Large Language Models as Neurolinguistic Subjects: Identifying Internal Representations for Form and Meaning

This study investigates the linguistic understanding of Large Language Models (LLMs) regarding signifier (form) and signified (meaning) by distinguishing two LLM evaluation paradigms: psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic. Traditional psycholinguistic evaluations often reflect statistical biases that may misrepresent LLMs' true linguistic capabilities. We introduce a neurolinguistic approach, utilizing a novel method that combines minimal pair and diagnostic probing to analyze activation patterns across model layers. This method allows for a detailed examination of how LLMs represent form and meaning, and whether these representations are consistent across languages. Our contributions are three-fold: (1) We compare neurolinguistic and psycholinguistic methods, revealing distinct patterns in LLM assessment; (2) We demonstrate that LLMs exhibit higher competence in form compared to meaning, with the latter largely correlated to the former; (3) We present new conceptual minimal pair datasets for Chinese (COMPS-ZH) and German (COMPS-DE), complementing existing English datasets.

Remote Sensing-Based Assessment of Economic Development

The goal of our project is to use satellite data (including nighttime light data and remote sensing images) to give us some statistical estimation of the economic development level of a selected area (Singapore). Findings from the project could inform policymakers about areas needing intervention or support for economic development initiatives. Insights gained might aid in targeted policy formulation for infrastructure, agriculture, urban planning, or resource management.

Decoding Probing: Revealing Internal Linguistic Structures in Neural Language Models using Minimal Pairs

Inspired by cognitive neuroscience studies, we introduce a novel `decoding probing' method that uses minimal pairs benchmark (BLiMP) to probe internal linguistic characteristics in neural language models layer by layer. By treating the language model as the `brain' and its representations as `neural activations', we decode grammaticality labels of minimal pairs from the intermediate layers' representations. This approach reveals: 1) Self-supervised language models capture abstract linguistic structures in intermediate layers that GloVe and RNN language models cannot learn. 2) Information about syntactic grammaticality is robustly captured through the first third layers of GPT-2 and also distributed in later layers. As sentence complexity increases, more layers are required for learning grammatical capabilities. 3) Morphological and semantics/syntax interface-related features are harder to capture than syntax. 4) For Transformer-based models, both embeddings and attentions capture grammatical features but show distinct patterns. Different attention heads exhibit similar tendencies toward various linguistic phenomena, but with varied contributions.

Survey on deep learning in multimodal medical imaging for cancer detection

The task of multimodal cancer detection is to determine the locations and categories of lesions by using different imaging techniques, which is one of the key research methods for cancer diagnosis. Recently, deep learning-based object detection has made significant developments due to its strength in semantic feature extraction and nonlinear function fitting. However, multimodal cancer detection remains challenging due to morphological differences in lesions, interpatient variability, difficulty in annotation, and imaging artifacts. In this survey, we mainly investigate over 150 papers in recent years with respect to multimodal cancer detection using deep learning, with a focus on datasets and solutions to various challenges such as data annotation, variance between classes, small-scale lesions, and occlusion. We also provide an overview of the advantages and drawbacks of each approach. Finally, we discuss the current scope of work and provide directions for the future development of multimodal cancer detection.

Do self-supervised speech and language models extract similar representations as human brain?

Speech and language models trained through self-supervised learning (SSL) demonstrate strong alignment with brain activity during speech and language perception. However, given their distinct training modalities, it remains unclear whether they correlate with the same neural aspects. We directly address this question by evaluating the brain prediction performance of two representative SSL models, Wav2Vec2.0 and GPT-2, designed for speech and language tasks. Our findings reveal that both models accurately predict speech responses in the auditory cortex, with a significant correlation between their brain predictions. Notably, shared speech contextual information between Wav2Vec2.0 and GPT-2 accounts for the majority of explained variance in brain activity, surpassing static semantic and lower-level acoustic-phonetic information. These results underscore the convergence of speech contextual representations in SSL models and their alignment with the neural network underlying speech perception, offering valuable insights into both SSL models and the neural basis of speech and language processing.