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0 pointspas5y ago0 comments

Huh? That sounds exactly the thing that a ML system would learn quickly from the data. You probably don't even need shiny deep learning (though it helps).

Just like with the Netflix Prize stuff, where the conclusion was very similar, ie. just dump in as much data as you can, crank up the ML machinery, and it'll discover the features (better than you can engineer them) and learn what to use for recommendation ranking. And that's basically what we see with GPT-3 too. If you have some useful labels in the data it'll learn them even without supervision, because it has so many parameters, it basically sticks.

Get some papers run it through a supervised training phase where you give it a set with every paper scored based on how retracted/bad/unreplicating it is and you'll get a great predictor. Then run it to find papers that stick out, and then have a human look at them, and try to replicate some of them to fine-tune the predictor. Plus continue to feed it with new replication results.

That said, using an ML system as the gatekeeper as OP suggested is a bad idea, as it'll quickly result in the loss of proxy variables' predictive power.

Though ultimately a GPT-like system has the capacity to encode "common sense".

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thu21115y ago

Even GPT-3 doesn't encode common sense, which is why it can't do a lot of basic physical reasoning. It's "just" word prediction, albeit very impressive word prediction.

If you look at what GPT produces closely, a lot of it is simply bullshit. It sounds plausible but is wrong. That's exactly the wrong type of AI to detect plausible-but-wrong-bullshit papers, which are the most common type.

pasOP5y ago

Right, I worded that a bit lazily. There's no confidence score output from GPT-3, but if there were and if the user would select to only get high confidence results then it would shut up quickly. And that's what I meant by common sense. Of course it depends on the corpus. It's really-really just text, as you said. (It's possible that it can somehow eventually encode high level things like arithmetic, but so far it seems, even if it does have that model somewhere embedded, it doesn't know how/when to use it.)

The language model (GPT-3) doesn't have to understand physics, it just have to help extract out some semantics of the paper.

There needs to be a classifier on top trained with a labeled set of good and bad papers.

thu21115y ago

I think there is a confidence score actually! Most blogs about it don't show them but this one went into it:

https://arr.am/2020/07/25/gpt-3-uncertainty-prompts/

It's really cool how the uncertainty prompts alter the confidence associated with the next words.

I guess I'm not disagreeing with you in the abstract that a theoretically strong enough AI could identify bad papers, especially if it had some help for 'real' arithmetic. It at least could flag the most basic issues like plagiarism, cited documents that don't contain the cited fact, etc. Detecting claims that are themselves implausible seems like the hardest task possible, however. That's very close to general AI.

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0 pointspas5y ago0 comments

Huh? That sounds exactly the thing that a ML system would learn quickly from the data. You probably don't even need shiny deep learning (though it helps).

That said, using an ML system as the gatekeeper as OP suggested is a bad idea, as it'll quickly result in the loss of proxy variables' predictive power.

Though ultimately a GPT-like system has the capacity to encode "common sense".

0 comments

thu21115y ago

Even GPT-3 doesn't encode common sense, which is why it can't do a lot of basic physical reasoning. It's "just" word prediction, albeit very impressive word prediction.

pasOP5y ago

The language model (GPT-3) doesn't have to understand physics, it just have to help extract out some semantics of the paper.

There needs to be a classifier on top trained with a labeled set of good and bad papers.

thu21115y ago

I think there is a confidence score actually! Most blogs about it don't show them but this one went into it:

https://arr.am/2020/07/25/gpt-3-uncertainty-prompts/

It's really cool how the uncertainty prompts alter the confidence associated with the next words.

1 more reply

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse