Sign in

Elizabeth Mieczkowski

@emiecz.bsky.social
217 followers 207 following 59 posts

Studying multi-agent teams 🤝🧩🤖 PhD Candidate at Princeton CS Prev: Cornell CS, MIT BCS emieczkowski.github.io

PostsRepliesMedia
Elizabeth Mieczkowski @emiecz.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
1/ Governments and organizations often cut staff and overlapping roles in the name of efficiency. But what looks unnecessary on a normal day may be essential when something goes wrong. Our new preprint tests how redundancy protects human teams 🧵👇
2198
Elizabeth Mieczkowski @emiecz.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
LATTE is accepted to NeurIPS 2026! ☕️ Adding agents is easy. Coordinating is hard. LLM teams often duplicate work, overwrite each other, and stall: classic distributed-systems failures. We borrowed the fix: a shared task graph that agents build, claim, and revise as they go 👇
2180
Reposted by Elizabeth Mieczkowski
Seth Karten @sethkarten.ai · 25/09/2026
We wrote Agent Bazaar back in May around a future where agents act on behalf of users and increasingly participate directly in marketplaces like Amazon and eBay. We introduced Economic Alignment to study what happens as agents become economic actors.
2153
Reposted by Elizabeth Mieczkowski
Kunal Jha @kjha02.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
Can self-interested, self-improving, self-replicating agents learn to cooperate? Our new paper, Tapes Together Strong, shows they can: when social behavior, computation, and reproduction share one energy budget, cooperation evolves from scratch. arxiv.org/abs/2609.10817 🧵
48418
Reposted by Elizabeth Mieczkowski
Yuka Machino @ymacci.bsky.social · 20/07/2026
Telling two people to be selfish barely changes their behavior, unless they both know they got the same message! Our #CogSci2026 paper reveals that these group expectations only matter when we all know that we share the same expectations.
1194
Reposted by Elizabeth Mieczkowski
Mark J. Nelson @mm-jj-nn.bsky.social · 16/07/2026
A paper casting doubt on the foundations of a bunch of nice convergence bounds in multi-agent RL (found via @quokkka.bsky.social). The technical material here is a bit out of my depth, but relevant to some stuff I do in game AI. Attempt to briefly summarize based on an initial read below. 1/n
arxiv.org
Paradoxes of Game Theoretic Equilibria and Price of Anarchy
For decades, static solution concepts (Nash, Correlated, and Coarse Correlated Equilibria) and the Price of Anarchy (PoA) have formed the bedrock of algorithmic game theory, with no-regret learning pr...
3305
Reposted by Elizabeth Mieczkowski
Kale-ab Tessera @kale-ab.bsky.social · 14/07/2026
Can LLM agents coordinate in long-horizon, open-ended worlds? We test 13 LLMs in Alem, a new benchmark. Most struggle, averaging ~6% normalised return. Yet on Hard, zero-shot Gemini 3.1 Pro matches the best MARL agent after 1B training steps. Our ablations show communication matters most. 🧵
13810
Reposted by Elizabeth Mieczkowski
NYU Center for Data Science @nyudatascience.bsky.social · 08/06/2026
CDS Faculty Fellow @sucholutsky.bsky.social co-authored a new paper arguing that teams of language models should be studied like distributed computer systems, with similar coordination and scaling challenges. arxiv.org/abs/2603.12229
arxiv.org
Language Model Teams as Distributed Systems
Large language models (LLMs) are growing increasingly capable, prompting recent interest in LLM teams. Yet, despite increased deployment of LLM teams at scale, we lack a principled framework for addre...
251
Reposted by Elizabeth Mieczkowski
Rachit Dubey @rachitdubey.bsky.social · 07/04/2026
