Revealing emergent human-like conceptual representations from language prediction
Bibliographic record
Abstract
People acquire concepts through rich physical and social experiences and use them to understand and navigate the world. In contrast, large language models (LLMs), trained solely through next-token prediction on text, exhibit strikingly human-like behaviors. Are these models developing concepts akin to those of humans? If so, how are such concepts represented, organized, and related to behavior? Here, we address these questions by investigating the representations formed by LLMs during an in-context concept inference task. We found that LLMs can flexibly derive concepts from linguistic descriptions in relation to contextual cues about other concepts. The derived representations converge toward a shared, context-independent structure, and alignment with this structure reliably predicts model performance across various understanding and reasoning tasks. Moreover, the convergent representations effectively capture human behavioral judgments and closely align with neural activity patterns in the human brain, providing evidence for biological plausibility. Together, these findings establish that structured, human-like conceptual representations can emerge purely from language prediction without real-world grounding, highlighting the role of conceptual structure in understanding intelligent behavior. More broadly, our work suggests that LLMs offer a tangible window into the nature of human concepts and lays the groundwork for advancing alignment between artificial and human intelligence.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".