Congratulations to @tomerullman.bsky.social on official release! For everyone, my disagreements on this paper has also already been accepted by NeurIPS SpaVLE this year. link: arxiv.org/abs/2510.20835

Rethinking the Simulation vs. Rendering Dichotomy: No Free Lunch in Spatial World Modelling

Spatial world models, representations that support flexible reasoning about spatial relations, are central to developing computational models that could operate in the physical world, but their precis...

arxiv.org

Tomer Ullman@tomerullman.bsky.social · 9mo ago

Officially out in the current issue of Trends in Cognitive Sciences: "Physics versus graphics as an organizing dichotomy in cognition" www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

developmental embodiedment 😎 #DevelopmentalEmbodiedment #GrowAI

‼️ Video models start to reason, let's build-in-public scaled eval together 🚀 github.com/hokindeng/VM... (Apache 2.0) offers 1⃣One-click inference across ALL available models 2⃣Unified API & datasets & auto resume + error handling + eval 3⃣Plug new models and tasks in <5 lines of code a thread (1/n)

Excited to share my essay with @carrot0817.bsky.social, Kaia Gao on the representational substrate of world-reasoning in both humans and machines has been accepted to the SpaVLE Workshop at #NeurIPS2025✨ a thread (1/n)

Very cool work !

Stanislas Dehaene@standehaene.bsky.social · 10mo ago

"Intuitions of mathematical curves in young children's drawings" In this new paper from the lab, Lorenzo Ciccione, Marie Lubineau, Theo Morfoisse and I show that 5 and 6 year olds already possess intuitions of linearity, curvature, period and compositionality. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

best Halloween costume this year

Sam Gershman@gershbrain.bsky.social · 10mo ago

Gonna wear this to the next faculty meeting to see if they think I’m Steve Pinker.

Josh Tenenbaum's inspiring keynote at #cogsci2025 on growing vs scaling AI, the big questions of cognitive science, and the many open questions for the field.

this was a hilarious final slide that just hung up there during q&a

David Barner@drbarner.bsky.social · last yr.

Susan Carey mic-drop at #cogsci2025. "There are no innate concepts: Discuss"

Susan Carey mic-drop at #cogsci2025. "There are no innate concepts: Discuss"

#CoreCognition #LLM #multimodal #GrowAI We spent 3 years to curate 1503 classic experiments spanning 12 core concepts in human cognitive development and evaluated on 230 MLLMs with 11 different prompts for 5 times to get over 3.8 millions inference data points. A thread (1/n) - #ICML2025 ✅

What is the best testbed for human-like cognition in machines?🤔 Hardly anything comes better than gaze understanding. Humans are extremely good at gaze reading 👁️ , and this ability develops extremely early in childhood. Here, we tested 111 VLMs and 65 humans ⬇️

Zory Zhang@zoryzhang.bsky.social · last yr.

👁️ 𝐂𝐚𝐧 𝐕𝐢𝐬𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐋𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐮𝐚𝐠𝐞 𝐌𝐨𝐝𝐞𝐥𝐬 (𝐕𝐋𝐌𝐬) 𝐈𝐧𝐟𝐞𝐫 𝐇𝐮𝐦𝐚𝐧 𝐆𝐚𝐳𝐞 𝐃𝐢𝐫𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧? Knowing where someone looks is key to a Theory of Mind. We test 111 VLMs and 65 humans to compare their inferences. Project page: grow-ai-like-a-child.github.io/gaze/ 🧵1/11

Beautiful to see this initiative from a group of like minded PhD students collaborating together! 🚀

Hokin@hokin.bsky.social · last yr.

New Paper Alert ‼️ Current VLMs completely fail human gaze understanding 🙀 and scaling does NO help ‼️ However, humans, since an extremely age 🧒, are extremely sensitive to other people's gaze 🙄 👀 No mentors, no labs, only pre-doc students, 111 VLMs, and we did it 😎

New Paper Alert ‼️ Current VLMs completely fail human gaze understanding 🙀 and scaling does NO help ‼️ However, humans, since an extremely age 🧒, are extremely sensitive to other people's gaze 🙄 👀 No mentors, no labs, only pre-doc students, 111 VLMs, and we did it 😎

I think there is a fundamental division between “physical reasoning” and “intuitive physical reasoning” in human mind. The former is grounded by System 2 where the latter is actually System 1. The physics/graphics I have never thought of - and never thought about this in context of aphantasia

Tomer Ullman@tomerullman.bsky.social · last yr.

Out now in TiCS, something i've been thinking about a lot: "Physics vs. graphics as an organizing dichotomy in cognition" (by Balaban & me) relevant for many people, related to imagination, intuitive physics, mental simulation, aphantasia, and more authors.elsevier.com/a/1lBaC4sIRv...

