Come and meet him in person!
- Wednesday, February 18th, 2026, from 3:00 to 4:30 p.m., followed by a cocktail.
- Université de Montréal, Pavillon Marie-Victorin, Room D-427 : Please register via the Doodle link
Emergent symbol processing in transformer language models
Abstract: Human cognition is characterized by a remarkable ability to recombine familiar elements in novel ways, a capacity that is central to our capabilities in domains ranging from scientific inquiry to the creative arts. This capacity for compositionality has been at the heart of the longstanding debate between neural networks and symbolic models of cognition, with some arguing that innate symbolic algorithms are needed to explain this capability. In this talk, I will discuss recent work investigating the learned mechanisms that support cognitive processing in large language models and vision language models and illustrate how these mechanisms implement an emergent form of symbol processing, suggesting a surprising resolution to this longstanding debate. I will also discuss the prospect for extending these studies to investigate the computational basis of symbolic musical cognition.
Bio: Taylor Webb is an assistant professor in the department of psychology at the Université de Montréal, and an associate faculty member at the Mila Québec AI institute. His work investigates the computational basis of abstract reasoning in both artificial intelligence and the human brain.
