Quoc V. Le

AbstractThere is a failure mode in large language models that we do not have a good name for, and thatwe therefore tend not to treat seriously enough. It is not hallucination — the model is not assertingsomething false. It is not refusal — the model answers at length. It is the production of responses thatcarry the complete outward form of careful reasoning while the cognitive work that reasoning issupposed to represent has not, in any meaningful sense, occurred. We call this theatrical compliance,and we argue that it is, in practical terms, more dangerous than either of the failure modes thatcurrently dominate alignment research. This paper identifies the phenomenon, characterizes its fiveprincipal forms, explains the asymmetry that makes it particularly costly in high-stakes settings, andoutlines the design requirements for systems intended to resist it. We do not describe such a systemin detail here. Our goal is to establish theatrical compliance as a research problem in its own rightand to argue that addressing it requires instruments operating at a fundamentally different level ofabstraction than task-level prompting frameworks.Keywords: theatrical compliance, large language models, AI reasoning quality, cognitiveprocess evaluation, prompt engineering, metacognitive systems.

Convolutional Neural Networks (ConvNets) are commonly developed at a fixed resource budget, and then scaled up for better accuracy if more resources are available. In this paper, we systematically study model scaling and identify that carefully balancing network depth, width, and resolution can lead to better performance. Based on this observation, we propose a new scaling method that uniformly scales all dimensions of depth/width/resolution using a simple yet highly effective compound coefficient. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this method on scaling up MobileNets and ResNet. To go even further, we use neural architecture search to design a new baseline network and scale it up to obtain a family of models, called EfficientNets, which achieve much better accuracy and efficiency than previous ConvNets. In particular, our EfficientNet-B7 achieves state-of-the-art 84.3% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet, while being 8.4x smaller and 6.1x faster on inference than the best existing ConvNet. Our EfficientNets also transfer well and achieve state-of-the-art accuracy on CIFAR-100 (91.7%), Flowers (98.8%), and 3 other transfer learning datasets, with an order of magnitude fewer parameters. Source code is at https://github.com/tensorflow/tpu/tree/master/models/official/efficientnet.