It's an interesting phenomenon that some of the deepest questions about how life works have become what looks like impossibly obscure molecular biology stuck right at the back of Nature, which will never get covered by the science media. Like this. /1 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

DNA-guided transcription factor interactions extend human gene regulatory code - Nature

A large-scale analysis of DNA-bound transcription factors (TFs) shows how the presence of DNA markedly affects the landscape of TF interactions, and identifies composite motifs that are recognized by ...

nature.com

Doing research not in your previous areas comes at a cost. Good paper but I disagree on the corollary. Instead, the best scientists should always walk out their comfort zones. And indeed they always do. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The pivot penalty in research - Nature

An analysis of millions of scientific papers and patents reveals a ‘pivot penalty’ when researchers shift direction, with the impact of studies decreasing rapidly the further they move from their prev...

nature.com

Check out our new work on making robots process touch more like brains! Surprisingly, ConvRNNs best matched mouse cortex—passing the NeuroAI Turing Test. We also developed tactile-specific SSL augmentations and an Encoder-Attender-Decoder framework unifying ConvRNNs, SSMs & Transformers.

Trinity Chung@trinityjchung.com · last yr.

1/ What if we make robots that process touch the way our brains do? We found that Convolutional Recurrent Neural Networks (ConvRNNs) pass the NeuroAI Turing Test in currently available mouse somatosensory cortex data. New paper by @Yuchen @Nathan @anayebi.bsky.social and me!

This is such a beautiful and important work. I have been thinking about the increasing automation due to AI a lot. Aran here puts into actions and give us such a beautiful work! It’s definitely part of the duties us as scientists to think about these important societal issues.

Aran Nayebi@anayebi.bsky.social · last yr.

Can a Universal Basic Income (UBI) become feasible—even if AI fully automates existing jobs and creates no new ones? We derive a closed-form UBI threshold tied to AI capabilities that suggests it's potentially achievable by mid-century even under moderate AI growth assumptions:

Sam is 100% correct on this. Indeed, human babies have essential cognitive priors such as permanence, continuity, and boundary of objects, 3D Euclidean understanding of space, etc. We spent 2 years to systematically to examine and show the lack of such in MLLMs: arxiv.org/abs/2410.10855

Sam Gershman@gershbrain.bsky.social · last yr.

I think the BabyLM Challenge is really interesting, but also feel that there is something fundamentally ill-posed about how it maps onto the challenge facing human children. It's true that babies only get a relatively limited amount of linguistic experience, but...

Sharing a new paper from the lab. This paper, led by Sangyoon Ko, represents a merging of two longstanding research themes in the lab-- adult neurogenesis and systems consolidation. rdcu.be/el18q A short thread follows for those interested. 1/n

Systems consolidation reorganizes hippocampal engram circuitry

Nature - A study shows that loss of memory precision associated with systems consolidation can be explained by neurogenesis-dependent reorganization of engram circuitry within the hippocampus over...

rdcu.be

Hippocampal reactivation of planned trajectories is required for effective goal choice in an allocentric memory task https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.05.10.653115v1

If I had more free time, I would become a sci-fi novelist. I have a long list of plots that I want to write. Here's one.

Lovely work — and yet another proof that perceptual integration, likely based on recurrent connections, can occur without awareness during the attentional blink. See also www.pnas.org/doi/full/10....

Perceptual integration without conscious access | PNAS

The visual system has the remarkable ability to integrate fragmentary visual input into a perceptually organized collection of surfaces and objects...

pnas.org

Johannes Fahrenfort@fahrenfort.bsky.social · last yr.

In @elife.bsky.social: Perceptual and attentional impairments of conscious access involve distinct neural mechanisms despite equal task performance doi.org/10.7554/eLif... by Samuel Noorman with @timostein.bsky.social and Simon van Gaal. Well done Samuel!

Loving the new ICLR blogpost track. Here's a cool one on engrams in neuroscience vs mechanistic interpretability: d2jud02ci9yv69.cloudfront.net/2025-04-28-e...

Finally finish making our website 💐 growing-ai-like-a-child.github.io 🤩 with @carrot0817.bsky.social @marstin.bsky.social @tonyfeng.bsky.social @zoryzhang.bsky.social and many others @growai.bsky.social🚶‍♂️🚶‍♀️🚶

#ICML landed 🛬🛬

One thing I love about my job is that at the end of the day my whiteboard might be covered in drawings of decapitated flatworms.

#ICLR 💐 @growai.bsky.social We have 4 posters TODAY ‼️ 🧐 Please come and checkout🤟

#ICLR #BiAlign ‼️🤔Intention understanding and perspective-taking are core theory-of-mind abilities that humans typically develop starting around age 3. However, in VLMs, these two abilities dissociate.🧐 📅 Tomorrow ‼️ April 28, Garnet 216-214 openreview.net/forum?id=rmH... 💐 @growai.bsky.social

#ICLR 🔍 Small poster, big insights ⁉️ 😮 😲 Vision Language Models Know Law of Conservation without Understanding More-or-Less 🙀🙀 Come to our poster at #BiAlign 📷 Room Garnet 216-214 📷 ❗️April 28❗️ openreview.net/forum?id=0fT... 👏 @growai.bsky.social