iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

briefly emerging to wish happy october to my friends

Najoung Kim @najoung.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Thanks @goodfire.bsky.social for supporting my lab with this grant! Excited to see how Silico could support projects on compositionality I've been meaning to explore for a while, as well as our lab's ongoing project on the role of people in ideation with research agents.

goodfire.com

Announcing Goodfire Research Grants - Goodfire

$1M in free Silico usage for academic and nonprofit researchers working on AI interpretability, alignment, and life sciences

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Najoung Kim @najoung.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Excited about finding grammaticality as an emergent property encoded in LM representations, deconfounded from factors affecting general probability! Hope this helps revisit debates in this space with a more nuanced answer to the prerequisite "do LMs even show sensitivity" Q

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Jane Li 🦖 @janeli.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

🦀New preprint! (w/ @najoung.bsky.social)🦞 Is grammaticality a major organizing principle of NLM representations? We show that many NLMs exhibit abstract rep. separation for grammaticality. We believe this work addresses debates about confounds in measuring model gram. knowledge. [1/10]

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Najoung Kim @najoung.bsky.social · 02/07/2026

i will be at #ICML2026! first time in my career (!) that I'm attending a major conf in my home town and super excited about it 💖🇰🇷 (but also... clash of worlds 😬) I'll be doing hallway track for the most part so DM or email me if you'd like to hang! + don't forget to 👇

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Najoung Kim @najoung.bsky.social · 01/07/2026

🐸 New position paper on compositionality! 🐸 I synthesize my thoughts about the proper role/interpretation of behavior and mechanism in asking the question "Is this system (mind or machine) exhibiting compositionality?"

No Escape from Behavior in Evaluating Compositionality by Najoung Kim

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Najoung Kim @najoung.bsky.social · 17/04/2026

OG hyp gen paper update! Even if you're not interested in the specific phenomenon we look at, the general framing should be of interest to a much broader audience

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Kanishka Misra @kanishka.bsky.social · 27/01/2026

“All bears have a property”, “Some bears have a property”, “Bears have a property” are different in terms of how the property is generalized to a specific bear – a great example of how language constrains thought! This holds for kids, adults, and according to our new work, (V)LMs! 🧵

Title page of our paper: "Bears, all bears, and some bears. Language Constraints on Language Models' Inductive Inferences"

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Najoung Kim @najoung.bsky.social · 08/12/2025

happy to have finally made a pilgrimage to ucsd, a special place for some of us :)

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Najoung Kim @najoung.bsky.social · 19/11/2025

My lab at BU is recruiting PhD students and possibly a postdoc this year! We study humans & machines, centered around topics like meaning, generalization, evaluation methods and design, and the nature of computation and representation that underlie language and cognition. 🫴🫴

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Najoung Kim @najoung.bsky.social · 18/11/2025

Here are the slides: docs.google.com/presentation... For context the intended audience is Lang Dev researchers who are attending a session on "what can LLMs tell us about human language". If you have any thoughts I'd love to hear them!

docs.google.com

SLD Plenary - Najoung Kim [external share]

Whence insights? The value of delineating human and machine CogSci Najoung Kim (Boston University) Society for Language Development Annual Symposium November 6, 2025 1

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Najoung Kim @najoung.bsky.social · 10/11/2025

for something to be considered creative, it has to be semantically/pragmatically felicitous!!!

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Najoung Kim @najoung.bsky.social · 09/11/2025

honored to have given a plenary address at the Society for Language Development annual symposium titled "Whence insights? The value of delineating human and machine CogSci". It's a synthesis of a few years of thoughts, recently concretized with @aditya-yedetore.bsky.social and @kanishka.bsky.social

screenshot of a slide titled "Whence insights? The value of delineating human and machine CogSci"

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Najoung Kim @najoung.bsky.social · 25/07/2025

👾 Full-time research assistant position (1 year) with @sebschu.bsky.social and me! 👾 We're looking for someone to join the research agent evaluation team, starting Fall 2025. Application link to be available soon, but feel free to send us your CV and/or come talk to us at #ACL2025. 🧵

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Lizzie Coppock @lizzieloo.bsky.social · 24/07/2025

I have a sabbatical coming up and I'm going to Nepal! Why Nepal? You can read about it at my first blog post about this trip. TL;DR: linguistic diversity, writing systems (and pretty scripts), classifiers, and a school for Newar kids in Kathmandu. sites.bu.edu/lislab/2025/...

sites.bu.edu

Field trip to Nepal! | Linguistic Semantics Lab (LiSLab)

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Najoung Kim @najoung.bsky.social · 22/07/2025

ever since VLMs were a thing i've been interested in how the additional visual modality changes language in meaningful ways. after negative findings after negative findings, excited to report this result! proud of our junior authors for digging into this 🐸

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Najoung Kim @najoung.bsky.social · 08/07/2025

green carded finally 💚💚

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Najoung Kim @najoung.bsky.social · 02/07/2025

Seeing an experiment and thinking "but have they tried X? what if we do Y?" is a key part of research and a start to new discoveries. RExBench tests if coding agents can implement new extensions. It complements recent evals (eg PaperBench from OpenAI ) on replication! See 👇 for details

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Koyena Pal @koyena.bsky.social · 30/06/2025

🚨 Registration is live! 🚨 The New England Mechanistic Interpretability (NEMI) Workshop is happening Aug 22nd 2025 at Northeastern University! A chance for the mech interp community to nerd out on how models really work 🧠🤖 🌐 Info: nemiconf.github.io/summer25/ 📝 Register: forms.gle/v4kJCweE3UUH...

