I am so excited about this finding from @pengrui-han.bsky.social and @andreadevarda.bsky.social, also with Jacob Andreas! Perhaps modularity is inevitable in intelligent systems, biological or in silico. :)

pengrui-han.bsky.social@pengrui-han.bsky.social · last mo.

The human brain is strikingly modular: distinct networks for language, formal reasoning, social reasoning, physical reasoning. Is this fundamental to intelligent systems, or an accident of evolution? In our new preprint, we find the same modular organization emerges in LLMs.

Humans largely learn language through speech. In contrast, most LLMs learn from pre-tokenized text. In our #Interspeech2025 paper, we introduce AuriStream: a simple, causal model that learns phoneme, word & semantic information from speech. Poster P6, tomorrow (Aug 19) at 1:30 pm, Foyer 2.2!

Is the Language of Thought == Language? A Thread 🧵 New Preprint (link: tinyurl.com/LangLOT) with @alexanderfung.bsky.social, Paris Jaggers, Jason Chen, Josh Rule, Yael Benn, @joshtenenbaum.bsky.social, ‪@spiantado.bsky.social‬, Rosemary Varley, @evfedorenko.bsky.social 1/8

Evidence from Formal Logical Reasoning Reveals that the Language of Thought is not Natural Language

Humans are endowed with a powerful capacity for both inductive and deductive logical thought: we easily form generalizations based on a few examples and draw conclusions from known premises. Humans al...

tinyurl.com

1/7 If you're at CogSci 2025, I'd love to see you at my talk on Friday 1pm PDT in Nob Hill A! I'll be talking about our work towards an implemented computational model of noisy-channel comprehension (with @postylem.bsky.social, Ted Gibson, and @rplevy.bsky.social).

Many LM applications may be formulated as text generation conditional on some (Boolean) constraint. Generate a… - Python program that passes a test suite. - PDDL plan that satisfies a goal. - CoT trajectory that yields a positive reward. The list goes on… How can we efficiently satisfy these? 🧵👇

#ICLR2025 Oral How can we control LMs using diverse signals such as static analyses, test cases, and simulations? In our paper “Syntactic and Semantic Control of Large Language Models via Sequential Monte Carlo” (w/ @benlipkin.bsky.social, @alexlew.bsky.social, @xtimv.bsky.social) we:

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!

Jason Eisner & Li Du’s “Syntactic and semantic control of large language models via sequential Monte Carlo” with @joaoloula.bsky.social, @benlipkin.bsky.social, @yahyaemara.bsky.social, @alexlew.bsky.social, @xtimv.bsky.social, & more presents an architecture for controlled LM generation: (11/12)

Syntactic and Semantic Control of Large Language Models via...

A wide range of LM applications require generating text that conforms to syntactic or semantic constraints. Imposing such constraints can be naturally framed as _probabilistic conditioning_, but...

openreview.net

New paper! 🧠 **The cerebellar components of the human language network** with: @hsmall.bsky.social @moshepoliak.bsky.social @gretatuckute.bsky.social @benlipkin.bsky.social @awolna.bsky.social @aniladmello.bsky.social and @evfedorenko.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 1/n 🧵

The cerebellar components of the human language network

The cerebellum's capacity for neural computation is arguably unmatched. Yet despite evidence of cerebellar contributions to cognition, including language, its precise role remains debated. Here, we sy...

biorxiv.org

New preprint on controlled generation from LMs! I'll be presenting at NENLP tomorrow 12:50-2:00pm Longer thread coming soon :)

I defended my PhD at MIT Brain&Cog last week--so much gratitude to my advisor @evfedorenko.bsky.social, as well as my committee @nancykanwisher.bsky.social, @joshhmcdermott.bsky.social and Yoon Kim. Thank you to all my brilliant collaborators and the MIT community. I have loved this journey so much.

If you're interested in a PhD at the intersection of machine learning and programming languages, consider applying to Yale CS! We're exploring new approaches to building software that draws inferences and makes predictions. See alexlew.net for details & apply at gsas.yale.edu/admissions/ by Dec. 15

Lots of folks talking about scaling LLM inference over this last year Internally, I’ve been developing and using a library that makes this extremely easy, and I decided to open-source it Meet the decoding library: github.com/benlipkin/de... 1/7

GitHub - benlipkin/decoding: Composable inference algorithms with LLMs and programmable logic

Composable inference algorithms with LLMs and programmable logic - benlipkin/decoding

github.com

✨ Now out in Psychological Review! ✨ We present a new account of relevance that weighs both *epistemic* and *decision-theoretic* utility: statements are relevant if they improve the accuracy of listener’s beliefs *and* their future decision-making. www.tedsumers.info/_files/ugd/2...

First post and big news - I am starting as an Assistant Professor in Psychology at Georgia Tech in Jan 2024! www.language-intelligence-thought.net

LIT Lab

Our goal is to understand the relationship between language and human thought. How does the language network in the brain interact with other systems to interpret meaning in the world? Can models...

language-intelligence-thought.net

To researchers doing LLM evaluation: prompting is *not a substitute* for direct probability measurements. Check out the camera-ready version of our work, to appear at EMNLP 2023! (w/ @rplevy.bsky.social) Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2305.13264 Original thread: twitter.com/_jennhu/stat...

👋Hi #bsky! Just wanted to let everyone know I'll be arriving at #Stanford in fall of 2024 and I'm looking for awesome people to help me figure out language. I'm new here my network is small, so RTs would be great! 🧵👇

🚀 We've officially landed on Bluesky! Excited to join this vibrant new platform and (re)connect with all of you! 🗣️💬 Help us spread the word by retweeting and following.