Beyond the Imitation Game: Quantifying and extrapolating the capabilities of language models

Language models demonstrate both quantitative improvement and new qualitative capabilities with increasing scale. Despite their potentially transformative impact, these new capabilities are as yet poorly characterized. In order to inform future research, prepare for disruptive new model capabilities, and ameliorate socially harmful effects, it is vital that we understand the present and near-future capabilities and limitations of language models. To address this challenge, we introduce the Beyond the Imitation Game benchmark (BIG-bench). BIG-bench currently consists of 204 tasks, contributed by 442 authors across 132 institutions. Task topics are diverse, drawing problems from linguistics, childhood development, math, common-sense reasoning, biology, physics, social bias, software development, and beyond. BIG-bench focuses on tasks that are believed to be beyond the capabilities of current language models. We evaluate the behavior of OpenAI's GPT models, Google-internal dense transformer architectures, and Switch-style sparse transformers on BIG-bench, across model sizes spanning millions to hundreds of billions of parameters. In addition, a team of human expert raters performed all tasks in order to provide a strong baseline. Findings include: model performance and calibration both improve with scale, but are poor in absolute terms (and when compared with rater performance); performance is remarkably similar across model classes, though with benefits from sparsity; tasks that improve gradually and predictably commonly involve a large knowledge or memorization component, whereas tasks that exhibit "breakthrough" behavior at a critical scale often involve multiple steps or components, or brittle metrics; social bias typically increases with scale in settings with ambiguous context, but this can be improved with prompting.

Games for Fairness and Interpretability

As Machine Learning (ML) systems becomes more ubiquitous, ensuring the fair and equitable application of their underlying algorithms is of paramount importance. We argue that one way to achieve this is to proactively cultivate public pressure for ML developers to design and develop fairer algorithms -- and that one way to cultivate public pressure while simultaneously serving the interests and objectives of algorithm developers is through gameplay. We propose a new class of games -- ``games for fairness and interpretability'' -- as one example of an incentive-aligned approach for producing fairer and more equitable algorithms. Games for fairness and interpretability are carefully-designed games with mass appeal. They are inherently engaging, provide insights into how machine learning models work, and ultimately produce data that helps researchers and developers improve their algorithms. We highlight several possible examples of games, their implications for fairness and interpretability, how their proliferation could creative positive public pressure by narrowing the gap between algorithm developers and the general public, and why the machine learning community could benefit from them.