2024/02/28 by Yuqi Ren, Renren Jin, Ren, Yuqi +5 · 4 citations
Computer Science · #Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Topic Modeling
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2402.18023
openalex publication_date 2024/02/28 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable abilities in text comprehension and logical reasoning, indicating that the text representations learned by LLMs can facilitate their language processing capabilities. In neuroscience, brain cognitive processing signals are typically utilized to study human language processing. Therefore, it is natural to ask how well the text embeddings from LLMs align with the brain cognitive processing signals, and how training strategies affect the LLM-brain alignment? In this paper, we employ Representational Similarity Analysis (RSA) to measure the alignment between 23 mainstream LLMs and fMRI signals of the brain to evaluate how effectively LLMs simulate cognitive language processing. We empirically investigate the impact of various factors (e.g., pre-training data size, model scaling, alignment training, and prompts) on such LLM-brain alignment. Experimental results indicate that pre-training data size and model scaling are positively correlated with LLM-brain similarity, and alignment training can significantly improve LLM-brain similarity. Explicit prompts contribute to the consistency of LLMs with brain cognitive language processing, while nonsensical noisy prompts may attenuate such alignment. Additionally, the performance of a wide range of LLM evaluations (e.g., MMLU, Chatbot Arena) is highly correlated with the LLM-brain similarity.