Laura Ruis

How do LLMs learn to reason from data? Are they ~retrieving the answers from parametric knowledge🦜? In our new preprint, we look at the pretraining data and find evidence against this: Procedural knowledge in pretraining drives LLM reasoning ⚙️🔢 🧵⬇️

I’m building a new team at @GoogleDeepMind to work on Open-Ended Discovery! We’re looking for strong Research Scientists and Research Engineers to help us push the frontier of autonomously discovering novel artifacts such as new knowledge, capabilities, or algorithms, in an…

🚨New paper alert!🚨 "Scalpel vs. Hammer: GRPO Amplifies Existing Capabilities, SFT Replaces Them" @ActInterp ICML'25 @deepseek_ai popularised RLVR and distillation for 'reasoning training'! But how do they differ under the hood? Details in 🧵: (1/8)

A bit late to announce, but I’m excited to share that I'll be starting as an assistant professor at the University of Maryland @umdcs this August. I'll be recruiting PhD students this upcoming cycle for fall 2026. (And if you're a UMD grad student, sign up for my fall seminar!)

LLMs acing math olympiads? Cute. But BALROG is where agents fight dragons (and actual Balrogs)🐉😈 And today, Grok-4 (@grok) takes the gold 🥇 Welcome to the podium, champion!

Do you have a PhD (or equivalent) or will have one in the coming months (i.e. 2-3 months away from graduating)? Do you want to help build open-ended agents that help humans do humans things better, rather than replace them? We're hiring 1-2 Research Scientists! Check the 🧵👇

My team at @AISecurityInst is hiring! This is an awesome opportunity to get involved with cutting-edge scientific research inside government on frontier AI models. I genuinely love my job and the team 🤗 Link: civilservicejobs.service.gov.uk/csr/jobs.cgi?j… More Info: ⬇️

Today (w/ @UniofOxford @Stanford @MIT @LSEnews) we’re sharing the results of the largest AI persuasion experiments to date: 76k participants, 19  LLMs, 707 political issues. We examine “levers” of AI persuasion: model scale, post-training, prompting, personalization, & more 🧵

Check out my posters today if you're at ICML! 1) Detecting high-stakes interactions with activation probes — Outstanding paper @ Actionable interp workshop, 10:40-11:40 2) LLMs’ activations linearly encode training-order recency — Best paper runner up @ MemFM workshop, 2:30-3:45

So much research is being done about LLMs that it's hard to stay on top of the literature. To help with this, I've made a list of all the most important papers from the past 8 years: rtmccoy.com/pubs/ I hope you enjoy!

Submit to our workshop with the goal of interpreting artificial cognition! 👇

Some personal news ✨ In September, I’m joining @ucl as Associate Professor of Computational Linguistics. I’ll be building a lab, directing the MSc programme, and continuing research at the intersection of language, cognition, and AI. 🧵

Can coding agents autonomously implement AI research extensions? We introduce RExBench, a benchmark that tests if a coding agent can implement a novel experiment based on existing research and code. Finding: Most agents we tested had a low success rate, but there is promise!

yeah, Akbir might be the goat of AI safety And I like his Shaper (multi-agent opponent modelling as a form of alignment) a lot

Highly recommend reading this, or at least the intro and conclusion. Some gems about the future of safety research