We study human learning using tools from machine learning and improve machine learning using insights from cognitive science.

Munich, Germany
Joined March 2019
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 Please share.
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Helmholtz Institute for Human-Centered AI retweeted
🚨New preprint alert Introducing Kombine: our benchmark for measuring LLM creativity. A key driving factor behind every genuinely novel scientific discovery is creativity. One such form of creativity is combinatorial creativity, which is the ability to combine disparate ideas to come up with a new one. Yet we do not yet know: 1. How to systematically measure this form of creativity in LLMs? 2. How creative are current LLMs at combining and composing known concepts? 3. Are LLMs and humans creative in the same ways or do they complement one other? Led by the inimitable @samschapiro, we draw on the extensive literature on measuring and quantifying human creativity to answer these questions 🧵
🧵[1/N] Are large language models more creative than humans at combining ideas? 🤔 Combinatorial creativity involves combining familiar ideas in unfamiliar ways, and is central to scientific discovery and technological innovation. In fact, breakthrough scientific work is often associated with more distant combinations of methods, techniques, and concepts. Here, we introduce Kombine, a new benchmark of combinatorial creativity for LLMs. TLDR: - LLMs are more combinatorially creative than the average human. - However, conceptual blending is the hardest task for LLMs, and even frontier models struggle. - LLMs also tend to homogenize, inventing concepts with the same properties across separate models. - Moreover, humans and LLMs combine in distinct regions of semantic space. - As a result, we anticipate greater conceptual diversity can be unlocked through human-AI collaboration. 🗣️ Thread below🧵⬇️
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What if we stopped building a new theory for every experiment and started building theories that explain them all? We show that a small set of computational principles explain human behavior across many tasks. A first step toward a radically different cogsci.
What is a minimal set of assumptions that can explain the majority of human behavior? We investigated this question with large-scale cognitive models🚀 CORE writes prediction errors in hierarchical episodic memories with context controling encoding, retrieval, and forgetting.
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Helmholtz Institute for Human-Centered AI retweeted
Delighted to share that this work is now accepted to @NeuroCellPress's Neuroview! 🎉 Key changes: [1] considering wider variety of simulators, behavioral, neural and task-specific cognitive models [2] highlighting the use of neural and other physiological measurements for calibration and adjudication. [3] expanding on the weaknesses of current methods (e.g. bias towards WEIRD population in dataset used to derive foundation models) For more details, check the full article ⬇️
1/ 🚨 New opinion piece: "Can we automatize scientific discovery in the cognitive sciences?" 👥 in collaboration with @milenamr7, @WitteKristin, @marvinmathony, @marcel_binz & @cpilab We lay out a vision for a fully automated, in-silico science of the mind, where modern AI systems run every stage of the scientific discovery cycle in cognitive science 🧵 #CognitiveModeling #AutomatedDiscovery #LLMs #AI4Science
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Helmholtz Institute for Human-Centered AI retweeted
"Europe only regulates AI." Last 3 weeks: @ElevenLabs #1 in voice. @bfl_ml #1 in robotics. @MistralAI and @Aleph__Alpha shipping frontier open models. 🇪🇺 is building.
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Helmholtz Institute for Human-Centered AI retweeted
Hugely inspiring.
FLUX 3 is the strongest world model in the world.
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Helmholtz Institute for Human-Centered AI retweeted
Meet Mistral Large 4, aka Le Chonk. • 1T parameters, natively multimodal. 49B active. It is the best open weights model from US or Europe on aggregated benchmarks. • State-of-the-art on critical workloads, including cyber defense, manufacturing and finance and it surpasses closed frontier models on visual grounding. • Forged in Europe end-to-end and is deployable from Europe via our own Mistral Cloud infrastructure. • Available to all via API today. Working with cybersecurity partners privately. Open weights release end of October.
🤖 Made with AI
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Helmholtz Institute for Human-Centered AI retweeted
Small bird, fast wings, Kolibri is here. 78B parameters. 3.46B active. Up to 1M tokens of context. Built in Europe. Now the weights are yours. Run it on your own hardware, under Apache 2.0.
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Helmholtz Institute for Human-Centered AI retweeted
Prior-Amortized In-Context Bayesian Inference for Generalized Linear Mixed-Effects Models Alex Kipnis, Marcel Binz, Eric Schulz arxiv.org/abs/2609.24422 [𝚌𝚜.𝙻𝙶 𝚜𝚝𝚊𝚝.𝙼𝙻]
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Helmholtz Institute for Human-Centered AI retweeted
Sakana AI welcomes Jürgen Schmidhuber as Chief Scientific Advisor. sakana.ai/schmidhuber/ Sakana AI is incredibly proud to announce that Jürgen Schmidhuber, universally recognized as the father of modern AI, is officially joining Sakana AI as Chief Scientific Advisor. For nearly four decades, Jürgen has explored how machines can learn to learn. His foundational work in the 1990s drove core advancements in deep learning and established early frameworks for world models. Crucially, his pioneering innovations in meta-learning opened the very path toward recursive self-improvement. These ideas have already shaped our own research, from the Darwin Gödel Machine to The AI Scientist. Now Jürgen will help guide our newly formed RSI Lab, whose objective is to trigger a compounding cycle of scientific discovery aimed at improving machine intelligence. We are assembling a critical mass of world-class experts in Tokyo to make this a reality. Welcome, @SchmidhuberAI !
