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Maria Ryskina

@mryskina.bsky.social
186 followers 184 following 40 posts

Postdoc @vectorinstitute.ai | organizer @queerinai.com | previously MIT, CMU LTI | 🐀 rodent enthusiast | she/they 🌐 ryskina.github.io

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Maria Ryskina @mryskina.bsky.social · 23/03/2026
I'm in Rabat, Morocco attending #EACL2026 and enjoying tea! I will present our recent work – comparing how new words emerge in books/articles and on social media – at the LChange workshop: aclanthology.org/2026.lchange...
A Moroccan tea service tray: a metal teapot and two glasses of tea
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Maria Ryskina @mryskina.bsky.social · 07/01/2026
The must-read paper on LLMs, language, and thought that I reference here: Dissociating language and thought in large language models arxiv.org/abs/2301.06627 by @kmahowald.bsky.social @neuranna.bsky.social Idan Blank @nancykanwisher.bsky.social @joshtenenbaum.bsky.social @evfedorenko.bsky.social
arxiv.org
Dissociating language and thought in large language models
Large Language Models (LLMs) have come closest among all models to date to mastering human language, yet opinions about their linguistic and cognitive capabilities remain split. Here, we evaluate LLMs...
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Maria Ryskina @mryskina.bsky.social · 07/01/2026
Huge thanks to @wiair.bsky.social for hosting me -- I had an absolutely wonderful time chatting with @j-novikova-nlp.bsky.social and @malikeh97.bsky.social 🤩
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languagemit.bsky.social @languagemit.bsky.social · 24/12/2025
New book! I have written a book, called Syntax: A cognitive approach, published by MIT Press. This is open access; MIT Press will post a link soon, but until then, the book is available on my website: tedlab.mit.edu/tedlab_websi...
tedlab.mit.edu
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Gillian Hadfield @ghadfield.bsky.social · 16/12/2025
Hiring a postdoc for the Normativity Lab at Johns Hopkins (2026 start). Looking for multiagent systems expertise (RL/generative agents) + interdisciplinary background in AI and cognitive science/econ/cultural evolution. apply.interfolio.com/177701
apply.interfolio.com
Apply - Interfolio
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Leonie Weissweiler @weissweiler.bsky.social · 11/12/2025
🧑‍🔬I’m recruiting PhD students in Natural Language Processing @unileipzig.bsky.social Computer Science, together with @scadsai.bsky.social! Topics include, but aren’t limited to: 🔎Linguistic Interpretability 🌍Multilingual Evaluation 📖Computational Typology Please share! #NLProc #NLP
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Maria Ryskina @mryskina.bsky.social · 04/12/2025
Accidental bibliography achievement unlocked! (I highly recommend checking out both papers)
References to two papers next to one another in a bibliography section:

Making FETCH! happen: Finding emergent dog whistles through common habitats by Kuleen Sasse, Carlos Alejandro Aguirre, Isabel Cachola, Sharon Levy, and Mark Dredze. ACL 2025.

