Tony Dear


2024

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Transformers Learn Transition Dynamics when Trained to Predict Markov Decision Processes
Yuxi Chen | Suwei Ma | Tony Dear | Xu Chen
Proceedings of the 7th BlackboxNLP Workshop: Analyzing and Interpreting Neural Networks for NLP

Language models have displayed a wide array of capabilities, but the reason for their performance remains a topic of heated debate and investigation. Do these models simply recite the observed training data, or are they able to abstract away surface statistics and learn the underlying processes from which the data was generated? To investigate this question, we explore the capabilities of a GPT model in the context of Markov Decision Processes (MDPs), where the underlying transition dynamics and policies are not directly observed. The model is trained to predict the next state or action without any initial knowledge of the MDPs or the players’ policies. Despite this, we present evidence that the model develops emergent representations of the underlying parameters governing the MDPs.