Elements of World Knowledge (EWOK): A cognition-inspired framework for evaluating basic world knowledge in language models

The ability to build and leverage world models is essential for a general-purpose AI agent. Testing such capabilities is hard, in part because the building blocks of world models are ill-defined. We present Elements of World Knowledge (EWOK), a framework for evaluating world modeling in language models by testing their ability to use knowledge of a concept to match a target text with a plausible/implausible context. EWOK targets specific concepts from multiple knowledge domains known to be vital for world modeling in humans. Domains range from social interactions (help/hinder) to spatial relations (left/right). Both, contexts and targets are minimal pairs. Objects, agents, and locations in the items can be flexibly filled in enabling easy generation of multiple controlled datasets. We then introduce EWOK-CORE-1.0, a dataset of 4,374 items covering 11 world knowledge domains. We evaluate 20 openweights large language models (1.3B--70B parameters) across a battery of evaluation paradigms along with a human norming study comprising 12,480 measurements. The overall performance of all tested models is worse than human performance, with results varying drastically across domains. These data highlight simple cases where even large models fail and present rich avenues for targeted research on LLM world modeling capabilities.

Comparing Plausibility Estimates in Base and Instruction-Tuned Large Language Models

Instruction-tuned LLMs can respond to explicit queries formulated as prompts, which greatly facilitates interaction with human users. However, prompt-based approaches might not always be able to tap into the wealth of implicit knowledge acquired by LLMs during pre-training. This paper presents a comprehensive study of ways to evaluate semantic plausibility in LLMs. We compare base and instruction-tuned LLM performance on an English sentence plausibility task via (a) explicit prompting and (b) implicit estimation via direct readout of the probabilities models assign to strings. Experiment 1 shows that, across model architectures and plausibility datasets, (i) log likelihood ($\textit{LL}$) scores are the most reliable indicator of sentence plausibility, with zero-shot prompting yielding inconsistent and typically poor results; (ii) $\textit{LL}$-based performance is still inferior to human performance; (iii) instruction-tuned models have worse $\textit{LL}$-based performance than base models. In Experiment 2, we show that $\textit{LL}$ scores across models are modulated by context in the expected way, showing high performance on three metrics of context-sensitive plausibility and providing a direct match to explicit human plausibility judgments. Overall, $\textit{LL}$ estimates remain a more reliable measure of plausibility in LLMs than direct prompting.

Running cognitive evaluations on large language models: The do's and the don'ts

In this paper, I describe methodological considerations for studies that aim to evaluate the cognitive capacities of large language models (LLMs) using language-based behavioral assessments. Drawing on three case studies from the literature (a commonsense knowledge benchmark, a theory of mind evaluation, and a test of syntactic agreement), I describe common pitfalls that might arise when applying a cognitive test to an LLM. I then list 10 do's and don'ts that should help design high-quality cognitive evaluations for AI systems. I conclude by discussing four areas where the do's and don'ts are currently under active discussion -- prompt sensitivity, cultural and linguistic diversity, using LLMs as research assistants, and running evaluations on open vs. closed LLMs. Overall, the goal of the paper is to contribute to the broader discussion of best practices in the rapidly growing field of AI Psychology.

Dissociating language and thought in large language models: a cognitive perspective

Today's large language models (LLMs) routinely generate coherent, grammatical and seemingly meaningful paragraphs of text. This achievement has led to speculation that these networks are -- or will soon become -- "thinking machines", capable of performing tasks that require abstract knowledge and reasoning. Here, we review the capabilities of LLMs by considering their performance on two different aspects of language use: 'formal linguistic competence', which includes knowledge of rules and patterns of a given language, and 'functional linguistic competence', a host of cognitive abilities required for language understanding and use in the real world. Drawing on evidence from cognitive neuroscience, we show that formal competence in humans relies on specialized language processing mechanisms, whereas functional competence recruits multiple extralinguistic capacities that comprise human thought, such as formal reasoning, world knowledge, situation modeling, and social cognition. In line with this distinction, LLMs show impressive (although imperfect) performance on tasks requiring formal linguistic competence, but fail on many tests requiring functional competence. Based on this evidence, we argue that (1) contemporary LLMs should be taken seriously as models of formal linguistic skills; (2) models that master real-life language use would need to incorporate or develop not only a core language module, but also multiple non-language-specific cognitive capacities required for modeling thought. Overall, a distinction between formal and functional linguistic competence helps clarify the discourse surrounding LLMs' potential and provides a path toward building models that understand and use language in human-like ways.

Event knowledge in large language models: the gap between the impossible and the unlikely

People constantly use language to learn about the world. Computational linguists have capitalized on this fact to build large language models (LLMs) that acquire co-occurrence-based knowledge from language corpora. LLMs achieve impressive performance on many tasks, but the robustness of their world knowledge has been questioned. Here, we ask: do LLMs acquire generalized knowledge about real-world events? Using curated sets of minimal sentence pairs (n=1215), we tested whether LLMs are more likely to generate plausible event descriptions compared to their implausible counterparts. We found that LLMs systematically distinguish possible and impossible events (The teacher bought the laptop vs. The laptop bought the teacher) but fall short of human performance when distinguishing likely and unlikely events (The nanny tutored the boy vs. The boy tutored the nanny). In follow-up analyses, we show that (i) LLM scores are driven by both plausibility and surface-level sentence features, (ii) LLMs generalize well across syntactic sentence variants (active vs passive) but less well across semantic sentence variants (synonymous sentences), (iii) some, but not all LLM deviations from ground-truth labels align with crowdsourced human judgments, and (iv) explicit event plausibility information emerges in middle LLM layers and remains high thereafter. Overall, our analyses reveal a gap in LLMs' event knowledge, highlighting their limitations as generalized knowledge bases. We conclude by speculating that the differential performance on impossible vs. unlikely events is not a temporary setback but an inherent property of LLMs, reflecting a fundamental difference between linguistic knowledge and world knowledge in intelligent systems.

Probing artificial neural networks: insights from neuroscience

A major challenge in both neuroscience and machine learning is the development of useful tools for understanding complex information processing systems. One such tool is probes, i.e., supervised models that relate features of interest to activation patterns arising in biological or artificial neural networks. Neuroscience has paved the way in using such models through numerous studies conducted in recent decades. In this work, we draw insights from neuroscience to help guide probing research in machine learning. We highlight two important design choices for probes $-$ direction and expressivity $-$ and relate these choices to research goals. We argue that specific research goals play a paramount role when designing a probe and encourage future probing studies to be explicit in stating these goals.