Rachit Dubey

@rachitdubey.bsky.social

Assistant Professor at UCLA | Alum @MIT @Princeton @UC Berkeley | AI+Cognitive Science+Climate Policy | https://ucla-cocopol.github.io/

1st book review! “Lombrozo unpacks the psychology of explanations in rich detail and sharply analyzes how explaining can help and hinder…The result is a fresh, engrossing take on an important aspect of human behavior.” 😀 www.publishersweekly.com/9780063395008

Why We Ask Why: The Science of Explanation and the Human Drive to Understand by Tania Lombrozo

People explain what they experience, feel, and encounter in order to understand the present and anticipate the future, according...

publishersweekly.com

At Brown, I'm privileged to organize an AI policy summer school where we bring grad students from across the nation together to learn about policymaking. We travel down to DC as a group and learn about policy implementation and careers, and the students conduct meetings with Congressional offices.

A group of 20 people standing together in front of a building

We appreciate the love ❤️ But limited engagement and few followers on Bsky makes some (not us!) question whether it's worth it Be sure to follow (and share with your ML friends!) if you want to see more updates from ICML!

Marc Lanctot@sharky6000.bsky.social · 4w ago

Wow, awesome! Massive thank you to the comms & PR team @icmlconf.bsky.social 🤩 ✅️ Multiple update posts per day ✅️ Posts with photos!! 📷 ✅️ Great use of hash tags #icml2026 ✅️ Schedule and QR links at the local mall ✅️ Setting the gold standard for academic Bluesky 👍 🙏

More evidence, from a large-scale study in China, that using AI hurts learning if it undermines mental effort. When homework time drops due to AI use, so do test scores. Across studies, there is a clear theme: AI tutoring in support of classes is good, using AI to "help" with homework is bad.

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Very excited to share that my lab will be moving to Princeton (Neuroscience & Psychology) this fall. I'll be recruiting at all levels (more info to come soon), please share / get in touch if you're interested in joining!

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Do LLMs *understand* language? Do educational AI agents *understand* the material they teach (or their students)? Claims about what AI systems do or don't understand are pervasive, but assessing them requires an account of MACHINE UNDERSTANDING

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Excited to share I will be joining UC Davis as an assistant professor starting July 2027! Thank you dearly to all mentors and friends who have supported me over the years ❤️ and Cal Poly friends, I'll miss you!

💬 Getting the ick with chatbots? Our research in Nature shows that models trained to adopt a warm and friendly tone are more likely to make mistakes when answering your questions. Small changes in tone can undermine accuracy across architectures, particularly when users express vulnerability.

Banner image with screenshot of paper on the left and first figure on the right, showing two conversations: one with a neutral model, one with a warm model.

New paper w/ UK AISI: Millions of people now use AI to help them write and communicate. In three experiments (14k participants, 3m+ human ratings) we show that AI writing assistance systematically distorts writer personas – their perceived beliefs, personality, and identity. 🧵

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🚨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/

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🚨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 🧵👇

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New paper! The Linear Representation Hypothesis is a powerful intuition for how language models work, but lacks formalization. We give a mathematical framework in which we can ask and answer a basic question: how many features can be stored under the hypothesis? 🧵 arxiv.org/abs/2602.11246

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