Bowen Xu

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit impressive linguistic competence but also produce inaccurate or fabricated outputs, often called “hallucinations”. Engineering approaches usually regard hallucination as a defect to be minimized, while formal analyses have argued for its theoretical inevitability. Yet both perspectives remain incomplete when considering the conditions required for artificial general intelligence (AGI). This paper reframes “hallucination” as a manifestation of the generalization problem. Under the Closed World assumption, where training and test distributions are consistent, hallucinations may be mitigated. Under the Open World assumption, however, where the environment is unbounded, hallucinations become inevitable. This paper further develops a classification of hallucination, distinguishing cases that may be corrected from those that appear unavoidable under open-world conditions. On this basis, it suggests that “hallucination” should be approached not merely as an engineering defect but as a structural feature to be tolerated and made compatible with human intelligence.

The feeling brings the "Hard Problem" to philosophy of mind. Does the subjective feeling have a non-ignorable impact on Intelligence? If so, can the feeling be realized in Artificial Intelligence (AI)? To discuss the problems, we have to figure out what the feeling means, by giving a clear definition. In this paper, we primarily give some mainstream perspectives on the topic of the mind, especially the topic of the feeling (or qualia, subjective experience, etc.). Then, a definition of the feeling is proposed through a thought experiment, the "semi-transparent room". The feeling, roughly to say, is defined as "a tendency of changing input representations by representing its inner state". Also, a formalized definition is given. The definition does not help to verify "having the feeling", but it helps to provide evidence. Based on the definition, we think these are the hard problems of intelligence — whether the "innate" feeling plays an important role in Intelligence, whether the difference between the "simulated" feeling and the "innate" feeling will have a significant influence on Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), and, if so, where the "innate" feeling comes from and how to make an artificial agent possess it.