by adastra22 an hour ago
I assumed you were speaking by analogy, as LLMs do not work by interpolation, or anything resembling that. Diffusion models, maybe you can make that argument. But GPT-derived inference is fundamentally different. It works via model building and next token prediction, which is not interpolative.
As for bias, I don’t see the distinction you are making. Biases in the training data produce biases in the weights. That’s where the biases come from: over-fitting (or sometimes, correct fitting) of the training data. You don’t end up with biases at random.
What I meant was that what LLMs are doing is very similar to curve fitting, so I think it is not wrong to call it interpolation (curve fitting is a type of interpolation, but not all interpolation is curve fitting).
As for bias, sampling bias is only one many types of biases. I mean the UNIX program YES(1) has a bias towards outputting the string y despite not sampling any data. You can very easily and deliberately program a bias into everything you like. I am writing a kanji learning program using SSR and I deliberately bias new cards towards the end of the review queue to help users with long review queues empty it quicker. There is no data which causes that bias, just program it in there.
I don‘t know enough about diffusion models to know how biases can arise, but with unsupervised learning (even though sampling bias is indeed very common) you can get a bias because you are using wrong, mal-adjusted, to many parameters, etc. even the way your data interacts during training can cause a bias, heck even by random one of your parameters hits an unfortunate local maxima yielding a mal-adjusted weight, which may cause bias in your output.