Making “fetch” happen: The influence of social and linguistic context on nonstandard word growth and decline by Ian Stewart and Jacob Eisenstein. EMNLP 2018.
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Gillian Hadfield @ghadfield.bsky.social · 06/11/2025
The recording of my keynote from #COLM2025 is now available!
youtube.com
Gillian Hadfield - Alignment is social: lessons from human alignment for AI
Current approaches conceptualize the alignment challenge as one of eliciting individual human preferences and training models to choose outputs that that satisfy those preferences. To the extent…
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Naomi Saphra @nsaphra.bsky.social · 06/11/2025
the only kind of Rat Race I'm down for
two rats in cars from the University of Richmond study where they trained rats to drive tiny cars to get to treats and concluded that the rats love driving so much they'll do it without any incentive
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Michael Hendricks 🇨🇦 @michaelhendricks.bsky.social · 30/10/2025
Canadian researchers should be aware the there is a motion before the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Science and Research to force Tricouncils to hand over disaggregated peer review data on all applications: Applicant names, profiles, demographics Reviewers names, profiles, comments, and scores
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Anna (Anya) Ivanova @neuranna.bsky.social · 20/10/2025
Finally out in TACL: 🌎EWoK (Elements of World Knowledge)🌎: A cognition-inspired framework for evaluating basic world knowledge in language models tl;dr: LLMs learn basic social concepts way easier than physical&spatial concepts Paper: direct.mit.edu/tacl/article... Website: ewok-core.github.io
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Badr AlKhamissi @bkhmsi.bsky.social · 20/10/2025
🚀 Excited to share a major update to our “Mixture of Cognitive Reasoners” (MiCRo) paper! We ask: What benefits can we unlock by designing language models whose inner structure mirrors the brain’s functional specialization? More below 🧠👇 cognitive-reasoners.epfl.ch
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Willie Agnew @willie-agnew.bsky.social · 17/10/2025
I'm on the job market looking for CS/ischool faculty and related positions! I'm broadly interested in doing research with policymakers and communities impacted by AI to inform and develop mitigations to harms and risks. If you've included any of my work in syllabi or policy docs please let me know!
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Gillian Hadfield @ghadfield.bsky.social · 16/10/2025
Grateful to keynote at #COLM2025. Here's what we're missing about AI alignment: Humans don’t cooperate just by aggregating preferences, we build social processes and institutions to generate norms that make it safe to trade with strangers. AI needs to play by these same systems, not replace them.
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Maria Antoniak @mariaa.bsky.social · 14/10/2025
Inspired to share some papers that I found at #COLM2025! "Register Always Matters: Analysis of LLM Pretraining Data Through the Lens of Language Variation" by Amanda Myntti et al. arxiv.org/abs/2504.01542
Title, authors, and abstract of the paper.Figure 3: Change of accuracy from first to final checkpoint on individual benchmarks shown as a range, with grey indicating the first checkpoint and colours indicating the last checkpoint. The random-guess threshold is shown as a grey vertical line in cases where at least one model falls below it. Bars and legend shown in order of average accuracy.
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Maria Ryskina @mryskina.bsky.social · 14/10/2025
⭐ A thread for some cool recent work I learned about at #COLM2025, either from the paper presentations or from the keynotes!
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Juan Diego Rodriguez @juand-r.bsky.social · 13/10/2025
👀
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Queer in AI @queerinai.com · 09/10/2025
We are launching our Graduate School Application Financial Aid Program (www.queerinai.com/grad-app-aid) for 2025-2026. We’ll give up to $750 per person to LGBTQIA+ STEM scholars applying to graduate programs. Apply at openreview.net/group?id=Que.... 1/5
queerinai.com
Grad App Aid — Queer in AI
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Maria Antoniak @mariaa.bsky.social · 09/10/2025
Keynote at #COLM2025: Nicholas Carlini from Anthropic "Are language models worth it?" Explains that the prior decade of his work on adversarial images, while it taught us a lot, isn't very applied; it's unlikely anyone is actually altering images of cats in scary ways.
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Conference on Language Modeling @colmweb.org · 07/10/2025
Outstanding paper 🏆 1: Fast Controlled Generation from Language Models with Adaptive Weighted Rejection Sampling openreview.net/forum?id=3Bm...
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Naomi Saphra @nsaphra.bsky.social · 29/08/2025
How can an imitative model like an LLM outperform the experts it is trained on? Our new COLM paper outlines three types of transcendence and shows that each one relies on a different aspect of data diversity. arxiv.org/abs/2508.17669
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Greta Tuckute @gretatuckute.bsky.social · 04/10/2025
Check out @mryskina.bsky.social's talk and poster at COLM on Tuesday—we present a method to identify 'semantically consistent' brain regions (responding to concepts across modalities) and show that more semantically consistent brain regions are better predicted by LLMs.
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Maria Ryskina @mryskina.bsky.social · 04/10/2025
Also, if you're at COLM, come to Gillian's keynote and find out what our lab is working on!
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Maria Ryskina @mryskina.bsky.social · 04/10/2025
Interested in language models, brains, and concepts? Check out our COLM 2025 🔦 Spotlight paper! (And if you’re at COLM, come hear about it on Tuesday – sessions Spotlight 2 & Poster 2)!
Paper title: Language models align with brain regions that represent concepts across modalities.
Authors:  Maria Ryskina, Greta Tuckute, Alexander Fung, Ashley Malkin, Evelina Fedorenko. 
Affiliations: Maria is affiliated with the Vector Institute for AI, but the work was done at MIT. All other authors are affiliated with MIT. 
Email address: maria.ryskina@vectorinstitute.ai.
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Queer in AI @queerinai.com · 01/10/2025
Attending COLM next week in Montreal? 🇨🇦 Join us on Thursday for a 2-part social! ✨ 5:30-6:30 at the conference venue and 7:00-10:00 offsite! 🌈 Sign up here: forms.gle/oiMK3TLP8ZZc...
Queer in AI @ COLM 2025. Thursday, October 9 5:30 to 10 pm Eastern Time. There is a QR code to sign up which is linked in the post.
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Pranav A @pranav-nlp.bsky.social · 09/09/2025
Hi all, we are organizing this fun affinity workshop at EurIPS in Copenhagen. Feel free to present any of your previously published works before or submit abstracts / mixed-media materials!
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Abhilasha Ravichander @lasha.bsky.social · 30/07/2025
Super super thrilled that HALoGEN, our study of LLM hallucinations and their potential origins in training data, received an ✨Outstanding Paper Award✨ at ACL! Joint work w/i Shrusti Ghela*, David Wadden, and Yejin Choi bsky.app/profile/lash...
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Kanishka Misra @kanishka.bsky.social · 28/07/2025
Looking forward to attending #cogsci2025 (Jul 29 - Aug 3)! I’m especially excited to meet students who will be applying to PhD programs in Computational Ling/CogSci in the coming cycle. Please reach out if you want to meet up and chat! Email is the best way, but DM also works if you must! quick🧵:
Placeholders for 3 students (number arbitrarily chosen) and me - to signify my eventual group!
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Maria Ryskina @mryskina.bsky.social · 24/07/2025
Join Abhilasha's lab, she is an awesome researcher and mentor! I can attest, being her collaborator was great fun 🤩
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Maria Ryskina @mryskina.bsky.social · 11/07/2025
Come join us in Vancouver for our ICML social! (I'll be at ICML July 15-18, any poster/talk recs welcome!)
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