CS Colloquium: Anna Rogers (ITU Copenhagen)
A Sanity Check on Emergent Properties
One of the frequent points in the mainstream narrative about large language models is that they have “emergent properties”, but there is a lot of disagreement about what that even means. If they are understood as a kind of generalization beyond training data – as something that a model does without being explicitly trained for it – I argue that we have not in fact established the existence of any such properties, and at the moment we do not even have the methodology for doing so.
Bio: Anna Rogers is tenured associate professor at the Computer Science department at IT University of Copenhagen. Her research focuses on interpretability, robustness, and sociotechnical aspects of large language models. She is one of the current editors-in-chief of ACL Rolling Review.