🚨New preprint and our results are rather concerning.. We find the "boiling frog" equivalent of AI use. Using large-scale RCTs, we provide *casual* evidence that AI assistance reduces persistence and hurts independent performance. And these effects emerge after just 10–15 minutes of AI use! 1/
261533684
Reposted by Elizabeth Mieczkowski
Paul Middlebrooks @braininspired.bsky.social · 18/03/2026
Are the laws of thought woven from three golden threads? Tom @cocoscilab.bsky.social and I discuss some of the history and themes in logic, probability, and neural nets, in his new book The Laws of Thought. braininspired.co/podcast/233/
063
Reposted by Elizabeth Mieczkowski
Jay Van Bavel, PhD @jayvanbavel.bsky.social · 09/03/2026
Sycophantic AI distorts reality by returning responses that are biased to reinforce existing beliefs. "sycophantic AI distorts belief, manufacturing certainty where there should be doubt." Unbiased sampling produces discovery rates 5X higher! arxiv.org/pdf/2602.14270
12813
Elizabeth Mieczkowski @emiecz.bsky.social · 16/03/2026
🚨New preprint! LLM teams are being deployed at scale, yet we lack the tools to predict when they’ll succeed, fail, or how to design them. Distributed computing faced the exact same questions and figured out how to answer them. We show those insights apply directly to LLMs 🧵👇
1323
Reposted by Elizabeth Mieczkowski
Seth Karten @sethkarten.ai · 13/03/2026
open.substack.com/pub/sethkart...
open.substack.com
We Automated RL Environment Engineering for $10
RL environment simulation eats 50-90% of training wall-clock for specialist RL policies. Coding agents can translate them automatically with no sim-to-sim gap.
264
Reposted by Elizabeth Mieczkowski
Declan Campbell @thisisadax.bsky.social · 05/02/2026
The visual world is composed of objects, and those objects are composed of features. But do VLMs exploit this compositional structure when processing multi-object scenes? In our 🆒🆕 #ICLR2026 paper, we find they do – via emergent symbolic mechanisms for visual binding. 🧵👇
18326
Reposted by Elizabeth Mieczkowski
Killian McLoughlin @killianmcloughlin.bsky.social · 02/02/2026
Are you a grad student who wants to give a talk at Princeton’s psychology department (in-person or on Zoom)? Nominate yourself or someone you know: forms.gle/WN2ybYMuZiW3... Priority given to non-Ivy and URM students. International applicants welcome. Deadline is this Friday (Feb 6)!
forms.gle
Emerging Scholars in Psychological Science Speaker Nominations
Nominate yourself or another late-stage PhD student to speak at Princeton's Department of Psychology this academic semester (Spring 2026). The Emerging Scholars in Psychological Science (ESPS) talk ...
01010
Reposted by Elizabeth Mieczkowski
Griffiths Computational Cognitive Science Lab @cocoscilab.bsky.social · 18/12/2025
Excited to announce a new book telling the story of mathematical approaches to studying the mind, from the origins of cognitive science to modern AI! The Laws of Thought will be published in February and is available for pre-order now.
217141
Reposted by Elizabeth Mieczkowski
Chris Amato @cjdamato.bsky.social · 19/11/2025
I'm looking for two PhD student for Fall 2026. Both on multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). - Theory of MARL: experience with theory and/or MARL -Formal methods for MARL: experience with formal methods or MARL (interest in learning the other) www.khoury.northeastern.edu/programs/com...
khoury.northeastern.edu
PhD in Computer Science - Khoury College of Computer Sciences
The PhD in Computer Science program will prepare you with advanced knowledge, industry opportunities, and research experience to be a leader in the field.
164
Reposted by Elizabeth Mieczkowski
Rachit Dubey @rachitdubey.bsky.social · 06/11/2025
