arXiv:2605.08837cs.CLcs.AI2026-05

LLMs理解抽象概念的方式与人类不同,依赖词关联而非情感体验。

The Grounding Gap: How LLMs Anchor the Meaning of Abstract Concepts Differently from Humans

论文配图:The Grounding Gap: How LLMs Anchor the Meaning of Abstract Concepts Differently from Humans
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 通过复现认知科学实验,比较模型与人类生成抽象概念属性
  • 模型与人类相关性最高仅0.37,远低于人类间0.9以上的水平
  • 大模型在明确提问时能识别语义维度,但自由生成时仍缺情感内核

抽象概念如正义、理论、可用性并无单一可感知参照物;在人类大脑中,其意义源于经验、情感与社会背景的交织。本研究通过复现认知科学中的属性生成实验,在21个前沿及开源大语言模型上探究了这一问题。结果显示,相较于人类,模型过度依赖词语关联,显著低估与情绪和内在状态相关的属性。这种系统性差异导致了显著的“语义锚定差距”:所有模型与人类响应的相关性最高仅为皮尔逊相关系数r=0.37,而人类之间相关性超过r=0.9。进一步复现语义类别评分实验发现,模型在明确任务下与人类判断更接近,且随着模型规模增大,对齐程度提升。利用稀疏自编码器(SAEs)分析模型内部表征,我们识别出与‘感官运动’和‘社会’等语义维度相关的特征。结果表明,当前模型虽能在被明确引导时恢复部分语义维度,但在自由生成中未能以类人方式调用这些表征。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Abstract concepts - justice, theory, availability - have no single perceivable referent; in the human brain, their meaning emerges from a web of experiences, affect, and social context. Do large language models (LLMs) ground abstract concepts in a similar way? We study this by replicating property-generation experiments from cognitive science on 21 frontier and open-weight LLMs. Across models and experiments, we find a consistent pattern: when compared to humans, models rely too heavily on word associations, and underproduce properties tied to emotion and internal states. This yields a large and consistent grounding gap: no model exceeds a Pearson correlation r=0.37 with human responses, compared to a human-to-human ceiling above r=0.9. To better interpret this gap, we also replicate a rating experiment on grounding categories and find that here LLMs align more closely with human judgment, and alignment improves as models get larger. We then use sparse autoencoders (SAEs) to inspect whether this information is also reflected in the models' internal features, and we do identify features connected to grounding dimensions such as "sensorimotor" and "social". These findings suggest that current LLMs can recover grounding dimensions when explicitly queried, but do not recruit them in a human-like way when words are generated freely.

抽象概念语义理解大模型机制认知对照

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