Ziyi Wu’s scientific contributions

Language models demonstrate both quantitative improvement and new qualitative capabilities with increasing scale. Despite their potentially transformative impact, these new capabilities are as yet poorly characterized. In order to inform future research, prepare for disruptive new model capabilities, and ameliorate socially harmful effects, it is vital that we understand the present and near-future capabilities and limitations of language models. To address this challenge, we introduce the Beyond the Imitation Game benchmark (BIG-bench). BIG-bench currently consists of 204 tasks, contributed by 442 authors across 132 institutions. Task topics are diverse, drawing problems from linguistics, childhood development, math, common-sense reasoning, biology, physics, social bias, software development, and beyond. BIG-bench focuses on tasks that are believed to be beyond the capabilities of current language models. We evaluate the behavior of OpenAI's GPT models, Google-internal dense transformer architectures, and Switch-style sparse transformers on BIG-bench, across model sizes spanning millions to hundreds of billions of parameters. In addition, a team of human expert raters performed all tasks in order to provide a strong baseline. Findings include: model performance and calibration both improve with scale, but are poor in absolute terms (and when compared with rater performance); performance is remarkably similar across model classes, though with benefits from sparsity; tasks that improve gradually and predictably commonly involve a large knowledge or memorization component, whereas tasks that exhibit "breakthrough" behavior at a critical scale often involve multiple steps or components, or brittle metrics; social bias typically increases with scale in settings with ambiguous context, but this can be improved with prompting.

A riddle is a mystifying, puzzling question about everyday concepts. For example, the riddle "I have five fingers but I am not alive. What am I?" asks about the concept of a glove. Solving riddles is a challenging cognitive process for humans, in that it requires complex commonsense reasoning abilities and an understanding of figurative language. However, there are currently no commonsense reasoning datasets that test these abilities. We propose RiddleSense, a novel multiple-choice question answering challenge for benchmarking higher-order commonsense reasoning models, which is the first large dataset for riddle-style commonsense question answering, where the distractors are crowdsourced from human annotators. We systematically evaluate a wide range of reasoning models over it and point out that there is a large gap between the best-supervised model and human performance -- pointing to interesting future research for higher-order commonsense reasoning and computational creativity.