Honored and excited to share that I am the winner of Nomis & Science Young Explorer Award!! Also thrilled to share that my article describing my research is out now in @science.org today! The normalization of (almost) everything www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... 1/
science.org
The normalization of (almost) everything: Our minds can get used to anything, and even crises start feeling normal
Our minds can get used to anything, and even crises start feeling normal
38821
Reposted by Elizabeth Mieczkowski
Gabe Grand @gabegrand.bsky.social · 27/10/2025
Do AI agents ask good questions? We built “Collaborative Battleship” to find out—and discovered that weaker LMs + Bayesian inference can beat GPT-5 at 1% of the cost. Paper, code & demos: gabegrand.github.io/battleship Here's what we learned about building rational information-seeking agents... 🧵🔽
12411
Reposted by Elizabeth Mieczkowski
Bella Fascendini @bellafascendini.bsky.social · 06/10/2025
Honored to contribute a Journal Club piece to @natrevpsychol.nature.com! I explore Robert White's seminal "competence motivation" framework (1959) and why it remains relevant over 60 years later—from why toddlers insist on doing things themselves to designing intrinsically motivated AI. 🤖
1134
Reposted by Elizabeth Mieczkowski
Mark Ho @markkho.bsky.social · 06/10/2025
I'm recruiting grad students!! 🎓 The CoDec Lab @ NYU (codec-lab.github.io) is looking for PhD students (Fall 2026) interested in computational approaches to social cognition & problem solving 🧠 Applications through Psych (tinyurl.com/nyucp) are due Dec 1. Reach out with Qs & please repost! 🙏
codec-lab.github.io
codec lab
36048
Reposted by Elizabeth Mieczkowski
Kunal Jha @kjha02.bsky.social · 03/10/2025
Forget modeling every belief and goal! What if we represented people as following simple scripts instead (i.e "cross the crosswalk")? Our new paper shows AI which models others’ minds as Python code 💻 can quickly and accurately predict human behavior! shorturl.at/siUYI%F0%9F%...
33814
Reposted by Elizabeth Mieczkowski
Sam Gershman @gershbrain.bsky.social · 23/09/2025
Timely reminder that 'associative' language leads lay people to confuse correlation and causation, as @tomerullman.bsky.social and I showed a few years ago. journals.plos.org/plosone/arti... Snapshot from the BBC: www.bbc.com/news/article...
26517
Reposted by Elizabeth Mieczkowski
Jamie Cummins @jamiecummins.bsky.social · 18/09/2025
Can large language models stand in for human participants? Many social scientists seem to think so, and are already using "silicon samples" in research. One problem: depending on the analytic decisions made, you can basically get these samples to show any effect you want. THREAD 🧵
arxiv.org
The threat of analytic flexibility in using large language models to simulate human data: A call to attention
Social scientists are now using large language models to create "silicon samples" - synthetic datasets intended to stand in for human respondents, aimed at revolutionising human subjects research. How...
11342159
Reposted by Elizabeth Mieczkowski
Brenden Lake @brendenlake.bsky.social · 08/09/2025
Our new lab for Human & Machine Intelligence is officially open at Princeton University! Consider applying for a PhD or Postdoc position, either through Computer Science or Psychology. You can register interest on our new website lake-lab.github.io (1/2)
15414
Elizabeth Mieczkowski @emiecz.bsky.social · 18/08/2025
Bonan's energy and excitement for CogSci are truly unmatched 🤩 Apply!
091
Reposted by Elizabeth Mieczkowski
Vélez Lab at UCSD @velezcolab.bsky.social · 29/07/2025
The CoLab is headed to #CogSci2025!! 🥳 Here's where to find us!
A lineup showing upcoming talks and posters for the CoLab at CogSci 2025. 

