xuan (ɕɥɛn / sh-yen)

I've struggled to announce this amidst so much dark & awful going on in the world, but with 1mo to go, I wanted to share that: (i) I finally graduated; (ii) In August, I'll begin as an assistant professor in the CS dept. of the National University of Singapore.

Our new paper is out in PNAS: "Evolving general cooperation with a Bayesian theory of mind"! Humans are the ultimate cooperators. We coordinate on a scale and scope no other species (nor AI) can match. What makes this possible? 🧵

New paper & surprising result. LLMs transmit traits to other models via hidden signals in data. Datasets consisting only of 3-digit numbers can transmit a love for owls, or evil tendencies. 🧵

How do people reason so flexibly about new problems, bringing to bear globally-relevant knowledge while staying locally-consistent? Can we engineer a system that can synthesize bespoke world models (expressed as probabilistic programs) on-the-fly?

WFP Statement | #Gaza On the morning of 20 July, a 25 truck WFP convoy carrying vital food assistance crossed the Zikim border point destined for starving communities in northern Gaza. Shortly after passing the final checkpoint beyond the Zikim crossing point into Gaza, the…

A hallmark of human intelligence is the capacity for rapid adaptation, solving new problems quickly under novel and unfamiliar conditions. How can we build machines to do so? In our new preprint, we propose that any general intelligence system must have an adaptive world model,…

This week's #PaperILike is "Stop! Planner Time: Metareasoning for Probabilistic Planning Using Learned Performance Profiles" (Budd et al., AAAI 2024). Metareasoning is increasingly important as we continue to make progress on "reasoning." PDF: ojs.aaai.org/index.php/AAAI…

Experts on body dysmorphic disorder have warned that people struggling with it have become increasingly dependent on AI chatbots to evaluate their self-perceived flaws and recommend cosmetic surgeries. "It’s almost coming up in every single session,” one therapist tells me.

Thrilled to announce our symposium, Cognitively Inspired Interpretability inn Large Neural Networks, at #CogSci2025 featuring @TaylorWWebb, Ellie Pavlick, @feng_jiahai, Gustaw Opielka, Claire Stevenson, and @IbanDlank!