Sign in

Nick Tomlin

@nickatomlin.bsky.social
1.7K followers 117 following 18 posts

Assistant professor at TTIC. Previously: faculty fellow at NYU, PhD student at Berkeley, undergrad at Brown University. Natural language processing. He/him. 🌐 nickatomlin.github.io

PostsRepliesMedia
Nick Tomlin @nickatomlin.bsky.social · 27/05/2026
New paper! LLM memory keeps improving, but this makes them *worse* as user sims. If we want to build models that can, e.g., simulate realistic students to train chatbots to be better teachers, then these models need to be able to forget like humans do 📄: arxiv.org/abs/2605.25680
arxiv.org
Simulating Human Memory with Language Models
Language models are increasingly being deployed as user simulators, but their memory is far more reliable than that of real users. To measure this gap, we run a series of classic memory experiments fr...
1251
Reposted by Nick Tomlin
Wenxuan Ding @wenxuand.bsky.social · 23/02/2026
Agents interact with environments to get information. But exploration (tools, retrieval, user interaction) is costly. Calibrate-Then-Act allows LLM agents to balance exploration and cost: 📐 Estimate uncertainty about the environment 💭 Reason about cost-uncertainty tradeoffs ⚙️ Act accordingly
1176
Reposted by Nick Tomlin
naitian @naitian.org · 05/12/2025
A couple years (!) in the making: we’re releasing a new corpus of embodied, collaborative problem solving dialogues. We paid 36 people to play Portal 2’s co-op mode and collected their speech + game recordings. Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2512.03381 Website: berkeley-nlp.github.io/portal-dialo... 1/n
A figure demonstrating the different aspects of the corpus described in the tweet. There is a main isomorphic 3D view of a level in the Portal 2 co-op game, with some portals, lasers, and the blue and orange players. Inset, there are first-person captures of the blue and orange player views. There is also a box containing the transcribed dialogue with timestamps and labels for the discursive acts. Finally, there is a box containing a task and a list of subtasks. Some subtasks are already crossed out, with the time that they have been completed. The last subtask ("Player 2 places portal 4 on wall 4") is marked incomplete.

The dialogue is as follows:

Blue: Can you put your other portal up here? (tagged as directive)
Orange: Where? (tagged as request for clarification)
Blue: On uh, on this wall. (tagged as directive)
Blue: So that it uh points at the circle. (tagged as directive)
Orange: Okay. (tagged as commit)

The full list of subtasks is:

Task: Redirect lasers
Subtask: Player 1 places portal 1 on wall 1. (completed)
Subtask: Player 1 polaces portal 2 on wall 2 or 3. (completed)
Subtask: Player 2 places portal 3 opposite of portal 2. (completed)
Subtask: Player 2 places portal 4 on wall 4. (incomplete)
310030
Nick Tomlin @nickatomlin.bsky.social · 24/11/2025
I'm recruiting my first group of students at TTIC! If you're interested, please apply by December 9th and mention my name in your application
096
Nick Tomlin @nickatomlin.bsky.social · 23/10/2025
Two brief advertisements! TTIC is recruiting both tenure-track and research assistant professors: ttic.edu/faculty-hiri... NYU is recruiting faculty fellows: apply.interfolio.com/174686 Happy to chat with anyone considering either of these options
ttic.edu
TTIC Faculty Opportunities at TTIC
086
Reposted by Nick Tomlin
Ari @ari-holtzman.bsky.social · 07/10/2025
FYI that UChicago CS & Stats is hiring at all levels via the Data Science Institue: Postdoc: uchicago.infoready4.com#freeformComp... Assistant Professor: apply.interfolio.com/174766 Associate Professor: apply.interfolio.com/174768
083
Nick Tomlin @nickatomlin.bsky.social · 28/09/2025
What does it take to build a human-like user simulator? // Jessy Lin and I wrote another blogpost on user simulators as a reward function for training interactive models, this time focused on methods + open questions: jessylin.com/2025/09/25/u...
jessylin.com
What does it take to build a human-like user simulator?
030
Reposted by Nick Tomlin
Eugene Vinitsky 🍒 @eugenevinitsky.bsky.social · 27/07/2025
Was talking to a student who wasn't sure about why one would get a PhD. So I wrote up a list of reasons! www.eugenevinitsky.com/posts/reason...
eugenevinitsky.com
Eugene Vinitsky
75111
Reposted by Nick Tomlin
Eugene Vinitsky 🍒 @eugenevinitsky.bsky.social · 10/07/2025
An excellent blog post about a still huge missing gap, models of humans you can actually use to study human-AI interaction: jessylin.com/2025/07/10/u...
jessylin.com
User simulators bridge RL with real-world interaction
1122
Reposted by Nick Tomlin
TTIC @tticconnect.bsky.social · 27/06/2025
We’re proud to announce three new tenure-track assistant professors joining TTIC in Fall 2026: Yossi Gandelsman, Will Merrill, and Nick Tomlin (@nickatomlin.bsky.social). Meet them here: buff.ly/JH1DFtT
072
Nick Tomlin @nickatomlin.bsky.social · 29/05/2025
🤠🤓🙂
140
Nick Tomlin @nickatomlin.bsky.social · 13/05/2025
I'm particularly fond of this new benchmark paper we wrote, which aims to scalably evaluate whether language models can generalize to arbitrary new tasks. The core idea is to use LLMs to generate new games, and then evaluate whether LLMs can play those games 📄: arxiv.org/abs/2505.07215
Title and abstract of the paper, "Measuring General Intelligence with Generated Games"
3339
Reposted by Nick Tomlin
Kyle Mahowald @kmahowald.bsky.social · 21/04/2025
I might be able to hire a postdoc for this fall in computational linguistics at UT Austin. Topics in the general LLM + cognitive space (particularly reasoning, chain of thought, LLMs + code) and LLM + linguistic space. If this could be of interest, feel free to get in touch!
05930
Nick Tomlin @nickatomlin.bsky.social · 15/04/2025
Writing my first post here to announce that I've accepted an assistant professor job at TTIC! I'll be starting in Fall 2026, and recruiting students this upcoming cycle. Until then, I'll be wrapping up the PhD at Berkeley, and this summer I'll join NYU as a CDS Faculty Fellow 🏙️
3412