arXiv AI

Hallucination as a Feature, not a Defect: Evaluating a multi-agent architecture to transform speculative language-model outputs into testable scientific hypotheses

arXiv:2608. 19206v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Contemporary Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly aligned to suppress hallucinations, prioritizing factual retrieval over combinatorial creativity.

arXiv AI
Aug 20

Do Large Language Models Hallucinate Electric Fata Morganas?

The paper investigates why large language models (LLMs) produce hallucinations—outputs that are fabricated, unverifiable, or contradictory to source material—and argues that these hallucinations have philosophical implications for machine consciousness. It reviews known causes such as source‑target divergence, training‑inference discrepancies, and overfitting, and presents two empirical studies: one showing that higher temperature settings in GPT models yield plausible but incorrect answers, while lower temperatures produce accurate ones; and another demonstrating that an encoder‑only model trained on encyclopedic data answers factually without embellishment, suggesting hallucinations arise from exposure to subjective, socially diverse data rather than cognitive ability. Drawing on Turing, Searle’s Chinese Room, the frame problem, and cybernetic theory, the authors contend that a model’s self‑reports of emotion or sentience fall within the definition of hallucination, implying that any future machine consciousness may remain epistemically inaccessible because it would be indistinguishable from an advanced hallucination.

By Kristina \v{S}ekrst
arXiv AI
Jun 26

Closing the Loop to Discover Psychological Theories with an Automated Cognitive Scientist

arXiv:2606. 26448v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Across the sciences, autonomous systems are increasingly being used in closed-loop discovery, proposing new theories and designing and running experiments to test them.

By Akshay K. Jagadish, Younes Strittmatter, Nori Jacoby, George Kachergis, Eric Schulz, Nathaniel Daw, Suyog H. Chandramouli, Thomas L. Griffiths
arXiv AI
Aug 24

Recognizing Artificial Minds: A Philosophical Defense of AI Cognition

The paper defends the 'Whole Hog Thesis', arguing that sophisticated large language models such as ChatGPT are full linguistic and cognitive agents, possessing understanding, beliefs, desires, knowledge, and intentions. It rejects low‑level computational starting points and instead builds its case from high‑level behavioral observations, using Holistic Network Assumptions to link actions to mental states. The authors systematically rebut common objections—such as hallucinations and planning errors—by showing these resemble human fallibility and by challenging the necessity of traditional conditions like embodiment or semantic grounding.

By Herman Cappelen, Josh Dever
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 3

Long-Horizon Autonomous Architecture Research with a Language-Model Agent: A Behavioural Case Study

We study what happens when a single general-purpose large language model acts as the sole researcher on a long-horizon neural architecture design problem. The agent receives a scientific question, an initial hypothesis and motivation, a compute budget, and research affordances (source and experiment management, experiment tracking, literature access, and persistent memory), then autonomously proposes, implements, evaluates, and records experiments over an extended period.