (10M to 1B), for the same training data. BDH can be represented as a brain model. The working memory of BDH during inference entirely relies on synaptic plasticity with Hebbian learning using spiking neurons. We confirm empirically that specific, individual synapses strengthen connection whenever BDH hears or reasons about a specific concept while processing language inputs. The neuron interaction network of BDH is a graph of high modularity with heavy-tailed degree distribution. The BDH model is biologically plausible, explaining one possible mechanism which human neurons could use to achieve speech. BDH is designed for interpretability. Activation vectors of BDH are sparse and positive. We demonstrate monosemanticity in BDH on language tasks. Interpretability of state, which goes beyond interpretability of neurons and model parameters, is an inherent feature of the BDH architecture.
An Interdisciplinary Approach to Human-Centered Machine Translation
Carpuat, Marine, Asscher, Omri, Bali, Kalika, Bentivogli, Luisa, Blain, Frédéric, Bowker, Lynne, Choudhury, Monojit, Daumé, Hal III, Duh, Kevin, Gao, Ge, Grissom, Alvin II, Karpinska, Marzena, Khoong, Elaine C., Lewis, William D., Martins, André F. T., Nurminen, Mary, Oard, Douglas W., Popovic, Maja, Simard, Michel, Yvon, François
Machine Translation (MT) tools are widely used today, often in contexts where professional translators are not present. Despite progress in MT technology, a gap persists between system development and real-world usage, particularly for non-expert users who may struggle to assess translation reliability. This paper advocates for a human-centered approach to MT, emphasizing the alignment of system design with diverse communicative goals and contexts of use. We survey the literature in Translation Studies and Human-Computer Interaction to recontextualize MT evaluation and design to address the diverse real-world scenarios in which MT is used today.