Telling two people to be selfish barely changes their behavior, unless they both know they got the same message! Our #CogSci2026 paper reveals that these group expectations only matter when we all know that we share the same expectations.

A paper casting doubt on the foundations of a bunch of nice convergence bounds in multi-agent RL (found via @quokkka.bsky.social). The technical material here is a bit out of my depth, but relevant to some stuff I do in game AI. Attempt to briefly summarize based on an initial read below. 1/n

Paradoxes of Game Theoretic Equilibria and Price of Anarchy

For decades, static solution concepts (Nash, Correlated, and Coarse Correlated Equilibria) and the Price of Anarchy (PoA) have formed the bedrock of algorithmic game theory, with no-regret learning pr...

arxiv.org

Can LLM agents coordinate in long-horizon, open-ended worlds? We test 13 LLMs in Alem, a new benchmark. Most struggle, averaging ~6% normalised return. Yet on Hard, zero-shot Gemini 3.1 Pro matches the best MARL agent after 1B training steps. Our ablations show communication matters most. 🧵

CDS Faculty Fellow @sucholutsky.bsky.social co-authored a new paper arguing that teams of language models should be studied like distributed computer systems, with similar coordination and scaling challenges. arxiv.org/abs/2603.12229

Language Model Teams as Distributed Systems

Large language models (LLMs) are growing increasingly capable, prompting recent interest in LLM teams. Yet, despite increased deployment of LLM teams at scale, we lack a principled framework for addre...

arxiv.org

🚨New preprint and our results are rather concerning.. We find the "boiling frog" equivalent of AI use. Using large-scale RCTs, we provide *casual* evidence that AI assistance reduces persistence and hurts independent performance. And these effects emerge after just 10–15 minutes of AI use! 1/

Are the laws of thought woven from three golden threads? Tom @cocoscilab.bsky.social and I discuss some of the history and themes in logic, probability, and neural nets, in his new book The Laws of Thought. braininspired.co/podcast/233/

Sycophantic AI distorts reality by returning responses that are biased to reinforce existing beliefs. "sycophantic AI distorts belief, manufacturing certainty where there should be doubt." Unbiased sampling produces discovery rates 5X higher! arxiv.org/pdf/2602.14270

🚨New preprint! LLM teams are being deployed at scale, yet we lack the tools to predict when they’ll succeed, fail, or how to design them. Distributed computing faced the exact same questions and figured out how to answer them. We show those insights apply directly to LLMs 🧵👇

open.substack.com/pub/sethkart...

We Automated RL Environment Engineering for $10

RL environment simulation eats 50-90% of training wall-clock for specialist RL policies. Coding agents can translate them automatically with no sim-to-sim gap.

open.substack.com

The visual world is composed of objects, and those objects are composed of features. But do VLMs exploit this compositional structure when processing multi-object scenes? In our 🆒🆕 #ICLR2026 paper, we find they do – via emergent symbolic mechanisms for visual binding. 🧵👇

Are you a grad student who wants to give a talk at Princeton’s psychology department (in-person or on Zoom)? Nominate yourself or someone you know: forms.gle/WN2ybYMuZiW3... Priority given to non-Ivy and URM students. International applicants welcome. Deadline is this Friday (Feb 6)!

Emerging Scholars in Psychological Science Speaker Nominations

Nominate yourself or another late-stage PhD student to speak at Princeton's Department of Psychology this academic semester (Spring 2026). The Emerging Scholars in Psychological Science (ESPS) talk ...

forms.gle

Excited to announce a new book telling the story of mathematical approaches to studying the mind, from the origins of cognitive science to modern AI! The Laws of Thought will be published in February and is available for pre-order now.

I'm looking for two PhD student for Fall 2026. Both on multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). - Theory of MARL: experience with theory and/or MARL -Formal methods for MARL: experience with formal methods or MARL (interest in learning the other) www.khoury.northeastern.edu/programs/com...

PhD in Computer Science - Khoury College of Computer Sciences

The PhD in Computer Science program will prepare you with advanced knowledge, industry opportunities, and research experience to be a leader in the field.

khoury.northeastern.edu

Honored and excited to share that I am the winner of Nomis & Science Young Explorer Award!! Also thrilled to share that my article describing my research is out now in @science.org today! The normalization of (almost) everything www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... 1/

The normalization of (almost) everything: Our minds can get used to anything, and even crises start feeling normal

Our minds can get used to anything, and even crises start feeling normal

science.org

Do AI agents ask good questions? We built “Collaborative Battleship” to find out—and discovered that weaker LMs + Bayesian inference can beat GPT-5 at 1% of the cost. Paper, code & demos: gabegrand.github.io/battleship Here's what we learned about building rational information-seeking agents... 🧵🔽

Honored to contribute a Journal Club piece to @natrevpsychol.nature.com! I explore Robert White's seminal "competence motivation" framework (1959) and why it remains relevant over 60 years later—from why toddlers insist on doing things themselves to designing intrinsically motivated AI. 🤖

