semantic feature vector
Semantic Structure in Large Language Model Embeddings
Kozlowski, Austin C., Dai, Callin, Boutyline, Andrei
Psychological research consistently finds that human ratings of words across diverse semantic scales can be reduced to a low-dimensional form with relatively little information loss. We find that the semantic associations encoded in the embedding matrices of large language models (LLMs) exhibit a similar structure. We show that the projections of words on semantic directions defined by antonym pairs (e.g. kind - cruel) correlate highly with human ratings, and further find that these projections effectively reduce to a 3-dimensional subspace within LLM embeddings, closely resembling the patterns derived from human survey responses. Moreover, we find that shifting tokens along one semantic direction causes off-target effects on geometrically aligned features proportional to their cosine similarity. These findings suggest that semantic features are entangled within LLMs similarly to how they are interconnected in human language, and a great deal of semantic information, despite its apparent complexity, is surprisingly low-dimensional. Furthermore, accounting for this semantic structure may prove essential for avoiding unintended consequences when steering features.
Parallel and Multi-Objective Falsification with Scenic and VerifAI
Viswanadha, Kesav, Kim, Edward, Indaheng, Francis, Fremont, Daniel J., Seshia, Sanjit A.
Falsification has emerged as an important tool for simulation-based verification of autonomous systems. In this paper, we present extensions to the Scenic scenario specification language and VerifAI toolkit that improve the scalability of sampling-based falsification methods by using parallelism and extend falsification to multi-objective specifications. We first present a parallelized framework that is interfaced with both the simulation and sampling capabilities of Scenic and the falsification capabilities of VerifAI, reducing the execution time bottleneck inherently present in simulation-based testing. We then present an extension of VerifAI's falsification algorithms to support multi-objective optimization during sampling, using the concept of rulebooks to specify a preference ordering over multiple metrics that can be used to guide the counterexample search process. Lastly, we evaluate the benefits of these extensions with a comprehensive set of benchmarks written in the Scenic language.
A La Carte Embedding: Cheap but Effective Induction of Semantic Feature Vectors
This paper introduces a la carte embed-ding, a simple and general alternative to the usual word2vec-based approaches for building such representations that is based upon recent theoretical results for GloVe-like embeddings. Our method relies mainly on a linear transfor-mation that is efficiently learnable using pretrained word vectors and linear regression. This transform is applicable on the fly in the future when a new text feature or rare word is encountered, even if only a single usage example is available. We introduce a new dataset showing how the a la carte method requires fewer examples of words in con-text to learn high-quality embeddings and we obtain state-of-the-art results on a nonce task and some unsupervised document classification tasks.