Developmental approach reveals the statistical learning of Neural Language Models: Transformers generalize from the most abstract statistical patterns

arXiv:2606.27460v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this study, we use a developmental approach to investigate the statistical learning and mental representation of neural language models (NLM). A series of Generative Transformer models are trained on a synthetic grammar. The model states are saved at multiple stages in the course of training. Through analyzing how the internal representations of these models change in the developmental path, we found that NLMs acquire the most abstract global st...