Will the Real Linda Please Stand up...to Large Language Models? Examining the Representativeness Heuristic in LLMs

Although large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in understanding text and generating human-like text, they may exhibit biases acquired from training data in doing so. Specifically, LLMs may be susceptible to a common cognitive trap in human decision-making called the representativeness heuristic. This is a concept in psychology that refers to judging the likelihood of an event based on how closely it resembles a well-known prototype or typical example versus considering broader facts or statistical evidence. This work investigates the impact of the representativeness heuristic on LLM reasoning. We created REHEAT (Representativeness Heuristic AI Testing), a dataset containing a series of problems spanning six common types of representativeness heuristics. Experiments reveal that four LLMs applied to REHEAT all exhibited representativeness heuristic biases. We further identify that the model's reasoning steps are often incorrectly based on a stereotype rather than the problem's description. Interestingly, the performance improves when adding a hint in the prompt to remind the model of using its knowledge. This suggests the uniqueness of the representativeness heuristic compared to traditional biases. It can occur even when LLMs possess the correct knowledge while failing in a cognitive trap. This highlights the importance of future research focusing on the representativeness heuristic in model reasoning and decision-making and on developing solutions to address it.

Grounding Language Models for Visual Entity Recognition

We introduce AutoVER, an Autoregressive model for Visual Entity Recognition. Our model extends an autoregressive Multi-modal Large Language Model by employing retrieval augmented constrained generation. It mitigates low performance on out-of-domain entities while excelling in queries that require visually-situated reasoning. Our method learns to distinguish similar entities within a vast label space by contrastively training on hard negative pairs in parallel with a sequence-to-sequence objective without an external retriever. During inference, a list of retrieved candidate answers explicitly guides language generation by removing invalid decoding paths. The proposed method achieves significant improvements across different dataset splits in the recently proposed Oven-Wiki benchmark. Accuracy on the Entity seen split rises from 32.7% to 61.5%. It also demonstrates superior performance on the unseen and query splits by a substantial double-digit margin.

Coherent Entity Disambiguation via Modeling Topic and Categorical Dependency

Previous entity disambiguation (ED) methods adopt a discriminative paradigm, where prediction is made based on matching scores between mention context and candidate entities using length-limited encoders. However, these methods often struggle to capture explicit discourse-level dependencies, resulting in incoherent predictions at the abstract level (e.g. topic or category). We propose CoherentED, an ED system equipped with novel designs aimed at enhancing the coherence of entity predictions. Our method first introduces an unsupervised variational autoencoder (VAE) to extract latent topic vectors of context sentences. This approach not only allows the encoder to handle longer documents more effectively, conserves valuable input space, but also keeps a topic-level coherence. Additionally, we incorporate an external category memory, enabling the system to retrieve relevant categories for undecided mentions. By employing step-by-step entity decisions, this design facilitates the modeling of entity-entity interactions, thereby maintaining maximum coherence at the category level. We achieve new state-of-the-art results on popular ED benchmarks, with an average improvement of 1.3 F1 points. Our model demonstrates particularly outstanding performance on challenging long-text scenarios.

Instructed Language Models with Retrievers Are Powerful Entity Linkers

Generative approaches powered by large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated emergent abilities in tasks that require complex reasoning abilities. Yet the generative nature still makes the generated content suffer from hallucinations, thus unsuitable for entity-centric tasks like entity linking (EL) requiring precise entity predictions over a large knowledge base. We present Instructed Generative Entity Linker (INSGENEL), the first approach that enables casual language models to perform entity linking over knowledge bases. Several methods to equip language models with EL capability were proposed in this work, including (i) a sequence-to-sequence training EL objective with instruction-tuning, (ii) a novel generative EL framework based on a light-weight potential mention retriever that frees the model from heavy and non-parallelizable decoding, achieving 4$\times$ speedup without compromise on linking metrics. INSGENEL outperforms previous generative alternatives with +6.8 F1 points gain on average, also with a huge advantage in training data efficiency and training compute consumption. In addition, our skillfully engineered in-context learning (ICL) framework for EL still lags behind INSGENEL significantly, reaffirming that the EL task remains a persistent hurdle for general LLMs.