LLMs have shown impressive performance in some reasoning tasks, but what internal mechanisms do they use to solve these tasks? In a new preprint, we find evidence that abstract reasoning in LLMs depends on an emergent form of symbol processing arxiv.org/abs/2502.20332 (1/N)

Every experience is unique 🌟 light shifts, angles change, yet we recognize objects effortlessly. How do our minds do this? And (how) do they differ from machines? In our new preprint with @ericschulz.bsky.social, we review human generalization and compare it to machine generalization: osf.io/k6ect

About a month late posting this, but here's a new project with @ericschulz.bsky.social, @akjagadish.bsky.social, @marvinmathony.bsky.social and Tobias Ludwig We are using LLMs to propose cognitive models in learning and decision making data. Presenting this work at RLDM! arxiv.org/abs/2502.00879

In previous work we found that VLMs fall short of human visual cognition. To make them better, we fine-tuned them on visual cognition tasks. We find that while this improves performance on the fine-tuning task, it does not lead to models that generalize to other related tasks:

We are currently building the largest, cross-domain data set of human behavior as part of an open collaborative project. Contributions of any form are welcome, but especially experiments with meta-data from developmental, cross-cultural, or clinical studies. More details: github.com/marcelbinz/P...

In the first paper, @candemircan.bsky.social and @tankred-saanum.bsky.social use sparse autoencoders to show that LLMs can implement temporal difference learning in context. This work is together with Akshay Jagadish and @marcelbinz.bsky.social. arxiv.org/abs/2410.01280

Alignment is more than comparing similarity judgments! How well do pretrained neural networks align with humans in few-shot learning settings? Come check our poster #3904 at #NeurIPS on Wednesday to find out

🚨Join our team! We’re hiring a PhD student in Cognitive & Clinical Neuroscience 🧠 🎓 at @uni_wue & @UKW_Wuerzburg! Explore mechanisms of decision-making in healthy people & Parkinson’s using new deep brain stimulation methods. German & English required. Apply by 20 Dec! 🌟🎄 Details: shorturl.at/IcNa0