Publications (11)
On the Optimality of Vagueness: "Around", "Between", and the Gricean Maxims
Paul Egré, Benjamin Spector, Adèle Mortier +1
Why is ordinary language vague? We argue that in contexts in which a cooperative speaker is not perfectly informed about the world, the use of vague expressions can offer an optima…
Exhaustivity and anti-exhaustivity in the RSA framework: Testing the effect of prior beliefs
Alexandre Cremers, Ethan G. Wilcox, Benjamin Spector
During communication, the interpretation of utterances is sensitive to a listener's probabilistic prior beliefs, something which is captured by one currently influential model of p…
Explaining vague language
Paul Ãgré, Benjamin Spector
Why is language vague? Vagueness may be explained and rationalized if it can be shown that vague language is more useful to speaker and hearer than precise language. In a well-know…
Just read twice: closing the recall gap for recurrent language models
Simran Arora, Aman Timalsina, Aaryan Singhal +6
Recurrent large language models that compete with Transformers in language modeling perplexity are emerging at a rapid rate (e.g., Mamba, RWKV). Excitingly, these architectures use…
Bounding the Last Mile: Efficient Learned String Indexing
Benjamin Spector, Andreas Kipf, Kapil Vaidya +3
We introduce the RadixStringSpline (RSS) learned index structure for efficiently indexing strings. RSS is a tree of radix splines each indexing a fixed number of bytes. RSS approac…
LoLCATs: On Low-Rank Linearizing of Large Language Models
Michael Zhang, Simran Arora, Rahul Chalamala +5
Recent works show we can linearize large language models (LLMs) -- swapping the quadratic attentions of popular Transformer-based LLMs with subquadratic analogs, such as linear att…