The recording of my keynote from #COLM2025 is now available!

the only kind of Rat Race I'm down for

Canadian researchers should be aware the there is a motion before the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Science and Research to force Tricouncils to hand over disaggregated peer review data on all applications: Applicant names, profiles, demographics Reviewers names, profiles, comments, and scores

Finally out in TACL: 🌎EWoK (Elements of World Knowledge)🌎: A cognition-inspired framework for evaluating basic world knowledge in language models tl;dr: LLMs learn basic social concepts way easier than physical&spatial concepts Paper: direct.mit.edu/tacl/article... Website: ewok-core.github.io

🚀 Excited to share a major update to our “Mixture of Cognitive Reasoners” (MiCRo) paper! We ask: What benefits can we unlock by designing language models whose inner structure mirrors the brain’s functional specialization? More below 🧠👇 cognitive-reasoners.epfl.ch

I'm on the job market looking for CS/ischool faculty and related positions! I'm broadly interested in doing research with policymakers and communities impacted by AI to inform and develop mitigations to harms and risks. If you've included any of my work in syllabi or policy docs please let me know!

Grateful to keynote at #COLM2025. Here's what we're missing about AI alignment: Humans don’t cooperate just by aggregating preferences, we build social processes and institutions to generate norms that make it safe to trade with strangers. AI needs to play by these same systems, not replace them.

Inspired to share some papers that I found at #COLM2025! "Register Always Matters: Analysis of LLM Pretraining Data Through the Lens of Language Variation" by Amanda Myntti et al. arxiv.org/abs/2504.01542

⭐ A thread for some cool recent work I learned about at #COLM2025, either from the paper presentations or from the keynotes!

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We are launching our Graduate School Application Financial Aid Program (www.queerinai.com/grad-app-aid) for 2025-2026. We’ll give up to $750 per person to LGBTQIA+ STEM scholars applying to graduate programs. Apply at openreview.net/group?id=Que.... 1/5

Keynote at #COLM2025: Nicholas Carlini from Anthropic "Are language models worth it?" Explains that the prior decade of his work on adversarial images, while it taught us a lot, isn't very applied; it's unlikely anyone is actually altering images of cats in scary ways.

Outstanding paper 🏆 1: Fast Controlled Generation from Language Models with Adaptive Weighted Rejection Sampling openreview.net/forum?id=3Bm...

How can an imitative model like an LLM outperform the experts it is trained on? Our new COLM paper outlines three types of transcendence and shows that each one relies on a different aspect of data diversity. arxiv.org/abs/2508.17669

Check out @mryskina.bsky.social's talk and poster at COLM on Tuesday—we present a method to identify 'semantically consistent' brain regions (responding to concepts across modalities) and show that more semantically consistent brain regions are better predicted by LLMs.

Also, if you're at COLM, come to Gillian's keynote and find out what our lab is working on!

Interested in language models, brains, and concepts? Check out our COLM 2025 🔦 Spotlight paper! (And if you’re at COLM, come hear about it on Tuesday – sessions Spotlight 2 & Poster 2)!

Attending COLM next week in Montreal? 🇨🇦 Join us on Thursday for a 2-part social! ✨ 5:30-6:30 at the conference venue and 7:00-10:00 offsite! 🌈 Sign up here: forms.gle/oiMK3TLP8ZZc...

Hi all, we are organizing this fun affinity workshop at EurIPS in Copenhagen. Feel free to present any of your previously published works before or submit abstracts / mixed-media materials!

Super super thrilled that HALoGEN, our study of LLM hallucinations and their potential origins in training data, received an ✨Outstanding Paper Award✨ at ACL! Joint work w/i Shrusti Ghela*, David Wadden, and Yejin Choi bsky.app/profile/lash...

Looking forward to attending #cogsci2025 (Jul 29 - Aug 3)! I’m especially excited to meet students who will be applying to PhD programs in Computational Ling/CogSci in the coming cycle. Please reach out if you want to meet up and chat! Email is the best way, but DM also works if you must! quick🧵:

Join Abhilasha's lab, she is an awesome researcher and mentor! I can attest, being her collaborator was great fun 🤩

Come join us in Vancouver for our ICML social! (I'll be at ICML July 15-18, any poster/talk recs welcome!)