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Helmholtz Institute for Human-Centered AI retweeted
📢 The CORE COGNITION lab (core-cognition.github.io) is looking to hire another PhD student, working on automated scientific discovery and knowledge representation in cognitive science. Starting date: March to September 2027. 🙏 Please share widely!
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Helmholtz Institute for Human-Centered AI retweeted
Free healthcare. Free childcare. Berlin Spätis. Free education @TU_Muenchen @cdtm_munich Oktoberfest. Bio everything. Bikeable cities. Hidden champions in cities you have never heard of. The alps. Christmas markets. @edeka_gmbh. That grumpy neighbour who has every single tool and always helps out. Culture of remembrance. Public transport @BVG_Kampagne. @dm_drogerie. @isaraerospace @bfl_ai @HelsingAI @FlixBus and @MarvelFusion Children walking to school by themselves. Käsespätzle. @MUC_Airport. Nice parks. Our police force. BioNTech. Leitungswasser. Sprudelwasser. FKK. Good Döner. Did I mention @dm_drogerie. „It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.“ - Charles Dickens
What the hell makes you bullish on Germany? I can't find a single reason except hidden underpaid talents in Mittelstand businesses.
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Alireza is a great scientist and a wonderful collaborator. We're sad to see him leave but very happy for him to take this next step. His lab will definitely amazing work. You should strongly consider joining.
Excited to share that I'll be starting as a junior professor and Emmy Noether awardee at the University of Göttingen this October! 🥳 🚀 I'll be hiring PhD students and postdocs across both ML and CogSci: modirlab.github.io/open-posi… Please spread the word! 🙏
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Helmholtz Institute for Human-Centered AI retweeted
We can finally talk about it: We found a way to extract hidden reasoning of frontier models using a vulnerability in the APIs of every frontier AI company. We verified that our reasoning token count matches billed API thinking tokens 1:1 for most of the prompts we queried.
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1 week left to apply.
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 Please share.
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Deadline to apply is August 14th. If you are looking for a postdoc on foundation models, open-ended discovery, or general ml-approaches to cognitive science, we would like to work with you.
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 Please share.
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Helmholtz Institute for Human-Centered AI retweeted
Delighted to be presenting two posters today at @cogsci_soc! Title: Scaling up computational cognitive modeling with LLMs Poster number: P2-C-14 Time: 10.00 AM Generating computational cognitive models for learning and decision making w/ @milenamr7, @marvinmathony, Tobias Ludwig, @cpilab xitter.cf/akjagadish/status/1926… Incorporating think aloud into cognitive modeling w/ @PsychBoyH @NRDlab xitter.cf/PsychBoyH/status/20764… Modeling individual differences in learning and decision making w/ @milenamr7 @marvinmathony @cpilab Discovering representations underlying similarity judgments w/ Daniel Braga @RajaMarjieh @norijacoby @sucholutsky @LakeBrenden and @cocosci_lab Closing the loop between experimental design and computational modeling w/ @strittmatteryo @suyoghc @norijacoby @nathanieldaw @cpilab and @cocosci_lab xitter.cf/akjagadish/status/2070…
1/ 🚨 New preprint: "Closing the Loop to Discover Psychological Theories with an Automated Cognitive Scientist" Co-led w/ Younes Strittmatter Co-mentored by @suyoghc and @cocosci_lab In collaboration w/ @kachergis, @norijacoby, @nathanieldaw, & @cpilab Introducing AutoCog — a fully autonomous AI system that runs the entire scientific discovery cycle in cognitive science to surface novel theories of human behavior 🧵 #CognitiveScience #AI4Science #LLMs
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Replying to @NeurIPSConf
@NeurIPSConf I completed all my meta-reviews yesterday, only a few hours late. Yet our reviews remain withheld, and this morning all co-authors were told I was late, many hours after completion. Email to SAC and support form remain unanswered. When will our reviews be released?
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It's been resolved. Thank you very much.
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Helmholtz Institute for Human-Centered AI retweeted
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 Please share.
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Former researchers from the group have gone on to lead independent research groups, take up tenure-track professorships, or exciting jobs in government and industry.
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Full details + application instructions can be found on our website. Please reach out if you have any questions.
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