Wednesday
Natalia Vélez: Understanding structural diversity in human collaboration
Metareasoning Workshop, Pacific H, 10:30-11:10am

Thursday
Huang Ham: Collaborative encoding of visual working memory
P1-H-244

Friday
Bonan Zhao (new PI!): Discovering hidden laws in innovation by recombination
P2-Z-231

Elizabeth Mieczkowski: A normative account of specialization: How task and environment shape role differentiation in collaboration
P2-M-133

Bella Fascendini: Are two-year-olds intrinsically motivated to explore their own competence?
Learning & Development 2, Salon 6, 1-2:30pm

Saturday
Renée Creppy (first-timer!): Children’s expectations of dominant and prestigious leaders
P3-C-40

Natalia Vélez: Thinking in teams
Invited Symposium: New Theoretical Directions in Cognitive Science
Salon 7, 2:15-3:45pm
0339
Elizabeth Mieczkowski @emiecz.bsky.social · 24/07/2025
Really exciting step toward AI-informed policy design! Nice work @sethkarten.ai 🙌
040
Reposted by Elizabeth Mieczkowski
Yang Xiang @yangxiang.bsky.social · 24/07/2025
Our latest on the cognitive science of LLMs! To be presented @CogSci‬2025 🎉 LLMs are increasingly involved in human collaborations. How do LLMs assign responsibility and reward to collaborators? Is it similar to how humans do it? 🤖🧑 📃 gershmanlab.com/pubs/XiangBi... (1/4)
2399
Elizabeth Mieczkowski @emiecz.bsky.social · 23/07/2025
I've learned so much working with Rachit! Highly recommend joining his lab 👏
020
Reposted by Elizabeth Mieczkowski
Max Kleiman-Weiner @maxkw.bsky.social · 22/07/2025
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? 🧵 www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
pnas.org
Evolving general cooperation with a Bayesian theory of mind | PNAS
Theories of the evolution of cooperation through reciprocity explain how unrelated self-interested individuals can accomplish more together than th...
29237
Reposted by Elizabeth Mieczkowski
Robert Hawkins @rdhawkins.bsky.social · 21/07/2025
"We introduce Collaborative Rational Speech Act (CRSA), an information-theoretic (IT) extension of RSA that models multi-turn dialog by optimizing a gain function adapted from rate-distortion theory." arxiv.org/abs/2507.14063
arxiv.org
Collaborative Rational Speech Act: Pragmatic Reasoning for Multi-Turn Dialog
As AI systems take on collaborative roles, they must reason about shared goals and beliefs-not just generate fluent language. The Rational Speech Act (RSA) framework offers a principled approach to pr...
0135
Elizabeth Mieczkowski @emiecz.bsky.social · 18/07/2025
So excited our paper is now out in ‪@cognitionjournal.bsky.social‬! Huge thanks to our editor and reviewers 🧠 Their thoughtful suggestions inspired Experiments 3 & 4, including a striking inverse correlation between idleness judgments and speed-up predictions
0194
Reposted by Elizabeth Mieczkowski
annecollins.bsky.social @annecollins.bsky.social · 12/07/2025
New published paper with Ham Huang and @actlab.bsky.social! @cognitionjournal.bsky.social authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S...
24414
Reposted by Elizabeth Mieczkowski
Wolfram Barfuss @wbarfuss.bsky.social · 17/06/2025
How to cooperate for a sustainable future? We don't know (yet), but I'm thrilled to share that our new perspective piece has just been published in @pnas.org. Bridging complexity science and multiagent reinforcement learning can lead to a much-needed science of collective, cooperative intelligence.
1116
Elizabeth Mieczkowski @emiecz.bsky.social · 17/06/2025
Excited to share our findings on prediction in the brain’s "physics network" 🧠 Honored to have contributed to this work, & huge kudos to @rtpramod.bsky.social for leading the project!
060
Reposted by Elizabeth Mieczkowski
Francisco Cruz @cruzf.bsky.social · 12/06/2025
Across 9 experiments (+6600 participants), we explored a paradox: How do non-experts judge scientific explanations they can’t fully understand? We found that scientific jargon can increase people’s satisfaction with explanations, even though it makes them less comprehensible. 2/9
132
Reposted by Elizabeth Mieczkowski
nitasha tiku @nitasha.bsky.social · 05/06/2025
A lot of people say generative AI shouldn't infringe on copyright. These researchers actually tried to do it. The result: an 8 terabyte dataset of text that's openly licensed or in the public domain & 7 B parameter model that performs as well as Meta's Llama 7B www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...
washingtonpost.com
Analysis | AI firms say they can’t respect copyright. These researchers tried.
A new effort using only openly licensed data may have implications on thorny policy disputes around copyright and AI
15761239
Reposted by Elizabeth Mieczkowski
Tomer Ullman @tomerullman.bsky.social · 02/06/2025