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Najoung Kim @najoung.bsky.social · 18/06/2025

i'll be in copenhagen for a few days, lmk if you want to get coffee! will be around most of Thurs and early Sat. alternatively you can also come see me give a talk (at a museum apparently) on Fri: cphnlp.github.io

cphnlp.github.io

Copenhagen NLP Symposium 2025

symposium website

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Anna Rogers @annarogers.bsky.social · 26/05/2025

📢 The Copenhagen NLP Symposium on June 20th! - Invited talks by @loubnabnl.hf.co (HF) @mziizm.bsky.social (Cohere) @najoung.bsky.social (BU) @kylelo.bsky.social (AI2) Yohei Oseki (UTokyo) - Exciting posters by other participants Register to attend and/or present your poster at cphnlp.github.io /1

cphnlp.github.io

Copenhagen NLP Symposium 2025

symposium website

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Matt Goldrick @mattgoldrick.bsky.social · 29/05/2025

Very sorry to learn of the passing of LouAnn Gerken, who had such an impact on our understanding of the acquisition of speech sounds and sound patterns obits.mlive.com/us/obituarie...

obits.mlive.com

LouAnn Gerken Obituary (1959 - 2025) - Tucson, AZ - Arizona Daily Star

View LouAnn A. Gerken's obituary, send flowers and sign the guestbook.

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Najoung Kim @najoung.bsky.social · 04/05/2025

hello NAACL friends I'm giving a keynote today at RepL4NLP at 1:30PM local time, come say hi! I'll mostly be musing about things with light research discussions

Screenshot of a slide that says "what does it take to convince ourselves that a system is exhibiting compositionality?" with a side comment "mostly AI, but humans too!!" for the word system

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Najoung Kim @najoung.bsky.social · 29/03/2025

in liminal state, as correctly described by a colleague

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Najoung Kim @najoung.bsky.social · 27/03/2025

so very excited that naomi is joining!!! a huge win for cds 💖

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Najoung Kim @najoung.bsky.social · 04/02/2025

"Gaming Linguists" good bigram

Korean to English Gaming Linguists Urgently Required

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Najoung Kim @najoung.bsky.social · 18/12/2024

Repost appreciated! 🙏 ACL 2025 Ling theory & Cognitive modeling track is looking for emergency reviewers. The emergency review period is between 3/18-26, and these reviewers will be excluded from the ARR cycle. If you're interested, please sign up here! docs.google.com/forms/d/1fH7...

docs.google.com

ACL 2025 Ling theory & Cognitive modeling track emergency reviewer volunteer form

The Linguistic Theories, Cognitive Modeling, and Psycholinguistics track at ACL 2025 is looking for emergency reviewers. The emergency reviews will take place between 18th to 26th of March, 2025. Thes...

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Najoung Kim @najoung.bsky.social · 01/12/2024

have many tasks but immobilized by car

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Ben Lipkin @benlipkin.bsky.social · 25/11/2024

Lots of folks talking about scaling LLM inference over this last year Internally, I’ve been developing and using a library that makes this extremely easy, and I decided to open-source it Meet the decoding library: github.com/benlipkin/de... 1/7

github.com

GitHub - benlipkin/decoding: Composable inference algorithms with LLMs and programmable logic

Composable inference algorithms with LLMs and programmable logic - benlipkin/decoding

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Najoung Kim @najoung.bsky.social · 22/11/2024

this is a first... suffering maximized...

The password must NOT contain a non alpha character in the last two positions of the password!

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Najoung Kim @najoung.bsky.social · 21/11/2024

why say "bad" when you can say "ungood"

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Najoung Kim @najoung.bsky.social · 19/11/2024

at the point of the semester where emergency todo lists inside of a todo list is made

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Najoung Kim @najoung.bsky.social · 16/11/2024

so proud of Hayley Ross for getting a best paper award at GenBench this year!! 🎉🪅🎉 I'm sure Kate would be too :) check out our paper and share if you think homemade cats are cats! arxiv.org/abs/2410.17482

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Najoung Kim @najoung.bsky.social · 08/11/2024

First bsky post about tinlab at #EMNLP2024! A few highlights: * Presentations from Aditya Yedetore and Hayley Ross on neural network generalizations! * I'm giving a keynote at GenBench & organizing BlackboxNLP * Ask me about our faculty hiring & PhD/postdoc positions at Boston University!

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Najoung Kim @najoung.bsky.social · 08/11/2024

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