These two scientists have mapped out the insides or “reachable space” of a language model using control theory, what they discovered was extremely surprising.
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Aman Bhargava from Caltech and Cameron Witkowski from the University of Toronto to discuss their groundbreaking paper, “What’s the Magic Word? A Control Theory of LLM Prompting.” They frame LLM systems as discrete stochastic dynamical systems. This means they look at LLMs in a structured way, similar to how we analyze control systems in engineering. They explore the “reachable set” of outputs for an LLM. Essentially, this is the range of possible outputs the model can generate from a given starting point when influenced by different prompts. The research highlights that prompt engineering, or optimizing the input tokens, can significantly influence LLM outputs. They show that even short prompts can drastically alter the likelihood of specific outputs. Aman and Cameron’s work might be a boon for understanding and improving LLMs. They suggest that a deeper exploration of control theory concepts could lead to more reliable and capable language models.
What’s the Magic Word? A Control Theory of LLM Prompting (Aman Bhargava, Cameron Witkowski, Manav Shah, Matt Thomson)
LLM Control Theory Seminar (April 2024)
Society for the pursuit of AGI (Cameron founded it)
Roger Federer demo
Neural Cellular Automata, Active Inference, and the Mystery of Biological Computation (Aman)
Aman and Cameron also want to thank Dr. Shi-Zhuo Looi and Prof. Matt Thomson from from Caltech for help and advice on their research. ( and
TOC:
00:00:00 – Main Intro
00:06:25 – Bios
00:07:50 – Control Theory and Governors
00:09:37 – LLM Control Theory
00:17:17 – Federer Game
00:19:49 – Building LLM Controllers
00:20:56 – Priors in LLMs
00:28:44 – Manipulating LLMs
00:34:11 – Adversarial Examples and Robustification
00:36:54 – Model vs Software
00:39:12 – Experiments in the Paper
00:44:36 – Language as an Interstate Freeway
00:46:41 – Collective Intelligence
00:58:54 – Biomimetic Intelligence
01:03:37 – Society for the Pursuit of AGI
01:05:47 – ICLR Rejection
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