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Nicolas Yax

@nicolasyax.bsky.social
74 followers 83 following 30 posts

PhD student working on the cognition of LLMs | HRL team - ENS Ulm | FLOWERS - Inria Bordeaux

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Reposted by Nicolas Yax
Eric Schulz @ericschulz.bsky.social · 21/07/2026
We are looking for a postdoctoral researcher who wants to innovate at the intersection of cognitive science, neuroscience, and machine learning. 📍Munich 📅Flexible start: 10/2026–03/2027 ⏳Full consideration by 14/08/2026 💼Funded for 2 years, extension possible Discover, grow, collaborate, eat cake.
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Charley Wu @thecharleywu.bsky.social · 29/04/2026
🚨 Permanent position! theadaptivemind-excellencecluster.de is looking for a managing director of our new outreach hub. This is an unlimited time position at an E13 paygrade (~postdoc level) Apply by May 31st 👉 www.career.tu-darmstadt.de/tu-darmstadt... Please share widely 🙏
career.tu-darmstadt.de
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Reposted by Nicolas Yax
Charley Wu @thecharleywu.bsky.social · 02/04/2026
🚨 New independent group leader position as part of theadaptivemind-excellencecluster.de April 12th deadline. Details 👇. Pls share 🔁 www.uni-giessen.de/de/ueber-uns...
uni-giessen.de
Research Group Leader (m/f/d)
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Reposted by Nicolas Yax
Pierre-Yves Oudeyer @pyoudeyer.bsky.social · 10/03/2026
New blog post: The Phylogenetics of Artifacts — inferring the evolution of cultural objects, artificial life forms, and language models. From cat genetics to ancient myths to LLMs. 🧬 1/n
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Joanna Bryson @j2bryson.bsky.social · 10/03/2026
Wow, some of my old #EvolutionOfLanguage #EoL pals may have just done something huge for #AILaw data attribution #LLM #AIGovernance Specifically @pyoudeyer.bsky.social @nicolasyax.bsky.social @stepalminteri.bsky.social Evolutionary biology can track LLM phylogeny! developmentalsystems.org/phylolm
developmentalsystems.org
The Phylogenetics of Artifacts - A deep dive into the evolution of cultural objects, artificial life forms and language models
Developmental Systems, a Blog of the Flowers Lab
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Stefano Palminteri @stepalminteri.bsky.social · 06/01/2026
Excited to announce our symposium on how AI and humans shape each other “Humans and Artificial Minds: Mutual Influences” 9 Jan at ENS Paris. Free registration here www.eventbrite.com/e/humans-and...
eventbrite.com
Humans and Artificial Minds: Mutual influences, for better and for worse
Symposium on AI and Cognition discussing the impact of AI on our societies and how it reshapes the field of cognitive sciences.
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Grgur Kovač @kovacgrgur.bsky.social · 18/12/2025
Will the influx of synthetic data lead to uniform #ModelCollapse across the internet? Our recent #EMNLP2025 (Oral) paper suggests a nuanced picture: different collapse dynamics might emerge in different internet domains based on the properties of human data in those domains! 🧵
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Stefano Palminteri @stepalminteri.bsky.social · 15/12/2025
Here is the link to (freely) sign-up for our symposium! Humans and Artificial Minds: Mutual influences, for better and for worse www.eventbrite.com/e/humans-and...
eventbrite.com
Humans and Artificial Minds: Mutual influences, for better and for worse
Symposium on AI and Cognition discussing the impact of AI on our societies and how it reshapes the field of cognitive sciences.
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Reposted by Nicolas Yax
Stefano Palminteri @stepalminteri.bsky.social · 10/12/2025
Excited to announce our symposium on how AI and humans shape each other “Humans and Artificial Minds: Mutual Influences” 9 Jan at ENS Paris. Talks by @smfleming.bsky.social, Valeria Giardino, Silvia Tulli, @thecharleywu.bsky.social, Laurence Devillers & @summerfieldlab.bsky.social . Program ↓
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Reposted by Nicolas Yax
Stefano Palminteri @stepalminteri.bsky.social · 03/12/2025
I’m happy to share a short opinion piece I’ve just finished, where I revisit the famous Skinner vs. Chomsky exchange on how language is learned through the lens of today’s large language models (before getting mad read the rest) 1/n osf.io/preprints/ps...
