[heisenburgzero]

I think some earlier NLP applications have something called "Unknown token", which they will replace any unseen word. But for recent implementations, I don't think they are being used anymore.

It still baffles me why such stochastic parrot / next token predictor, will recognize these "Unseen combinations of tokens" and reuse them in response.

[stormfather]

This helped me understand but not well enough to explain it yet: https://transformer-circuits.pub/2022/in-context-learning-an...

[heisenburgzero]

Thanks. "In-context learning" was the phrase I was looking for.

Also, I found these 2 links pretty good too. 1. http://ai.stanford.edu/blog/understanding-incontext/ 2. http://ai.stanford.edu/blog/in-context-learning/

I'm still not completely convinced. Probably need to dwell on the topic longer.

[stevenhuang]

Everything falls into place once you understand that LLMs are indeed learning hierarchical concepts inherent in the structured data it has been trained on. These concepts exist in a high dimensional latent space. Within this space is the concept of nonsense/gibberish/placeholder, which your sequence of unseen tokens map to. Then it combines this with the concept of SQL tables, resulting in hopefully the intended answer.