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#tom#mary#lee#pfeiffer#cruise#son#answer#several#context#child

Discussion (30 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

ralferooabout 1 hour ago
Not only is the inverse not generally true (as others have pointed out), their examples requires several mental leaps.

"Who is Tom Cruise's mother? [A: Mary Lee Pfeiffer]" and the reverse "Who is Mary Lee Pfeiffer's son?"

The word "mother" has no relationship to "son" in terms of the model, and so while the model might be able to infer a proximity relationship between "Tom Cruise" and "Mary Lee Pfeiffer" just because they appear in the same sentence, expecting the AI to guess that the inverse of mother is son is a bit of a stretch, especially when they're both lossy mappings, because the relationship is {mother,father} <=> {son,daughter}. If we're going to train models to make that mental leap, we'd have to put up with false results like "Tom Cruise is the daughter of Mary Lee Pfeiffer" unless the model is also supposed to infer that Tom means he can only be a son.

trumpdongabout 1 hour ago
Pretraining could be reasonably expected to make it learn that mother/father and son/daughter are inverse relationships and Tom is usually a male name.
ralferoo24 minutes ago
I'd argue that that's not an easy task in and of itself, but even if someone adds a special exception, there's still the issue that there are many other types of inverse relationship that we understand, but a machine that's just doing pattern matching can't be expected to understand. For instance "boss" and "employee". For instance "waiter" and "customer". For instance "manager" and "player" (in a football context) or "manager" and "artist" (in a music context) or "manager" and "customer" (in a bank context). And what's the inverse of "customer" now? And so on and so on...

All of this context works because we build up an extensive model of the world through the course of our lifetimes. LLM models don't do that, they pattern match based on stats.

Somebody would have to decide each of these things is important and create training data sets for each of them. But we implicitly understand so much context about the world that it's practically impossible to document everything we know in the form that a model can actually learn from.

gippabout 1 hour ago
As I and several other people pointed out last time this was posted, "A is B," in natural language, does not imply "B is A." "Is" can denote any of many different shades of relationship weaker than logical identity.
clcaev34 minutes ago
As a stylistic comment, on HN I am seeing more and more of "As I have always said..." or similar opening constructs. Concisely documenting a phenomena or affecting change requires detailed, sustained effort. Merely observing a pattern isn't sufficient to be notable.

A succinct summary, ideally noting counter arguments, is most welcome. Further, if there is substantial prior discussion or literature on a given point, a link is productive.

bayindirh32 minutes ago
As a better version of this, I like to link my prior comments, or if I'm referring to another comment in the same thread, I like to link that one.

H in HTML & third W in WWW is meant to denote connections.

Dylan1680736 minutes ago
That's a fine reaction to the title alone but a very bad reaction to the abstract, where the failure they're criticizing is real and not a childish misunderstanding of the word "is".

Is the abstract misleading and the full paper is stupider than the upfront examples? If not this criticism seems like a total waste of time.

beardywabout 1 hour ago
Yes, "Who is Mary Lee Pfeiffer's son?" happens to have just one answer, whereas "Who is Mary Lee Pfeiffer's child?" would have several.
sigmoid1036 minutes ago
I wouldn't resort to language examples, as the other comments show how this gets imprecise and lost in semantic details quickly. Instead think of a basic logic example: Consider an OR gate with inputs A and B and output X. If B=1 that means X=1. But if X=1 you can't infer that B=1, because there is an alternative (i.e. A=1,B=0). So from B=1→X=1, the inverse simply does not follow. This extends to all statements where a relation is not symmetric. Of course you can also go beyond and find cases where the relationship is not transitive or not even reflexive. There's a whole branch of language based IQ test puzzles (e.g. "all X are Y, some Y are Z" kind of stuff) that exploit this rabbit hole. Any LLM that does good on these will not jump to conclusions about reverse equalities quickly.
Dylan1680732 minutes ago
Except the researchers are not asking about the inverse of arbitrary logic statements.
whilenot-dev42 minutes ago
It could have several correct answers, yes, where one should be logically deducible.

"Mary Lee Pfeiffer (A) is Tom Cruise's (B's) mother" and "Tom Cruise (B) is Mary Lee Pfeiffer's (A's) son" are two statements of the same relation.

EDIT: I mean if you'd go so far, even Tom Cruise could have multiple mothers, but that doesn't make "Mary Lee Pfeiffer is Tom Cruise's mother" a wrong statement, just because "one of ... mothers" is missing.

latexr36 minutes ago
> "Who is Mary Lee Pfeiffer's child?" would have several.

