{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/probing-bert-s-priors-with-serial","title":"Probing BERT's priors with serial reproduction chains","arxiv_id":"2202.12226","date":"2022-02-24","proceeding":null,"authors":["Takateru Yamakoshi","Thomas L. Griffiths","Robert D. Hawkins"],"abstract":"Sampling is a promising bottom-up method for exposing what generative models have learned about language, but it remains unclear how to generate representative samples from popular masked language models (MLMs) like BERT. The MLM objective yields a dependency network with no guarantee of consistent conditional distributions, posing a problem for naive approaches. Drawing from theories of iterated learning in cognitive science, we explore the use of serial reproduction chains to sample from BERT's priors. In particular, we observe that a unique and consistent estimator of the ground-truth joint distribution is given by a Generative Stochastic Network (GSN) sampler, which randomly selects which token to mask and reconstruct on each step. We show that the lexical and syntactic statistics of sentences from GSN chains closely match the ground-truth corpus distribution and perform better than other methods in a large corpus of naturalness judgments. Our findings establish a firmer theoretical foundation for bottom-up probing and highlight richer deviations from human priors.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.12226v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2202.12226v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"probing-bert-s-priors-with-serial","repo_url":"https://github.com/taka-yamakoshi/telephonegame","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"language-modelling","task_name":"Language Modelling"},{"task_slug":"masked-language-modeling","task_name":"Masked Language Modeling"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"adam","method_name":"Adam"},{"method_slug":"attention","method_name":"Attention"},{"method_slug":"attention-dropout","method_name":"Attention Dropout"},{"method_slug":"bert","method_name":"BERT"},{"method_slug":"dense-connections","method_name":"Dense Connections"},{"method_slug":"dropout","method_name":"Dropout"},{"method_slug":"layer-normalization","method_name":"Layer Normalization"},{"method_slug":"linear-layer","method_name":"Linear Layer"},{"method_slug":"linear-warmup-with-linear-decay","method_name":"Linear Warmup With Linear Decay"},{"method_slug":"multi-head-attention","method_name":"Multi-Head Attention"},{"method_slug":"residual-connection","method_name":"Residual Connection"},{"method_slug":"softmax","method_name":"Softmax"},{"method_slug":"weight-decay","method_name":"Weight Decay"},{"method_slug":"wordpiece","method_name":"WordPiece"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2202.12226","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2202.12226"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/taka-yamakoshi/telephonegame","reach":null}],"summary":{"ran":1},"by_repo_kind":{"official":{"samples":1,"ran":1,"repositories":1}},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":1,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"1b07e2e09a4f7adc","entry":"UniformGibbs","repo":"taka-yamakoshi/telephonegame","repo_kind":"official","path":"model/bert.py","file_url":"https://github.com/taka-yamakoshi/telephonegame/blob/HEAD/model/bert.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran","verification_level":1,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"NONE","inline_ok":false,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"1b07e2e09a4f7adc"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}