Rethinking ChatGPT's Success: Usability and Cognitive Behaviors Enabled by Auto-regressive LLMs' Prompting

TL;DR

This paper explores how auto-regressive LLMs' prompting paradigms enhance usability and cognitive behaviors by leveraging free-form modalities and verbal contexts, improving deployment strategies and mimicking human-like cognition.

Contribution

It introduces analytical metrics for usability and demonstrates how prompting paradigms stimulate human-like cognitive behaviors in LLMs.

Findings

AR-LLMs' prompting paradigms improve task customizability and transparency.

Free-form modalities enable LLMs to mimic human cognitive behaviors.

Potential for deploying LLMs as autonomous agents and in multi-agent systems.

Abstract

Over the last decade, a wide range of training and deployment strategies for Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged. Among these, the prompting paradigms of Auto-regressive LLMs (AR-LLMs) have catalyzed a significant surge in Artificial Intelligence (AI). This paper aims to emphasize the significance of utilizing free-form modalities (forms of input and output) and verbal free-form contexts as user-directed channels (methods for transforming modalities) for downstream deployment. Specifically, we analyze the structure of modalities within both two types of LLMs and six task-specific channels during deployment. From the perspective of users, our analysis introduces and applies the analytical metrics of task customizability, transparency, and complexity to gauge their usability, highlighting the superior nature of AR-LLMs' prompting paradigms. Moreover, we examine the stimulation of diverse cognitive behaviors in LLMs through the adoption of free-form text and verbal contexts, mirroring human linguistic expressions of such behaviors. We then detail four common cognitive behaviors to underscore how AR-LLMs' prompting successfully imitate human-like behaviors using this free-form modality and channel. Lastly, the potential for improving LLM deployment, both as autonomous agents and within multi-agent systems, is identified via cognitive behavior concepts and principles.