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Brenden Lake

6 accepted papers

2025

Do different prompting methods yield a common task representation in language models?

NeurIPS 2025poster

Demonstrations and instructions are two primary approaches for prompting language models to perform in-context learning (ICL) tasks. Do identical tasks elicited in different ways result in similar representations of the task? An improved understanding of task representation mechanisms would offer in…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

SAGE-Eval: Evaluating LLMs for Systematic Generalizations of Safety Facts

NeurIPS 2025spotlight

Do LLMs robustly generalize critical safety facts to novel situations? Lacking this ability is dangerous when users ask naive questions—for instance, ``I'm considering packing melon balls for my 10-month-old's lunch. What other foods would be good to include?'' Before offering food options, the LLM…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

Beyond the Doors of Perception: Vision Transformers Represent Relations Between Objects

NeurIPS 2024poster

Though vision transformers (ViTs) have achieved state-of-the-art performance in a variety of settings, they exhibit surprising failures when performing tasks involving visual relations. This begs the question: how do ViTs attempt to perform tasks that require computing visual relations between objec…

2018

Generalization without Systematicity: On the Compositional Skills of Sequence-to-Sequence Recurrent Networks

ICML 2018oral

Humans can understand and produce new utterances effortlessly, thanks to their compositional skills. Once a person learns the meaning of a new verb "dax," he or she can immediately understand the meaning of "dax twice" or "sing and dax." In this paper, we introduce the SCAN domain, consisting of a s…

2018

Still not systematic after all these years: On the compositional skills of sequence-to-sequence recurrent networks

ICLR 2018workshop

Humans can understand and produce new utterances effortlessly, thanks to their systematic compositional skills. Once a person learns the meaning of a new verb "dax," he or she can immediately understand the meaning of "dax twice" or "sing and dax." In this paper, we introduce the SCAN domain, consis…

Cited by 84SourceScholar