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Sean Trott

@seantrott.bsky.social
94 followers 47 following 70 posts
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Mike Frank @mcxfrank.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
We've just released a new version of childes-db, my lab's interface to the CHILDES database of child language transcripts. It lets you work with CHILDES data from R through a versioned, reproducible API. A few updates 🧵 childes-db.stanford.edu/
Screenshot of the childes-db website: 'A flexible and reproducible interface to CHILDES.' childes-db 2026.1 contains 56,579 transcripts from 9,151 children across 437 corpora, with panels for an R API tutorial and interactive visualizations of mean length of utterance by child age.
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Kensy Cooperrider @kensycoop.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
It's "advice to grad students" season! Here's a post I wrote several geological epochs ago, in 2019. My advice gets harder and harder to follow every year (even for me). But I think that means it gets better and better? kensycooperrider.com/blog/advice-...
kensycooperrider.com
Advice to a young scholar — Kensy Cooperrider
Ten tips for young scholars on doing good work (and living well at the same time).
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Kanishka Misra @kanishka.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
Understanding how learners conclude “X laughed Y” is incorrect is an age-old question, with several hypotheses, some of which have been ~impossible to disentangle! @tomyxw.bsky.social, @fredashi.bsky.social, and I use controlled rearing to shed light on this in our new EMNLP paper: 1/n
Title slide for “Disentangling Statistical Preemption from Entrenchment in Language Models’ Avoidance of Overgeneralization,” by Yixuan Wang, Freda Shi, and Kanishka Misra. Includes the main results plot and experimental design.
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Sean Trott @seantrott.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
New paper out in @openmindjournal.bsky.social! "Large Language Models as Distributional Baselines for Language Tasks". With @jamichaelov.bsky.social , @camrobjones.bsky.social , Tyler Chang, and Ben Bergen. direct.mit.edu/opmi/article...
direct.mit.edu
Large Language Models as Distributional Baselines for Language Tasks
Abstract. In order to ask questions about the mechanisms underpinning human cognition, researchers must control for properties of stimuli that could confound detected effects. In experiments involving...
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Gary Lupyan @glupyan.bsky.social · 29/08/2026
Yes, exactly. Platonic representations are one of the many erroneous conclusions reached under the assumption that intelligence is a one-dimensional scalar.
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Mike Frank @mcxfrank.bsky.social · 11/08/2026
Almost no psychology research is based on a true probability sample. The question is whether that undermines your research! Ch 10 of Experimentology argues that it depends on whether the effect you're studying is heterogeneous. 🧵 experimentology.io
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Sean Trott @seantrott.bsky.social · 08/07/2026
Great chapter on a very important topic. Construct validity continues to be one of the biggest challenges in research characterizing the behavior of LLMs as well.
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Sean Trott @seantrott.bsky.social · 05/07/2026
Will be presenting this work measuring behavioral sensitivity to false belief manipulations in a sample of open-weight LMs at tomorrow's poster session (11am). Stop by if you're interested! #ACL2026 aclanthology.org/2026.acl-lon...
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Reposted by Sean Trott
Mike Frank @mcxfrank.bsky.social · 29/06/2026
Most of the statistical tests you learned in stats class — t-test, ANOVA, correlation — are actually special cases of a single thing: linear regression. Ch 7 of Experimentology argues that thinking in models, not tests, is more flexible and a better foundation for theory. 🧵 experimentology.io
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James Michaelov @jamichaelov.bsky.social · 11/06/2026
Seems like a good time to share our new preprint about model openness! (with @catherinearnett.bsky.social @tylerachang.bsky.social Pamela D. Rivière, Samuel M. Taylor @camrobjones.bsky.social @seantrott.bsky.social @rplevy.bsky.social Ben Bergen, and Micah Altman): arxiv.org/abs/2603.26539
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Stella Biderman @stellaathena.bsky.social · 10/06/2026
In film, "we'll fix it in post" is what you say when something went wrong on set and you don't want to redo it. AI research has made it our entire methodology: train the model, then patch whatever comes out. Our new ICML oral argues this can't be the basis of a science of AI. 🧵
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Jessica Hullman @jessicahullman.bsky.social · 14/04/2026
If you're a faculty, research scientist, postdoc, or senior PhD in any area of science, select your top 6 virtues at this link: shorturl.at/bV2lF You can also tell us if you think we missed any. We want broad participation, so pls RT! 🙏 In collab w/@devezer.bsky.social @statmodeling.bsky.social
shorturl.at
Epistemic Virtues for Scientific Inquiry — Community Survey
In Six Memos for the Next Millenium, Italo Calvino proposed six literary virtues he felt should be preserved and cultivated in literature regardless of how the world changed: lightness, quickness, exa...
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Sean Trott @seantrott.bsky.social · 17/12/2025
Very excited to announce that I'll be starting as an Assistant Professor in the Psychology department at Rutgers University-Newark in January 2026!
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Sean Trott @seantrott.bsky.social · 02/12/2025
Will be presenting a new paper on generalizability in mechinterp research at the 2025 NeurIPS MechInterp workshop! Thread below. #NeurIPS
Screenshot of paper title.
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yuluqin.bsky.social @yuluqin.bsky.social · 22/07/2025
Does vision training change how language is represented and used in meaningful ways?🤔The answer is a nuanced yes! Comparing VLM-LM minimal pairs, we find that while the taxonomic organization of the lexicon is similar, VLMs are better at _deploying_ this knowledge. [1/9]
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Sean Trott @seantrott.bsky.social · 24/11/2025
I think understanding which factors lead to convergence and divergence (both in behavior and internal mechanisms) across networks is crucial to understanding what kinds of systems we're studying and what kinds of claims we can generalize across model instances. Very cool work!
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Ann Huang @annhuang42.bsky.social · 24/11/2025
📍Excited to share that our paper was selected as a Spotlight at #NeurIPS2025! arxiv.org/pdf/2410.03972 It started from a question I kept running into: When do RNNs trained on the same task converge/diverge in their solutions? 🧵⬇️
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Kyle Mahowald @kmahowald.bsky.social · 10/11/2025
A confounding thing for the linguistics of LMs: the best way to assess their grammatical ability is string probability. Yet string probability and grammaticality are famously not the same! Really excited to have this out, where we give a formal account, w/ experiments, of how to make sense of that!
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Eran Mukamel @neurome.bsky.social · 23/05/2025
Hard to process the news about Harvard and international students. Other universities should stand in solidarity with our colleagues who are being persecuted.
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Alondra Nelson @alondra.bsky.social · 14/05/2025
Please read my essay in TIME, which @science.org did not do carefully before publishing this assertion. time.com/7285045/resi...
time.com
Why I’m Resigning from the NSF and Library of Congress
I cannot participate in systems that require dishonesty as the price of belonging.
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Eran Mukamel @neurome.bsky.social · 17/12/2024
My awesome colleague @seantrott.bsky.social quoted on understanding the nature of our new robot overlords in @nytimes.com www.nytimes.com/2024/12/16/o...
nytimes.com
Opinion | How Does A.I. Think? Here’s One Theory.
It may employ a kind of reasoning humans use all the time — but you’ve probably never heard of it.
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