BRAMS-CRBLM Lecture Series - Taylor Webb
Dr. Taylor Webb (Universit茅 de Montr茅al) will give a lecture entitled 鈥淓mergent symbol processing in transformer language models鈥�.
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.
When: February 18th, 2026, from 3:00-4:30 p.m., followed by a cocktail
Where: Universit茅 de Montr茅al, Pavillon Marie-Victorin, Room D-427
顿别迟补颈濒蝉听聽and registration聽.
