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DTSTART:20260218T200000Z
DTEND:20260218T213000Z
DTSTAMP:20260114T160900Z
CREATED:20260114
LAST-MODIFIED:20260126
SUMMARY:BRAMS-CRBLM Lecture Series – Conference by Dr. Taylor Webb, Université de Montréal
DESCRIPTION:Come and meet him in person! 
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.

 
URL:https://brams.org/events/brams-crblm-lecture-series-conference-by-dr-taylor-webb-universite-de-montreal/
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CATEGORIES:Conference
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