Happy to be a part of this!

Minds, Machines, and Brains (MMB)@mmb-journal.bsky.social · 3d ago

Hello world! 👋 We’re Minds, Machines, and Brains (MMB) 👤🤖🧠 a new open access journal from @mitpress.bsky.social exploring the principles of intelligence and cognition across natural and artificial minds. Submissions open this Fall! 🔗 direct.mit.edu/mmb

i will be at #ICML2026! first time in my career (!) that I'm attending a major conf in my home town and super excited about it 💖🇰🇷 (but also... clash of worlds 😬) I'll be doing hallway track for the most part so DM or email me if you'd like to hang! + don't forget to 👇

🐸 New position paper on compositionality! 🐸 I synthesize my thoughts about the proper role/interpretation of behavior and mechanism in asking the question "Is this system (mind or machine) exhibiting compositionality?"

OG hyp gen paper update! Even if you're not interested in the specific phenomenon we look at, the general framing should be of interest to a much broader audience

Kanishka Misra@kanishka.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Announcing a new version of our 2024 paper on linguistic hypothesis generation from LMs! @najoung.bsky.social and I have systematized our hypothesis generation framework, added stringent criteria for model selection, 10x-ed our learning trials, and included an epigraph from Jeff Elman 🙏!

“All bears have a property”, “Some bears have a property”, “Bears have a property” are different in terms of how the property is generalized to a specific bear – a great example of how language constrains thought! This holds for kids, adults, and according to our new work, (V)LMs! 🧵

happy to have finally made a pilgrimage to ucsd, a special place for some of us :)

Kanishka Misra@kanishka.bsky.social · 8mo ago

@najoung.bsky.social and I did a side quest during NeurIPS and gave a joint talk at UCSD on our thoughts about the role of NNs/LLMs in Human CogSci! Thanks @alexwarstadt.bsky.social and Rachel Dudley for hosting us! Catch our slides here: docs.google.com/presentation...

My lab at BU is recruiting PhD students and possibly a postdoc this year! We study humans & machines, centered around topics like meaning, generalization, evaluation methods and design, and the nature of computation and representation that underlie language and cognition. 🫴🫴

Here are the slides: docs.google.com/presentation... For context the intended audience is Lang Dev researchers who are attending a session on "what can LLMs tell us about human language". If you have any thoughts I'd love to hear them!

SLD Plenary - Najoung Kim [external share]

Whence insights? The value of delineating human and machine CogSci Najoung Kim (Boston University) Society for Language Development Annual Symposium November 6, 2025 1

docs.google.com

for something to be considered creative, it has to be semantically/pragmatically felicitous!!!

Arkadiy Saakyan@asaakyan.bsky.social · 9mo ago

N-gram novelty is widely used as a measure of creativity and generalization. But if LLMs produce highly n-gram novel expressions that don’t make sense or sound awkward, should they still be called creative? In a new paper, we investigate how n-gram novelty relates to creativity.

honored to have given a plenary address at the Society for Language Development annual symposium titled "Whence insights? The value of delineating human and machine CogSci". It's a synthesis of a few years of thoughts, recently concretized with @aditya-yedetore.bsky.social and @kanishka.bsky.social

👾 Full-time research assistant position (1 year) with @sebschu.bsky.social and me! 👾 We're looking for someone to join the research agent evaluation team, starting Fall 2025. Application link to be available soon, but feel free to send us your CV and/or come talk to us at #ACL2025. 🧵

I have a sabbatical coming up and I'm going to Nepal! Why Nepal? You can read about it at my first blog post about this trip. TL;DR: linguistic diversity, writing systems (and pretty scripts), classifiers, and a school for Newar kids in Kathmandu. sites.bu.edu/lislab/2025/...

ever since VLMs were a thing i've been interested in how the additional visual modality changes language in meaningful ways. after negative findings after negative findings, excited to report this result! proud of our junior authors for digging into this 🐸

@yuluqin.bsky.social · last yr.

Does vision training change how language is represented and used in meaningful ways?🤔The answer is a nuanced yes! Comparing VLM-LM minimal pairs, we find that while the taxonomic organization of the lexicon is similar, VLMs are better at _deploying_ this knowledge. [1/9]

green carded finally 💚💚

Seeing an experiment and thinking "but have they tried X? what if we do Y?" is a key part of research and a start to new discoveries. RExBench tests if coding agents can implement new extensions. It complements recent evals (eg PaperBench from OpenAI ) on replication! See 👇 for details

Sebastian Schuster@sebschu.bsky.social · last yr.

Can coding agents autonomously implement AI research extensions? We introduce RExBench, a benchmark that tests if a coding agent can implement a novel experiment based on existing research and code. Finding: Most agents we tested had a low success rate, but there is promise!

🚨 Registration is live! 🚨 The New England Mechanistic Interpretability (NEMI) Workshop is happening Aug 22nd 2025 at Northeastern University! A chance for the mech interp community to nerd out on how models really work 🧠🤖 🌐 Info: nemiconf.github.io/summer25/ 📝 Register: forms.gle/v4kJCweE3UUH...

i'll be in copenhagen for a few days, lmk if you want to get coffee! will be around most of Thurs and early Sat. alternatively you can also come see me give a talk (at a museum apparently) on Fri: cphnlp.github.io

📢 The Copenhagen NLP Symposium on June 20th! - Invited talks by @loubnabnl.hf.co (HF) @mziizm.bsky.social (Cohere) @najoung.bsky.social (BU) @kylelo.bsky.social (AI2) Yohei Oseki (UTokyo) - Exciting posters by other participants Register to attend and/or present your poster at cphnlp.github.io /1

Very sorry to learn of the passing of LouAnn Gerken, who had such an impact on our understanding of the acquisition of speech sounds and sound patterns obits.mlive.com/us/obituarie...

LouAnn Gerken Obituary (1959 - 2025) - Tucson, AZ - Arizona Daily Star

View LouAnn A. Gerken's obituary, send flowers and sign the guestbook.

obits.mlive.com

hello NAACL friends I'm giving a keynote today at RepL4NLP at 1:30PM local time, come say hi! I'll mostly be musing about things with light research discussions

in liminal state, as correctly described by a colleague

so very excited that naomi is joining!!! a huge win for cds 💖

Naomi Saphra@nsaphra.bsky.social · last yr.

Life update: I'm starting as faculty at Boston University @bucds.bsky.social in 2026! BU has SCHEMES for LM interpretability & analysis, I couldn't be more pumped to join a burgeoning supergroup w/ @najoung.bsky.social @amuuueller.bsky.social. Looking for my first students, so apply and reach out!

"Gaming Linguists" good bigram

Repost appreciated! 🙏 ACL 2025 Ling theory & Cognitive modeling track is looking for emergency reviewers. The emergency review period is between 3/18-26, and these reviewers will be excluded from the ARR cycle. If you're interested, please sign up here! docs.google.com/forms/d/1fH7...

ACL 2025 Ling theory & Cognitive modeling track emergency reviewer volunteer form

The Linguistic Theories, Cognitive Modeling, and Psycholinguistics track at ACL 2025 is looking for emergency reviewers. The emergency reviews will take place between 18th to 26th of March, 2025. Thes...

docs.google.com

have many tasks but immobilized by car

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

this is a first... suffering maximized...

why say "bad" when you can say "ungood"

at the point of the semester where emergency todo lists inside of a todo list is made