Major new system and result from the team: SOAR is an open-source self-improving genAI system pushing the frontier of ARC performances using program synthesis It relies on using LLMs as self-improving smart operators for evolutionary search

Using LLMs to advance the cognitive science of collectives Very interesting new paper by @sucholutsky.bsky.social Katherine Collins @norijacoby.bsky.social @billdthompson @roberthawkins.bsky.social arxiv.org/pdf/2506.00052

Le travail de Samuel Bianchini à partir des algorithmes de @pyoudeyer.bsky.social mis en lumière par le Jeu de paume dans son expo IA

Humans' ability to invent their own games & goals is at the core of open-ended learning. Understanding and modeling computationally how they do it would be enlightening to understand better human cognition and build open-ended AI Great step in this direction in new paper by Guy Davidson et al.

I reviewed "These Strange New Minds: How AI Learned to Talk and What It Means" by Chris Summerfield. melaniemitchell.me/EssaysConten...

Cool

Another one.

Here is a cool Flow-Lenia simulation, which is a continuous cellular automaton with two distinct features: 1. Mass conservation - sum of all activations is constant through time 2. Localized update rules - enables simulations with differently behaving matter on the same grid

Very happy that our paper received both the EvoApps best paper and the EvoStar best student paper! Congrats team!! Emergent Kin Selection of Altruistic Feeding via Non-Episodic Neuroevolution arxiv.org/abs/2411.10536

Check out @nicolasyax.bsky.social thread about our paper (co-supervised by @pyoudeyer.bsky.social) where we show that evolutionary tree reconstruction can be successfully applied to map LLMs to map relations and predict their performance! Currently at @iclr-conf.bsky.social

Generative AI is a cultural transmission technology: it plays a growing role in generation, selection and transmission of ideas/opinions in human society 🧠🔄🌐 And yet we understand very little of this dynamics at this point 🤔❓ A step forward is our #ICLR2025 paper !👇

Imagine you can compute a (very) cheap behavioural signatures for LLMs and from it 1) infer their history (which previous models they derived from) 2) build large maps to navigate spaces of 100s of models 3) predict (coarsely) their performances in benchmarks That's PhyloLM 🚀

We are starting a new major research project investigating the joint development of curiosity and metacognition in adolescents, where the Flowers lab will collaborate with @mjgruber.bsky.social 's lab at Univ. Cardiff, and Yana Fandakova at Univ. Trier !!! Open postdocs positions, see below 👇

Why Self-Determination Theory Needs Computational Modelling: The Case of Competence and Optimal Challenge by @codingconduct.cc E. Lintunen N. Aly @creativeendvs.bsky.social osf.io/n6x8s/downlo...

Forcing Diffuse Distributions out of Language Models "When LLMs are used for real-world tasks where diversity of outputs is crucial their inability to produce diffuse distributions over valid choices is a major hurdle" New method to address this challenge by Zhang et al.: arxiv.org/pdf/2404.10859

Accepting “the bitter lesson” and embracing the brain’s complexity by Dyer and Richards. Great article! www.thetransmitter.org/neuroai/acce...

"The Appeal of Insight: Why Riddles and Whodunits Captivate Us" - These studies contribute to a growing literature in which the cultural success of fictional stories is explained by their ability to tap into specific cognitive mechanisms. osf.io/preprints/ps...

Extreme stances about AI and LLMs in particular (be them deflationary or inflationary) are very likely wrong, valid and certainly not good for an healthy debate. But where do they come from? We (with @giadapistilli.com) argue that common cognitive biases may play a role: osf.io/preprints/ps...

Humans excel at estimating their own competence and progress on tasks. But can LLM agents do the same? With 🧭MAGELLAN, our agent predicts its own learning progress across vast goal spaces, even generalizing to new tasks! 📄Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2502.07709

Enabling forms of metacognition in LLMs is a frontiers challenge in #AI We've made progress in this direction with MAGELLAN 🧭: curiosity-driven LLMs learn to predict and generalize their own learning progress in very large spaces of goals 🚀 This is then used for automatic curriculum learning 👇

“The days of pretending we have binary, easy-to-recognize categories of machines & living beings are over.” — @drmichaellevin.bsky.social

From the point of view of science I've never been too excited about the Game of Life. But now I realize that what's really exciting about it is what it tells us about what we can call metaengineering... writings.stephenwolfram.com/2025/03/what...

New research project: Lluminate - an evolutionary algorithm that helps LLMs break free from generating predictable, similar outputs. Combining evolutionary principles with creative thinking strategies can illuminate the space of possibilities. www.joelsimon.net/lluminate

Very good points Thomas Wolf ! This is to address this grand challenge that various labs (and mine in particular) have been working on mechanisms enabling AI systems to have capabilities for curiosity and metacognition 🧵

This is great news that Andrew Barto and Richard Sutton were awarded the #TuringAward 🚀 Thread 🧵

A key mechanisms in human curiosity-driven exploration is the ability to assess one's own learning progress in various tasks. Can humans predict future learning progress? When no learning has even started? Yes, to some extent ! see this cool paper from X. Zhang, S. McDougle, and J. Leonard

The Dynamics of Collective Creativity in Human-AI Social Networks by S. Shiiku, R. Marjieh, M. Anglada-Tort, N. Jacoby "...over time, hybrid human-AI networks became more diverse in their creations than AI-only networks." 📖 arxiv.org/pdf/2502.17962

We're excited to announce the first Evolving Self-organisation workshop at GECCO 2025! Submission deadline: March 26, 2025 More information: evolving-self-organisation-workshop.github.io

www.linkedin.com/posts/pierre... @pyoudeyer.bsky.social

[Conférence 🎥] Revoir les interventions de @pyoudeyer.bsky.social et @droy.bsky.social, invités à la librairie #Mollat pour rencontrer 150 collégiens et collégiennes et présenter l'ouvrage "C'est (pas) moi, c'est l' #IA !" 🎦Le replay : www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONTP... 📘 Le livre : urlr.me/UHGsJS

🌍How to ground generative AI in the external world? 🤖How to turn LLMs into curious open-ended agents that spontaneously explore and set their own goals? 🤝How to align such agents on the social environment? 📺 I address these questions & our associated research program in this talk 👇