Related papers: How language models extrapolate outside the traini…
Large language models (LLMs) offer emerging opportunities for psychological and behavioral research, but methodological guidance is lacking. This article provides a framework for using LLMs as psychological simulators across two primary…
The ability to combine linguistic guidance from others with direct experience is central to human development, enabling safe and rapid learning in new environments. How do people integrate these two sources of knowledge, and how might AI…
In contrast to classical cognitive science which studied brains in isolation, ecological approaches focused on the role of the body and environment in shaping cognition. Similarly, in this thesis we adopt an ecological approach to grounded…
When a language model generates text, the selection of individual tokens might lead it down very different reasoning paths, making uncertainty difficult to quantify. In this work, we consider whether reasoning language models represent the…
The advancement of the Natural Language Processing field has enabled the development of language models with a great capacity for generating text. In recent years, Neuroscience has been using these models to better understand cognitive…
Navigation in unfamiliar environments presents a major challenge for robots: while mapping and planning techniques can be used to build up a representation of the world, quickly discovering a path to a desired goal in unfamiliar settings…
This study investigates the in-context learning capabilities of various decoder-only transformer-based language models with different model sizes and training data, including GPT2, SmolLM2, OpenELM, TinyLlama, Stable LM, and Gemma 2. We…
Spatial reasoning based on natural language expressions is essential for everyday human tasks. This reasoning ability is also crucial for machines to interact with their environment in a human-like manner. However, recent research shows…
Embodied planning requires agents to make coherent multi-step decisions based on dynamic visual observations and natural language goals. While recent vision-language models (VLMs) excel at static perception tasks, they struggle with the…
Recently, a number of articles have argued that deep learning models such as GPT could also capture key aspects of language processing in the human mind and brain. However, I will argue that these models are not suitable as neural models of…
While explicit Chain-of-Thought (CoT) equips Large Language Models (LLMs) with strong reasoning capabilities, it requires models to verbalize every intermediate step in text tokens, constraining the model thoughts to the discrete vocabulary…
Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning typically utilizes the discrete language space for thinking, which is inherently inefficient, as many generated tokens only enforce linguistic rules that are not required for reasoning. To bypass this,…
How do language models "think"? This paper formulates a probabilistic cognitive model called the bounded pragmatic speaker, which can characterize the operation of different variations of language models. Specifically, we demonstrate that…
Transferring latent structure from one environment or problem to another is a mechanism by which humans and animals generalize with very little data. Inspired by cognitive and neurobiological insights, we propose graph schemas as a…
Inspired by animal navigation strategies, we introduce a novel computational model to navigate and map a space rooted in biologically inspired principles. Animals exhibit extraordinary navigation prowess, harnessing memory, imagination, and…
Standard Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting empowers Large Language Models (LLMs) with reasoning capabilities, yet its reliance on linear natural language is inherently insufficient for effective world modeling in embodied tasks. While text…
Large language models (LLMs) are becoming increasingly capable, but the mechanisms of their thinking and decision-making processes remain unclear. Chain-of-thoughts (CoTs) have been commonly utilized to externalize LLMs' thinking, but this…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are capable of displaying a wide range of abilities that are not directly connected with the task for which they are trained: predicting the next words of human-written texts. In this article, I review recent…
Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have enhanced natural-language reasoning. However, their limited parametric memory and susceptibility to hallucination present persistent challenges for tasks requiring accurate,…
Language is crucial for human intelligence, but what exactly is its role? We take language to be a part of a system for understanding and communicating about situations. The human ability to understand and communicate about situations…