Robert Hawkins
@rdhawkins.bsky.social
3.7K followers 3.1K following 270 posts
asst prof @Stanford linguistics | director of social interaction lab 🌱 | bluskies about computational cognitive science & language
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Reposted by Robert Hawkins
anamarasovic.bsky.social
📣Tomorrow at #COLM2025:

1️⃣ Purbid's 𝐩𝐨𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐫 at 𝐒𝐨𝐋𝐚𝐑 (𝟏𝟏:𝟏𝟓𝐚𝐦-𝟏:𝟎𝟎𝐩𝐦) on catching redundant preference pairs & how pruning them hurts accuracy; www.anamarasovic.com/publications...

2️⃣ My 𝐭𝐚𝐥𝐤 at 𝐗𝐋𝐋𝐌-𝐑𝐞𝐚𝐬𝐨𝐧-𝐏𝐥𝐚𝐧 (𝟏𝟐𝐩𝐦) on measuring CoT faithfulness by looking at internals, not just behaviorally

1/3
Reposted by Robert Hawkins
daweibai.bsky.social
Happy to share that our BBS target article has been accepted: “Core Perception”: Re-imagining Precocious Reasoning as Sophisticated Perceiving
With Alon Hafri, @veroniqueizard.bsky.social, @chazfirestone.bsky.social & Brent Strickland
Read it here: doi.org/10.1017/S014...
A short thread [1/5]👇
Reposted by Robert Hawkins
julianje.bsky.social
Our paper in annual review of dev psych is out! It's a big-picture look at the development of social cognition from a computational perspective: compdevlab.yale.edu/docs/2025/an...
compdevlab.yale.edu
Reposted by Robert Hawkins
kohitij.bsky.social
🧠 New preprint!
Recognition-trained ANNs miss a key dimension of IT coding: memorability. Jointly optimizing for both recognition and memorability yielded more brain-like visual models.
Another step toward multi-goal modeling of the ventral stream.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Reposted by Robert Hawkins
mariaa.bsky.social
Another oral talk, this one by @stellali.bsky.social, discussing "PrefPalette: Personalized Preference Modeling with Latent Attributes."

Communities prefer different kinds of responses, which prioritize specific values. Aggregating preferences over communities would lose that signal.

#COLM2025
PrefPalette: Personalized Preference Modeling with Latent Attributes
Personalizing AI systems requires understanding not just what users prefer, but the reasons that underlie those preferences - yet current preference models typically treat human judgment as a black bo...
arxiv.org
Reposted by Robert Hawkins
mariaa.bsky.social
Now we're hearing a talk by @valentinhofmann.bsky.social about "Fluid Language Model Benchmarking."

Computerized adaptive testing is used for humans (like the GRE). This work adopts Item Response Theory from education to measure benchmark characteristics.

#COLM2025
Fluid Language Model Benchmarking
Language model (LM) benchmarking faces several challenges: comprehensive evaluations are costly, benchmarks often fail to measure the intended capabilities, and evaluation quality can degrade due to l...
arxiv.org
Reposted by Robert Hawkins
raziasahi.bsky.social
Managing emotions is not easy - we often get by with a little help. In the NEW Social Interaction and Emotion Lab at Rutgers-Newark, we’ll study how social interactions regulate emotion using experiments, naturalistic data, and multi-modal approaches. ✨ Now recruiting! ✨🙌 Learn more: raziasahi.com
Reposted by Robert Hawkins
emollick.bsky.social
Early evidence that AI agents in a guessing game develop emergent coordination and specialized roles, especially when assigned personas & prompted to consider other agents’ actions. There was no significant increase in accuracy but higher goal-directed behavior & teamwork. arxiv.org/abs/2510.05174
Reposted by Robert Hawkins
joshcjackson.bsky.social
🚨Historical Psych Pre-Conference🚨

We have a great lineup of speakers for the #SPSP2026 edition!

Submit your poster or data blitz abstract by Oct. 23 (link below!). Open to folks from any career stage

Any research on psychological change or historical context of social psych is welcome!
Reposted by Robert Hawkins
kmahowald.bsky.social
UT Austin Linguistics is hiring in computational linguistics!

Asst or Assoc.

We have a thriving group sites.utexas.edu/compling/ and a long proud history in the space. (For instance, fun fact, Jeff Elman was a UT Austin Linguistics Ph.D.)

faculty.utexas.edu/career/170793

🤘
UT Austin Computational Linguistics Research Group – Humans processing computers processing humans processing language
sites.utexas.edu
Reposted by Robert Hawkins
mjcrockett.bsky.social
Great piece in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social on why AI won't solve the loneliness epidemic:

"presenting AI as a scalable solution to the loneliness epidemic risks overlooking the structural and societal roots of the problem and may allow us to abdicate our responsibility as a society."
Can AI really help solve the loneliness epidemic?
Advances in artificial intelligence offer an enticing solution to a global problem: perhaps interacting with large language models (LLMs) can help all…
www.sciencedirect.com
Reposted by Robert Hawkins
jayvanbavel.bsky.social
Why do some ideas spread widely, while others fail to catch on?

Our new review paper on the PSYCHOLOGY OF VIRALITY is now out in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social (it was led by @steverathje.bsky.social)

Read the full paper here: www.cell.com/trends/cogni...
Reposted by Robert Hawkins
Reposted by Robert Hawkins
seema.bsky.social
We just spent 6 months to add 1 figure to this paper. Some people said, "Couples aren't prioritizing men's careers. Men just have better earnings opportunities when moving."

Earnings effects of moves for couples on the left, singles on the right. Negligible gap between single men and women.
Event study coefficients that show that men's earnings rise more than women's among couples following a cross-commuting zone move (left panels). The pattern is muted or reverses among single men and single women (right panels).
Reposted by Robert Hawkins
hannesmehrer.bsky.social
🧠 New preprint: we show that model-guided microstimulation can steer monkey visual behavior.

Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2510.03684

🧵
Reposted by Robert Hawkins
cantb.bsky.social
The AAUP and other labor groups sue the administration over its plan to charge $100,000 for every new H-1B. The AAU is not party to the suit, even though though its members among the largest employers of foreign academics. We’re seeing which groups are willing to let others take the heat.
Higher ed groups sue over Trump administration’s $100K H-1B visa fee
The surprise policy rolled out last month could cause “catastrophic setbacks” to research in the U.S., the lawsuit alleges.
www.highereddive.com
Reposted by Robert Hawkins
colmweb.org
We are excited to announce 4 outstanding papers 🏆🏆🏆🏆 --> 🧵
Reposted by Robert Hawkins
julia-m-smith.bsky.social
If you could win a prize by guessing the number on a die 🎲 hidden under a cup, would you want to guess before the die was rolled, or after?
The odds of winning are the same in both, but they can feel different. 🧵