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Large Content And Behavior Models To Understand, Simulate, And Optimize Content And Behavior (2309.00359v4)

Published 1 Sep 2023 in cs.CL and cs.CV

Abstract: Shannon and Weaver's seminal information theory divides communication into three levels: technical, semantic, and effectiveness. While the technical level deals with the accurate reconstruction of transmitted symbols, the semantic and effectiveness levels deal with the inferred meaning and its effect on the receiver. LLMs, with their wide generalizability, make some progress towards the second level. However, LLMs and other communication models are not conventionally designed for predicting and optimizing communication for desired receiver behaviors and intents. As a result, the effectiveness level remains largely untouched by modern communication systems. In this paper, we introduce the receivers' "behavior tokens," such as shares, likes, clicks, purchases, and retweets, in the LLM's training corpora to optimize content for the receivers and predict their behaviors. Other than showing similar performance to LLMs on content understanding tasks, our trained models show generalization capabilities on the behavior dimension for behavior simulation, content simulation, behavior understanding, and behavior domain adaptation. We show results on all these capabilities using a wide range of tasks on three corpora. We call these models Large Content and Behavior Models (LCBMs). Further, to spur more research on LCBMs, we release our new Content Behavior Corpus (CBC), a repository containing communicator, message, and corresponding receiver behavior (https://behavior-in-the-wild.github.io/LCBM).

Citations (7)

Summary

  • The paper introduces a novel LCBM approach by incorporating behavior tokens into LLM training to bridge content and communication effectiveness.
  • The paper validates LCBMs with strong numerical results, outperforming models like GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 in behavior simulation tasks.
  • The paper outlines practical and theoretical implications for targeted recommendations and enhanced human-computer interaction models.

Overview of Large Content and Behavior Models

The paper "Large Content and Behavior Models to Understand, Simulate, and Optimize Content and Behavior" presents an innovative exploration into the integration of receiver behaviors into the training regime of LLMs. This approach extends traditional LLM capabilities by introducing "behavior tokens" such as likes, shares, clicks, purchases, and retweets into the model's training dataset, thereby creating what the authors call Large Content and Behavior Models (LCBMs). These models are designed to handle traditional content tasks while also predicting, understanding, and simulating human behavior in response to diverse content.

The authors ground their innovation within the longstanding framework of Shannon and Weaver's communication theory, particularly the less-addressed "effectiveness level," which involves shaping communication to achieve desired receiver behaviors. Unlike conventional LLMs focused solely on content understanding, LCBMs aim to cover the third layer of communication effectiveness, tackling both content and behavior in a unified model.

Strong Numerical Results

Training LCBMs involves the integration of visual, textual, and behavioral data across multiple corpora, including YouTube and Twitter, providing a substantial repository termed the Content Behavior Corpus (CBC). The authors employed various behavioral tasks to evaluate the efficacy of LCBMs, such as behavior simulation, content simulation, content and behavior understanding, and behavior domain adaptation.

LCBMs demonstrate competitive performance in behavior simulation tasks, outperforming state-of-the-art models like GPT-3.5 and GPT-4. Despite their smaller size, LCBMs surpass these models in predictive tasks, such as replay value and like/view ratio predictions, emphasizing their tailored architecture for incorporating behavioral data.

Practical and Theoretical Implications

The introduction of behavior tokens into LLM training represents a significant pivot in modeling human-computer interactions. On a practical level, LCBMs furnish applications in areas requiring thorough understanding and prediction of human behavior, such as targeted content recommendation, customer engagement optimization, and digital marketing strategies. The enriched model architecture allows for more nuanced simulations of potential human interactions, thereby enhancing user experiences through content personalized for predicted behavioral outcomes.

From a theoretical standpoint, this research bridges a substantial gap between communication theories and machine learning implementations, facilitating the modeling of human communication as a holistic process involving both content transmission and reception effects. This unified approach helps in understanding the broader impact of content beyond engagement metrics, laying a foundation for more robust interdisciplinary pursuits between AI development and human behavioral sciences.

Future Directions

The authors highlight the potential of LCBMs as foundational models in domains beyond traditional NLP, encouraging their application to diverse behavior-driven contexts. Future work could explore optimizing these models for real-time adaptation, refining their efficiency in predicting not only individual behaviors but also collective trends across varying social and cultural frameworks.

Moreover, expanding the dataset diversity to include more varied behavioral markers and content types could enhance LCBMs' generalizability. Additional studies could also explore hybrid integration with existing ABM frameworks, a blend that might capitalize on the strengths of both language-driven and rational agent-based modeling paradigms.

In conclusion, this paper provides a compelling vision for the future of AI, where understanding and optimizing human behavior through content is not just a goal but a readily achievable reality facilitated by sophisticated model designs like LCBMs. By expanding the traditional boundaries of LLM capabilities, this research sets a precedent for future innovations that blend communication theory with computational prowess.