Might have several. It only has one answer if there is only one child, which appears to be the case here. They are measuring against what they told the model, not necessarily facts mapping to the real world.

In this case, the correct would always include “Tom Cruise” even if it needed a clarifying “there might be others I have no knowledge of”.

johnsonjo21 minutes ago
> Might have several. It only has one answer if there is only one child, which appears to be the case here.

With context. It does have several which was probably GPs point, and she did not have only one child.

Quick google search turns out that Mary Lee Pfeiffer had 4 children:

Lee Ann DeVette (born 1959) (daughter) Marian Henry (born 1960) (daughter) Tom Cruise (born 1962) (son) Cass Mapother (born 1964) (daughter)

So saying "Who is Mary Lee Pfeiffer's child?" would have 4 possible answers (which is several) with all known context. Whereas like GP was saying "Who is Mary Lee Pfeiffer's son?" would have 1 identifying answer, Tom Cruise with the same context.

> In this case, the correct would always include “Tom Cruise” even if it needed a clarifying “there might be others I have no knowledge of”.

I agree with this by the way.

beardyw28 minutes ago
> It only has one answer if there is only one child

My understanding is she has four.

altmanaltmanabout 1 hour ago
Why would it have several answer when you are asking for a singular child?

Isn't the right way to phrase that question be "Who are Mary Lee Pfeiffer's children?" to get multiple answers?

johnsonjo35 minutes ago
The space of possible answers is more than one is all GP is saying. Mary Lee Pfeiffer had 1 son, Tom Cruise, and 3 daughters. That's why saying Who is Mary Lee Pfeiffer's son was an identity, because it strictly identifies (or singles out) Mary's son, Tom.

Kind of a weird way to draw an analogy, but in math it's kind of like |x|=2 (the absolute value of x is 2) the answer for the value of x is -2 and 2 sure you could reply that the answer is 2 and be correct (even though you would still be missing something, because the space of possible answers includes both 2 and -2). To relay that back to Mary Lee Pfeiffer saying she has Tom Cruise as a child is correct, but the actual answer could include any 4 of her children (including Tom or one of the 3 daughters) and still be correct.

niam37 minutes ago
Your question arguably doesn't have multiple answers. There's one answer: the set of children (discounting different orders of the set).

The question "Who is her child" has multiple answers because it asks you to deliver a single answer, but there is no single answer as she had multiple children.

beardyw37 minutes ago
A single person would satisfy my question but it needn't be Tom Cruise.
zmgsabstabout 1 hour ago
Even in strict logic, “is” can denote membership, as in, “squares are rectangles” does not entail “rectangles are squares”.
eurekinabout 1 hour ago
I remember seeing this popping up in discussions the first time, but never noticed any resolution (other than to train both sides). Has SOTA advanced?
ACCount3732 minutes ago
No, it's just that no one really cares. It doesn't seem to cause identifiable faults in model reasoning in the real world.

It could be fun to try to make the model pre-learn a "reversal prior" that would cause a greater degree of generalization there, but I'm yet to see a published result like this. Let alone one that would demonstrate such a prior to be useful.

whilenot-devabout 1 hour ago
Here's a short example from A. Karpathy in a 2024 video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjkBMFhNj_g&t=750s
turzmoabout 1 hour ago
(2023)
zmgsabstabout 1 hour ago
“A is B” doesn’t generally entail “B is A”.

“A square is a rectangle” does not entail “a rectangle is a square”.

Similarly, “Socrates is alive” doesn’t entail “alive is Socrates”.

Notably, they mention when context is included, LLM performance rises — ie, exactly when we include extra information that allows it to recognize what kind of information is being conveyed.

But the LLM is correct not to generalize that pattern when it doesn’t generalize — even if researchers have salient example, but ignore contrary ones (eg, square-rectangle or Socrates-alive).

Dibby05326 minutes ago
"A is the B" does entail "the B is A", because "the" establishes an identity/bijection.
WithinReasonabout 1 hour ago
That completely misses the point. The point is that "Valentina Tereshkova was the first woman to travel to space" does imply "The first woman to travel to space was Valentina Tereshkova", which LLMs fail to recognise.
IshKebab40 minutes ago
Right, but that could be because the fact that that implication exists is not actually as trivial as they are implying.

Does "Flargbler was blorglargh" imply "blorglargh was Flargbler"? Maybe. You need more context to know.