Are there conceptual directions in VLMs that transcend modality? Check out our COLM oral spotlight 🔦 paper! We use SAEs to analyze the multimodality of linear concepts in VLMs with @chloesu07.bsky.social, @thomasfel.bsky.social, @shamkakade.bsky.social and Stephanie Gil arxiv.org/abs/2504.11695

@avzaagzonunaada.bsky.social

How do people trade off between speed and accuracy in reasoning tasks without easy heuristics? Come to my talk, "Thinking fast, slow, and everywhere in between in humans and language models," in the Reasoning session this afternoon #CogSci2025 to find out! paper: escholarship.org/uc/item/5td9...

Thinking fast, slow, and everywhere in between in humans and language models

Author(s): Prystawski, Ben; Goodman, Noah | Abstract: How do humans adapt how they reason to varying circumstances? Prior research has argued that reasoning comes in two types: a fast, intuitive type ...

escholarship.org

When people form conventions in reference games, how easy are they for outsiders to interpret? (for values of "outsider" that include naïve humans and vision-language models) Check out @vboyce.bsky.social's poster today at #CogSci2025 to find out. paper: escholarship.org/uc/item/16c4...

Idiosyncratic but not opaque: Linguistic conventions formed in reference games are interpretable by naïve humans and vision–language models

Author(s): Boyce, Veronica; Prystawski, Ben; Tan, Alvin Wei Ming; Frank, Michael C. | Abstract: When are in-group linguistic conventions opaque to non-group members (teen slang like "rizz") or general...

escholarship.org

Why can’t LMs solve puzzles about the number systems of languages, when they can solve really complex math problems? Our new paper, led by @antararb.bsky.social looks at why this intersection of language and math is difficult, and what this means for LM reasoning! arxiv.org/abs/2506.13886

ACL paper alert! What structure is lost when using linearizing interp methods like Shapley? We show the nonlinear interactions between features reflect structures described by the sciences of syntax, semantics, and phonology.

Congrats to Veronica Boyce on her dissertation defense! That’s three amazing talks by three great students in 8 days!

This work Mac (my first ever) is great because every time something seriously breaks, instead of becoming distressed and despondent like I usually do, it's just like "ooooooh yeahhh, yet another win for team Linux 😎😎😎🎉🐧"

😼SMOL DATA ALERT! 😼Anouncing SMOL, a professionally-translated dataset for 115 very low-resource languages! Paper: arxiv.org/pdf/2502.12301 Huggingface: huggingface.co/datasets/goo...

New paper in Psychological Review! In "Causation, Meaning, and Communication" Ari Beller (cicl.stanford.edu/member/ari_b...) develops a computational model of how people use & understand expressions like "caused", "enabled", and "affected". 📃 osf.io/preprints/ps... 📎 github.com/cicl-stanfor... 🧵

Where are all of the phoneticians of the Boston area and why isn't there a storied subfield of fieldwork studying the Cambridge shopkeeper who seems to have a mix between a West Country (rhotic English!) and a Boston (non-rhotic American!) accent. Apparently the shop's been open for decades, smh

Quanta write-up of our Mission: Impossible Language Models work, led by @juliekallini.bsky.social. As the photos suggest, Richard, @isabelpapad.bsky.social, and I do all our work sitting together around a single laptop and pointing at the screen.

Quanta Magazine@quantamagazine.org · 2y ago

Large language models may not be so omnipotent after all. New research shows that LLMs, like humans, prefer to learn some linguistic patterns over others. @benbenbrubaker.bsky.social reports: www.quantamagazine.org/can-ai-model...

I will be at NeurIPS starting tomorrow! Would love to chat about interpretability, linguistics, language structure, meaning in LLMs. Reach out! Aaaand if you love Vancouver, apply to do a PhD at UBC! Fun research in a lovely place! linguistics.ubc.ca/graduate/adm...

Do you want to understand how language models work, and how they can change language science? I'm recruiting PhD students at UBC Linguistics! The research will be fun, and Vancouver is lovely. So much cool NLP happening at UBC across both Ling and CS! linguistics.ubc.ca/graduate/adm...