Belated update #2: my year at Meta FAIR through the AIM program was so nice that I’m sticking around for the long haul. I’m excited to stay at FAIR and work with @asli-celikyilmaz.bsky.social and friends on fun LLM questions; I’ll be working from the New York office so we’re sticking around.

Belated update #1: I defended my PhD about a month ago! I appreciate the warm reception from everyone who made it in-person and virtually. Thanks to my committee, @lerrelpinto.com, @togelius.bsky.social, and @markkho.bsky.social for your feedback and fun questions.

Friends and virtual acquaintances! I’m defending my PhD tomorrow morning at 11:30 AM ET. If anyone would like to watch, let me know and I’ll send you the Zoom link (and if you’re in NYC and feel compelled to join in person, that works, too!)

#CogSci2025 friends! I'm here all week and would love to chat. I'd particularly love to talk to anyone thinking about Theory of Mind and how to evaluate it better (in both minds and machines, in different settings and contexts), and about goals and their representations. Find me at:

Cool new work on localizing and removing concepts using attention heads from colleagues at NYU and Meta!

You (yes, you!) should work with Sydney! Either short-term this summer, or longer term at her nascent lab at NYU!

Fantastic new work by @johnchen6.bsky.social (with @brendenlake.bsky.social and me trying not to cause too much trouble). We study systematic generalization in a safety setting and find LLMs struggle to consistently respond safely when we vary how we ask naive questions. More analyses in the paper!

New preprint alert! We often prompt ICL tasks using either demonstrations or instructions. How much does the form of the prompt matter to the task representation formed by a language model? Stick around to find out 1/N

Another banger from Jenn, Felix, and Tomer that jumps right to the top of my reading list.

I snuck a moment with my son Logan (2.5), ever the creative goal generator, into Fig. 1: "Papa, I made a Truck Carrier Truck!" How do people compose existing concepts to create new goals? Can models generate and understand goals too? nature.com/articles/s4225

Out today in Nature Machine Intelligence! From childhood on, people can create novel, playful, and creative goals. Models have yet to capture this ability. We propose a new way to represent goals and report a model that can generate human-like goals in a playful setting... 1/N

I've been really enjoying the new Gemini 2.0-Flash as my go-to 'how do I do this', but the Experimental tag is there for a reason. The funniest failure mode I've had yet:

Made a second starter pack for folks in Computational Cognitive Science since the first one is now full! Again, let me know if you'd like to be added :) Pack I: go.bsky.app/KDTg6pv Pack II: go.bsky.app/TTjTNsu

Big, if true (Definitely true) (Not very big; might grow up to be!) (Meet Lila!!)

Repost appreciated! 🙏 ACL 2025 Ling theory & Cognitive modeling track is looking for emergency reviewers. The emergency review period is between 3/18-26, and these reviewers will be excluded from the ARR cycle. If you're interested, please sign up here! docs.google.com/forms/d/1fH7...

I, for one, enjoyed the sermon delivered to us by the high priest of deep learning

What counts as in-context learning (ICL)? Typically, you might think of it as learning a task from a few examples. However, we’ve just written a perspective (arxiv.org/abs/2412.03782) suggesting interpreting a much broader spectrum of behaviors as ICL! Quick summary thread: 1/7

Friends and frenemies! I'll be at #NeurIPS2024 all week and would love to catch up! Let's grab coffee/food and talk about goal generation and representation, how to think about goals with/in/for LLMs, cognitive science in 2025+, or give me advice for getting into (mech.) interpretability research!

New paper alert! There's a wealth of evidence that infants categorize spatial relations starting from 3-4 months onward. Can we evaluate neural networks in similar paradigms to babies, without special relational training? If so, what do we learn? 1/N (x-post from the other place)

Today! Come see talks by some of the wonderful folks who inspire this line of work, and chat with early career researchers (incl. my amazing [twitterless?] collaborator Graham Todd and I) about our posters! Room 260-262, starting now and until our intrinsic motivation runs out!

I'm on my way to #NeurIPS2023! Let's chat about any and all of the following: - How people represent (cognitive) goals, and how can machines generate such goals (presented at IMOL workshop on Saturday) - The potential benefits of richer, more structured goal representations... (1/3)