Out now in TiCS, something i've been thinking about a lot: "Physics vs. graphics as an organizing dichotomy in cognition" (by Balaban & me) relevant for many people, related to imagination, intuitive physics, mental simulation, aphantasia, and more authors.elsevier.com/a/1lBaC4sIRv...
515148
Reposted by Elizabeth Mieczkowski
Eugene Vinitsky 🍒 @eugenevinitsky.bsky.social · 23/05/2025
Are you an RL PhD at Harvard who has had your funding wrecked by the government and working on topics related to multi-agent? Reach out, I am happy to try to find a way to support you.
1497
Reposted by Elizabeth Mieczkowski
Nori Jacoby @norijacoby.bsky.social · 29/04/2025
We are recruiting two postdoctoral scholars for a research project in human collective intelligence and creativity at UC Davis and Cornell. Joint project with @enfascination.com, @norijacoby.bsky.social, @oferon.bsky.social & Dalton Conley. Please forward this thread to relevant people. 1/n
22224
Reposted by Elizabeth Mieczkowski
Fred Callaway @fredcallaway.bsky.social · 07/05/2025
Despite the world being on fire, I can't help but be thrilled to announce that I'll be starting as an Assistant Professor in the Cognitive Science Program at Dartmouth in Fall '26. I'll be recruiting grad students this upcoming cycle—get in touch if you're interested!
1714624
Reposted by Elizabeth Mieczkowski
Grist @grist.org · 05/05/2025
Scientists just found a way to break through climate apathy. In a field of muddy results, it's among the clearest findings. grist.org/science/brea... #Science #Climate #Communication #Psychology #Greensky
grist.org
Scientists just found a way to break through climate apathy
In a field of muddy results, it's among the clearest findings that one cognitive scientist has seen in his career.
25014
Reposted by Elizabeth Mieczkowski
Shari Liu @shariliu.bsky.social · 02/05/2025
The first big talk I have given since starting my lab in 2023! 🧠 👶 💻📊Thank you @kempnerinstitute.bsky.social for the invitation and recording. Feedback welcome!
1203
Reposted by Elizabeth Mieczkowski
ammar i marvi @aimarvi.bsky.social · 22/04/2025
**ecstatic** to share our @iclr-conf.bsky.social paper: sparse components distinguish visual pathways & their alignment to neural networks, with @nancykanwisher.bsky.social and meenakshi khosla (openreview.net/forum?id=IqH...) 1/n
openreview.net
Sparse components distinguish visual pathways & their alignment to...
The ventral, dorsal, and lateral streams in high-level human visual cortex are implicated in distinct functional processes. Yet, deep neural networks (DNNs) trained on a single task model the...
1196
Reposted by Elizabeth Mieczkowski
Colton Casto @coltoncasto.bsky.social · 21/04/2025
New paper! 🧠 **The cerebellar components of the human language network** with: @hsmall.bsky.social @moshepoliak.bsky.social @gretatuckute.bsky.social @benlipkin.bsky.social @awolna.bsky.social @aniladmello.bsky.social and @evfedorenko.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 1/n 🧵
biorxiv.org
The cerebellar components of the human language network
The cerebellum's capacity for neural computation is arguably unmatched. Yet despite evidence of cerebellar contributions to cognition, including language, its precise role remains debated. Here, we sy...
24918
Reposted by Elizabeth Mieczkowski
Kunal Jha @kjha02.bsky.social · 19/04/2025
Our new paper (first one of my PhD!) on cooperative AI reveals a surprising insight: Environment Diversity > Partner Diversity. Agents trained in self-play across many environments learn cooperative norms that transfer to humans on novel tasks. shorturl.at/fqsNN%F0%9F%...
1267
Reposted by Elizabeth Mieczkowski
Rachit Dubey @rachitdubey.bsky.social · 17/04/2025
🚨 New in Nature Human Behavior! 🚨 Binary climate data visuals amplify perceived impact of climate change. Both graphs in this image reflect equivalent climate change trends over time, yet people consistently perceive climate change as having a greater impact in the right plot than the left. 👇1/n
524587
Reposted by Elizabeth Mieczkowski
Martin Hebart @martinhebart.bsky.social · 15/04/2025
Proud to announce our primer on "Ten principles for reliable, efficient, and adaptable coding in psychology and cognitive neuroscience" www.nature.com/articles/s44... This primer is for beginners to get started, advanced programmers to improve, and PIs. #psychology #psychsci #cogsci #neuroskyence
nature.com
Ten principles for reliable, efficient, and adaptable coding in psychology and cognitive neuroscience - Communications Psychology
Programming is essential for modern research in neuroscience and psychology, but it can quickly become a source of frustration and error. This Primer introduces ten practical principles guiding resear...
210957