LLMs, Cognitive Science, Linguistics, and Neuroscience

Program

Special Year on Large Language Models and Transformers, Part 2

Location

Calvin Lab auditorium

Date

Monday, Feb. 3 – Friday, Feb. 7, 2025

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8:45 – 9:15 a.m.

Coffee and Check-In

9:15 – 9:30 a.m.

Opening Remarks

9:30 – 10:30 a.m.

Rules vs. Neurons and what may be next

Steven Piantadosi (UC Berkeley)

10:30 – 11 a.m.

Break

11 a.m. – 12 p.m.

Neuroscience and AI: a symbiosis

Surya Ganguli (Stanford University)

12 – 1:45 p.m.

Lunch (on your own)

1:45 – 2:45 p.m.

Learning a language like infants do: Results and challenges for developmentally inspired AI

Emmanuel Dupoux (Laboratoire de Science Cognitive et Psycholinguistique)

2:45 – 3 p.m.

Break

3 – 4 p.m.

How DeepSeek Changes the LLM Story

Sasha Rush (Cornell University)

4 – 5 p.m.

Reception

9 – 9:30 a.m.

Coffee and Check-In

9:30 – 10:30 a.m.

How Linguistics Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Language Models

Kyle Mahowald (UT Austin)

10:30 – 11 a.m.

Break

11 a.m. – 12 p.m.

Why it Matters That Babies and Language Models are the Only Known Language Learners

Alex Warstadt (UC San Diego)

12 – 1:45 p.m.

Lunch (on your own)

1:45 – 2:45 p.m.

Neural algorithms of human language

Laura Gwilliams (Stanford University)

2:45 – 3:45 p.m.

Do LLMs Use Language?

Alane Suhr (UC Berkeley)

3:45 – 4 p.m.

Break

4 – 5 p.m.

Panel Discussion

9 – 9:30 a.m.

Coffee and Check-In

9:30 – 10:30 a.m.

More accurate behavioral predictions with hybrid Bayesian-Transformer models

Brenden Lake (New York University)

10:30 – 11 a.m.

Break

11 a.m. – 12 p.m.

Cognitive modeling of development using AI tools

Mike Frank (Stanford University)

12 – 1:45 p.m.

Lunch (on your own)

1:45 – 2:45 p.m.

Knowledge is structured and domain-specific: lessons from developmental cognitive science

Fei Xu (UC Berkeley)

2:45 – 3:45 p.m.

Virtual Lab of AI Scientists

James Zou (Stanford University)

3:45 – 4 p.m.

Break

4 – 5 p.m.

You Know It Or You Don’t: Compositionality and Phase Transitions in LMs

Naomi Saphra (Kempner Institute at Harvard University)

9 – 9:30 a.m.

Coffee and Check-In

9:30 – 10:30 a.m.

Interpreting LLMs to Interpret the Brain

Shailee Jain (UC San Francisco)

10:30 – 11 a.m.

Break

11 a.m. – 12 p.m.

Language and thought in brains: Implications for AI

Evelina Fedorenko (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

12 – 2 p.m.

Lunch (on your own)

2 – 3 p.m.

Dissociating language and thought in large language models

Anya Ivanova (Georgia Institute of Technology)

3 – 3:30 p.m.

Break

3:30 – 4:30 p.m.

AI safety via Inference-time compute

Boaz Barak (Harvard University)

9 – 9:30 a.m.

Coffee and Check-In

9:30 – 10:30 a.m.

Building scalable systems for automatically understanding LLMs

Jacob Steinhardt (UC Berkeley)

10:30 – 11 a.m.

Break

11 a.m. – 12 p.m.

How Do Transformers Learn Variable Binding?

Raphaël Millière (Macquarie University)

12 – 2 p.m.

Lunch (on your own)

2 – 3 p.m.

The Cognitive Boundaries of Language Models: Hallucinations and Understanding

Santosh Vempala (Georgia Institute of Technology)

3 – 3:30 p.m.

Break

3:30 – 4:30 p.m.

Automating scientific discovery and hypothesis generation with language model agents

Andrew White (FutureHouse)