HONG KONG, May 27, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- With generative
artificial intelligence (GenAI) transforming the social interaction
landscape in recent years, large language models (LLMs), which use
deep-learning algorithms to train GenAI platforms to process
language, have been put in the spotlight. A recent study by The
Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) found that LLMs perform
more like the human brain when being trained in more similar ways
as humans process language, which has brought important insights to
brain studies and the development of AI models.
Current large language models (LLMs) mostly rely on a single
type of pretraining - contextual word prediction. This simple
learning strategy has achieved surprising success when combined
with massive training data and model parameters, as shown by
popular LLMs such as ChatGPT. Recent studies also suggest that word
prediction in LLMs can serve as a plausible model for how humans
process language. However, humans do not simply predict the next
word but also integrate high-level information in natural language
comprehension.
A research team led by Prof. Li
Ping, Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Sin Wai Kin
Foundation Professor in Humanities and Technology at PolyU, has
investigated the next sentence prediction (NSP) task, which
simulates one central process of discourse-level comprehension in
the human brain to evaluate if a pair of sentences is coherent,
into model pretraining and examined the correlation between the
model's data and brain activation. The study has been recently
published in the academic journal Sciences Advances.
The research team trained two models, one with NSP enhancement
and the other without, both also learned word prediction.
Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data were collected
from people reading connected sentences or disconnected sentences.
The research team examined how closely the patterns from each model
matched up with the brain patterns from the fMRI brain data.
It was clear that training with NSP provided benefits. The model
with NSP matched human brain activity in multiple areas much better
than the model trained only on word prediction. Its mechanism also
nicely maps onto established neural models of human discourse
comprehension. The results gave new insights into how our brains
process full discourse such as conversations. For example, parts of
the right side of the brain, not just the left, helped understand
longer discourse. The model trained with NSP could also better
predict how fast someone read - showing that simulating discourse
comprehension through NSP helped AI understand humans better.
Recent LLMs, including ChatGPT, have relied on vastly increasing
the training data and model size to achieve better performance.
Prof. Li Ping said, "There
are limitations in just relying on such scaling. Advances should
also be aimed at making the models more efficient, relying on less
rather than more data. Our findings suggest that diverse learning
tasks such as NSP can improve LLMs to be more human-like and
potentially closer to human intelligence."
He added, "More importantly, the findings show how
neurocognitive researchers can leverage LLMs to study higher-level
language mechanisms of our brain. They also promote interaction and
collaboration between researchers in the fields of AI and
neurocognition, which will lead to future studies on AI-informed
brain studies as well as brain-inspired AI."
Media Contact
Ms Annie
Wong
Senior Manager, Public Affairs
Tel: +852 3400 3853
Email: anniewy.wong@polyu.edu.hk
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