GPT style cartoon of a debate between a smiling Skinner and a angry Chomsky, while in the back, a robot is reading "verbal behavior"
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Stefano Palminteri @stepalminteri.bsky.social · 08/10/2025
New (revised) preprint with @thecharleywu.bsky.social We rethink how to assess machine consciousness: not by code or circuitry, but by behavioral inference—as in cognitive science. Extraordinary claims still need extraordinary evidence. 👉 osf.io/preprints/ps... #AI #Consciousness #LLM
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Stefano Palminteri @stepalminteri.bsky.social · 26/05/2025
🧠 New paper in Open Mind! We show that LLM-based reinforcement learning agents encode relative reward values like humans, even when suboptimal and display a positivity bias. Work led by William Hayes w/ @nicolasyax.bsky.social doi.org/10.1162/opmi... #AI #LLM #RL
doi.org
Relative Value Encoding in Large Language Models: A Multi-Task, Multi-Model Investigation
Abtract. In-context learning enables large language models (LLMs) to perform a variety of tasks, including solving reinforcement learning (RL) problems. Given their potential use as (autonomous) decis...
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Reposted by Nicolas Yax
Milena Rmus @milenamr7.bsky.social · 26/05/2025
Preprint update, co-led with @akjagadish.bsky.social, with @marvinmathony.bsky.social, Tobias Ludwig and @ericschulz.bsky.social!
arxiv.org
Generating Computational Cognitive Models using Large Language Models
Computational cognitive models, which formalize theories of cognition, enable researchers to quantify cognitive processes and arbitrate between competing theories by fitting models to behavioral data....
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Nicolas Yax @nicolasyax.bsky.social · 26/04/2025
Curious about LLM interpretability and understanding ? We borrowed concepts from genetics to map language models, predict their capabilities, and even uncovered surprising insights about their training ! Come see my poster at #ICLR2025 3pm Hall 2B #505 !
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Nicolas Yax @nicolasyax.bsky.social · 24/04/2025
🔥Our paper PhyloLM got accepted at ICLR 2025 !🔥 In this work we show how easy it can be to infer relationship between LLMs by constructing trees and to predict their performances and behavior at a very low cost with @stepalminteri.bsky.social and @pyoudeyer.bsky.social ! Here is a brief recap ⬇️
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cartathomas.bsky.social @cartathomas.bsky.social · 24/03/2025
🚀 Introducing 🧭MAGELLAN—our new metacognitive framework for LLM agents! It predicts its own learning progress (LP) in vast natural language goal spaces, enabling efficient exploration of complex domains.🌍✨Learn more: 🔗 arxiv.org/abs/2502.07709 #OpenEndedLearning #LLM #RL
arxiv.org
MAGELLAN: Metacognitive predictions of learning progress guide...
Open-ended learning agents must efficiently prioritize goals in vast possibility spaces, focusing on those that maximize learning progress (LP). When such autotelic exploration is achieved by LLM...
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cedric @ccolas.bsky.social · 27/11/2024
we are recruiting interns for a few projects with @pyoudeyer in bordeaux > studying llm-mediated cultural evolution with @nisioti_eleni @Jeremy__Perez > balancing exploration and exploitation with autotelic rl with @ClementRomac details and links in 🧵 please share!
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Gautier Hamon @hamongautier.bsky.social · 22/11/2024
Putting some Flow Lenia here too
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Gautier Hamon @hamongautier.bsky.social · 22/11/2024
1/⚡️Looking for a fast and simple Transformer baseline for your RL environment in JAX ? Sharing my implementation of transformerXL-PPO: github.com/Reytuag/tran... The implementation is the first to attain the 3rd floor and obtain advanced achievements in the challenging Craftax
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Nicolas Yax @nicolasyax.bsky.social · 15/11/2024
🚨New preprint🚨 When testing LLMs with questions, how can we know they did not see the answer in their training? In this new paper we propose a simple out of the box and fast method to spot contamination on short texts with @stepalminteri.bsky.social and Pierre-Yves Oudeyer !
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