Nature Reviews Psychology@natrevpsychol.nature.com · 10mo ago

‘Motivation reconsidered’ reconsidered Journal Club by Bella Fascendini go.nature.com/3IwYftH

I'm recruiting grad students!! 🎓 The CoDec Lab @ NYU (codec-lab.github.io) is looking for PhD students (Fall 2026) interested in computational approaches to social cognition & problem solving 🧠 Applications through Psych (tinyurl.com/nyucp) are due Dec 1. Reach out with Qs & please repost! 🙏

Forget modeling every belief and goal! What if we represented people as following simple scripts instead (i.e "cross the crosswalk")? Our new paper shows AI which models others’ minds as Python code 💻 can quickly and accurately predict human behavior! shorturl.at/siUYI%F0%9F%...

Timely reminder that 'associative' language leads lay people to confuse correlation and causation, as @tomerullman.bsky.social and I showed a few years ago. journals.plos.org/plosone/arti... Snapshot from the BBC: www.bbc.com/news/article...

Can large language models stand in for human participants? Many social scientists seem to think so, and are already using "silicon samples" in research. One problem: depending on the analytic decisions made, you can basically get these samples to show any effect you want. THREAD 🧵

The threat of analytic flexibility in using large language models to simulate human data: A call to attention

Social scientists are now using large language models to create "silicon samples" - synthetic datasets intended to stand in for human respondents, aimed at revolutionising human subjects research. How...

arxiv.org

Our new lab for Human & Machine Intelligence is officially open at Princeton University! Consider applying for a PhD or Postdoc position, either through Computer Science or Psychology. You can register interest on our new website lake-lab.github.io (1/2)

Bonan's energy and excitement for CogSci are truly unmatched 🤩 Apply!

Bonan Zhao (赵博囡)@bonan.bsky.social · 12mo ago

My Lab at the University of Edinburgh🇬🇧 has funded PhD positions for this cycle! We study the computational principles of how people learn, reason, and communicate. It's a new lab, and you will be playing a big role in shaping its culture and foundations. Spread the words!

The CoLab is headed to #CogSci2025!! 🥳 Here's where to find us!

Really exciting step toward AI-informed policy design! Nice work @sethkarten.ai 🙌

Seth Karten@sethkarten.ai · last yr.

🚀 New preprint! 🤔 Can one agent “nudge” a synthetic civilization of Census‑grounded agents toward higher social welfare—all by optimizing utilities in‑context? Meet the LLM Economist ↓

Our latest on the cognitive science of LLMs! To be presented @CogSci‬2025 🎉 LLMs are increasingly involved in human collaborations. How do LLMs assign responsibility and reward to collaborators? Is it similar to how humans do it? 🤖🧑 📃 gershmanlab.com/pubs/XiangBi... (1/4)

I've learned so much working with Rachit! Highly recommend joining his lab 👏

Rachit Dubey@rachitdubey.bsky.social · last yr.

Headed to #CogSci2025 next week! Interested in computational cognitive science applied to climate change and real-world policy? Come find me! My lab at UCLA is recruiting 1–2 fully funded PhD students. We work on: • decision-making • climate perception • human–AI collaboration for policy design

Our new paper is out in PNAS: "Evolving general cooperation with a Bayesian theory of mind"! Humans are the ultimate cooperators. We coordinate on a scale and scope no other species (nor AI) can match. What makes this possible? 🧵 www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Evolving general cooperation with a Bayesian theory of mind | PNAS

Theories of the evolution of cooperation through reciprocity explain how unrelated self-interested individuals can accomplish more together than th...

pnas.org

"We introduce Collaborative Rational Speech Act (CRSA), an information-theoretic (IT) extension of RSA that models multi-turn dialog by optimizing a gain function adapted from rate-distortion theory." arxiv.org/abs/2507.14063

Collaborative Rational Speech Act: Pragmatic Reasoning for Multi-Turn Dialog

As AI systems take on collaborative roles, they must reason about shared goals and beliefs-not just generate fluent language. The Rational Speech Act (RSA) framework offers a principled approach to pr...

arxiv.org

So excited our paper is now out in ‪@cognitionjournal.bsky.social‬! Huge thanks to our editor and reviewers 🧠 Their thoughtful suggestions inspired Experiments 3 & 4, including a striking inverse correlation between idleness judgments and speed-up predictions

Cognition@cognitionjournal.bsky.social · last yr.

“People Evaluate Idle Collaborators Based on their Impact on Task Efficiency” 📢 New paper from: Elizabeth Mieczkowski, Cameron Rouse Turner, Natalia Vélez, & Tom Griffiths www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... TL;DR: Sometimes it's acceptable not to help with group work 🧵👇

New published paper with Ham Huang and @actlab.bsky.social! @cognitionjournal.bsky.social authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S...