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Despite the widespread use of machine learning algorithms to solve problems of technological, economic, and social relevance, provable guarantees on the performance of these data-driven algorithms are critically lacking, especially when the…
We present modal aphasia, a systematic dissociation in which current unified multimodal models accurately memorize concepts visually but fail to articulate them in writing, despite being trained on images and text simultaneously. For one,…
Language models often show a preference for using information from specific positions in the input regardless of semantic relevance. While positional bias has been studied in various contexts, from attention sinks to task performance…
The Availability bias, manifested in the over-representation of extreme eventualities in decision-making, is a well-known cognitive bias, and is generally taken as evidence of human irrationality. In this work, we present the first…
Language evolves over time in many ways relevant to natural language processing tasks. For example, recent occurrences of tokens 'BERT' and 'ELMO' in publications refer to neural network architectures rather than persons. This type of…
While natural-language explanations from large language models (LLMs) are widely adopted to improve transparency and trust, their impact on objective human-AI team performance remains poorly understood. We identify a Persuasion Paradox:…
Developmental amnesia, featured with severely impaired episodic memory and almost normal semantic memory, has been discovered to occur in children with hippocampal atrophy. This unique combination of characteristics seems to challenge the…
Predictive coding has emerged as an influential normative model of neural computation, with numerous extensions and applications. As such, much effort has been put into mapping PC faithfully onto the cortex, but there are issues that remain…
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in decision-support systems for high-stakes domains such as hiring and university admissions, where choices often involve selecting among competing alternatives. While prior work has…
In this work, we introduce a learning model designed to meet the needs of applications in which computational resources are limited, and robustness and interpretability are prioritized. Learning problems can be formulated as constrained…
We investigate from a computational perspective the efficiency of the Willshaw synaptic update rule in the context of familiarity discrimination, a binary-answer, memory-related task that has been linked through psychophysical experiments…
Large language models are known to memorize parts of their training data, posing risk of copyright violations. To systematically examine this risk, we pretrain language models (1B/3B/8B) from scratch on 83B tokens, mixing web-scale data…
Machine learning models can capture and amplify biases present in data, leading to disparate test performance across social groups. To better understand, evaluate, and mitigate these biases, a deeper theoretical understanding of how model…
Vocabulary learning by children can be characterized by many biases. When encountering a new word, children as well as adults, are biased towards assuming that it means something totally different from the words that they already know. To…
Societies often rely on human experts to take a wide variety of decisions affecting their members, from jail-or-release decisions taken by judges and stop-and-frisk decisions taken by police officers to accept-or-reject decisions taken by…
Causal reasoning is a cornerstone of human intelligence and a critical capability for artificial systems aiming to achieve advanced understanding and decision-making. This thesis delves into various dimensions of causal reasoning and…
This paper investigates the influence of cognitive biases on Large Language Models (LLMs) outputs. Cognitive biases, such as confirmation and availability biases, can distort user inputs through prompts, potentially leading to unfaithful…
Studies of human decision-making demonstrate that environmental regularities, such as natural image statistics or intentionally nonuniform stimulus probabilities, can be exploited to improve efficiency (termed `efficient-coding').…
Decisions in organizations are about evaluating alternatives and choosing the one that would best serve organizational goals. To the extent that the evaluation of alternatives could be formulated as a predictive task with appropriate…
Incremental learning enables artificial agents to learn from sequential data. While important progress was made by exploiting deep neural networks, incremental learning remains very challenging. This is particularly the case when no memory…