The Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh invites you to join us for our 65th Annual Lecture Series Talk. \;Attend in person in room 1008 in the Cathedral of Learning (10th Floor) \; or visit our live stream on YouTube at \;https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrRp47ZMXD7NXO3a9Gyh2sg.
\nThe Annual Lecture Series\, the Center&rsquo\;s oldest program\, was established in 1960\, the year when Adolf Grü\;nbaum founded the Center. Each year the series consists of six to eight lectures\, about three quarters of which are given by philosophers\, historians\, and scientists from other universities.
\n\nALS &ndash\;Colin Klein
\nFriday\, October 11 \; @ 3:30 pm \;- \;6:00 pm \;EDT
\n1008 Cathedral of Learning \;
\nTitle: \;Transformers\, Representational Structure\, and the Language of Thought
\nAbstract:
\nTransformers are an extraordinarily powerful computational architecture\, applicable across a range of domains. They are\, notably\, \;the computational foundation of contemporary Large Language Models (LLMs). \;LLMs&rsquo\; facility with language have led many to draw analogies between LLMs and human cognitive processing. Drawing out the consequences of what seems like an innocuous step&mdash\;the need for positional encoding of the input to LLMs&mdash\;I argue that transformers are broad precisely because they have so little built-in representational structure. This naturally raises questions about the need for structured representations and what (if any) advantage they might have over mere representation of structure. I develop this in particular in the context of the contemporary revival of the Language of Thought hypothesis.
\nYouTube at \;https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrRp47ZMXD7NXO3a9Gyh2sg.
ORGANIZER;CN=Edouard Machery: METHOD:PUBLISH END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR