New paper! LLM memory keeps improving, but this makes them *worse* as user sims. If we want to build models that can, e.g., simulate realistic students to train chatbots to be better teachers, then these models need to be able to forget like humans do 📄: arxiv.org/abs/2605.25680

Agents interact with environments to get information. But exploration (tools, retrieval, user interaction) is costly. Calibrate-Then-Act allows LLM agents to balance exploration and cost: 📐 Estimate uncertainty about the environment 💭 Reason about cost-uncertainty tradeoffs ⚙️ Act accordingly

A couple years (!) in the making: we’re releasing a new corpus of embodied, collaborative problem solving dialogues. We paid 36 people to play Portal 2’s co-op mode and collected their speech + game recordings. Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2512.03381 Website: berkeley-nlp.github.io/portal-dialo... 1/n

I'm recruiting my first group of students at TTIC! If you're interested, please apply by December 9th and mention my name in your application

Two brief advertisements! TTIC is recruiting both tenure-track and research assistant professors: ttic.edu/faculty-hiri... NYU is recruiting faculty fellows: apply.interfolio.com/174686 Happy to chat with anyone considering either of these options

FYI that UChicago CS & Stats is hiring at all levels via the Data Science Institue: Postdoc: uchicago.infoready4.com#freeformComp... Assistant Professor: apply.interfolio.com/174766 Associate Professor: apply.interfolio.com/174768

What does it take to build a human-like user simulator? // Jessy Lin and I wrote another blogpost on user simulators as a reward function for training interactive models, this time focused on methods + open questions: jessylin.com/2025/09/25/u...

Was talking to a student who wasn't sure about why one would get a PhD. So I wrote up a list of reasons! www.eugenevinitsky.com/posts/reason...

An excellent blog post about a still huge missing gap, models of humans you can actually use to study human-AI interaction: jessylin.com/2025/07/10/u...

We’re proud to announce three new tenure-track assistant professors joining TTIC in Fall 2026: Yossi Gandelsman, Will Merrill, and Nick Tomlin (@nickatomlin.bsky.social). Meet them here: buff.ly/JH1DFtT

🤠🤓🙂

I'm particularly fond of this new benchmark paper we wrote, which aims to scalably evaluate whether language models can generalize to arbitrary new tasks. The core idea is to use LLMs to generate new games, and then evaluate whether LLMs can play those games 📄: arxiv.org/abs/2505.07215

I might be able to hire a postdoc for this fall in computational linguistics at UT Austin. Topics in the general LLM + cognitive space (particularly reasoning, chain of thought, LLMs + code) and LLM + linguistic space. If this could be of interest, feel free to get in touch!

Writing my first post here to announce that I've accepted an assistant professor job at TTIC! I'll be starting in Fall 2026, and recruiting students this upcoming cycle. Until then, I'll be wrapping up the PhD at Berkeley, and this summer I'll join NYU as a CDS Faculty Fellow 🏙️