Mark Ho @mark_ho_ Twitter profile

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Mark Ho

2 years

1/ I'm excited to share our new paper, now in @Nature ! Paper: PDF: Summary 🧵: We present a new theory of problem simplification to answer an old question in cognitive science and AI: How do we represent problems when planning?

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

2 months

I’m excited to share some news: My group and I are moving to @NYUPsych ! I’ll be affiliated with both cognition/perception and social psych, and I am SO thrilled about this unique opportunity to help bridge the two programs 🤗

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

2 years

Excited to share a new review paper on *Planning with Theory of Mind* by @rebecca_saxe , @fierycushman and myself, now out in @TrendsCognSci ! A very brief 🧵:

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

2 years

Excited to share that Fall 2023, I'm starting a lab in the CS department @FollowStevens ! Even MORE excited to share that I'm recruiting Ph.D. students interested in computational Cog Sci, RL, and/or HCI 🧠💭🤖! The official deadline is *Feb 1st*...

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

1 year

Excited to share a new paper just accepted at Psych Science 🎉 Preprint: We look at one of my all time favorite cognitive biases: ✨💭 Functional Fixedness 💭✨ Have you heard the idiom “To a person with a hammer, everything looks like a nail”? A 🧵

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

11 months

Really beautiful paper by @fierycushman that reviews the current state of computational social psychology

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

2 years

Looking forward to joining @NYUDataScience as a Faculty Fellow in September!

NYU Data Science

@NYUDataScience

2 years

Incoming Faculty Fellow Mark Ho ( @Mark_Ho_ ) currently works as a post-doc in the Computer Science and Psychology departments at Princeton University and will be joining CDS this fall. Read more about Mark on our blog! #datascience

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

3 years

Now in press at Annual Review of Control, Robotics, and Autonomous Systems! Tom Griffiths ( @cocosci_lab ) and I take a whirlwind tour of research on human decision-making and theory of mind in relation to control and robotics 🤔 💭 🤖 1/5

Cognitive science as a source of forward and inverse models of...

Those designing autonomous systems that interact with humans will invariably face questions about how humans think and make decisions. Fortunately, computational cognitive science offers insight...

arxiv.org

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

1 year

New preprint up! 📜 "Bayesian Reinforcement Learning with Limited Cognitive Load" with @Dilip_Arumugam @noahdgoodman and Ben Van Roy This was such a fun and stimulating paper to work on 🤓 A few additional points to complement Dilip's excellent summary:

Dilip Arumugam

@Dilip_Arumugam

1 year

Q: What happens when you combine Bayesian inference, reinforcement learning, and rate-distortion theory? A: A way to formalize capacity-limited cognition in biological and artificial decision-making agents! New paper with @mark_ho_ , @noahdgoodman , & BVR -

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

2 years

SUPER excited to share a new pre-print on how people break down big problems into smaller, more manageable ones 🎉🎉🎉 This work was done with @cocosci_lab @nathanieldaw @callfredaway and spearheaded by the brilliant @_cgcorrea 🙌🥳

carlos g. correa

@_cgcorrea

2 years

✨Preprint✨ w/ @mark_ho_ , @callfredaway , @nathanieldaw , & Tom Griffiths: TLDR: How do people decompose goals into subgoals? We ran a large-scale experiment to test how the computational cost of planning drives subgoal choice. More in 🧵

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

2 years

By the time a dog, cat, or chimpanzee turns 5, its seen a similar number of "frames" to learn how the world works through self-supervised learning. But a 5yo human can do things a 5yo dog/cat/chimp can't (e.g., use language productively, etc).

Yann LeCun

@ylecun

2 years

By the time a human child turns 5, she has seen the equivalent of 800 million "frames" of video + audio + touch to learn how the world works through Self-Supervised Learning. Much of it is acquired actively. 5 years * 365 days * 12 hours * 3600 seconds * 10 fps = 788.4 million

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

2 years

So excited for #RLDM2022 and Saturday's #RLasAgency workshop, organized with the amazing @aharutyu + @dabelcs 🤩🤩 We'll be discussing the limits+possibilities of RL as a model of agency in cog sci/neuro/philosphy/AI with a brilliant group of scholars...

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

4 years

At #AAAI2020 ? I'll be talking today about our paper, "The Efficiency of Human Cognition Reflects Planned Information Processing" w @dabelcs , Jon Cohen, @mlittmancs , and Tom Griffiths. Talk at 2pm in Madison Poster #44 at 6:30-8:30 Link to paper below!

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

5 years

Excited that our paper "People teach with rewards and punishments as communication, not reinforcements" is now out in JEP:General 😃 preprint here w/ @JoeAusterweil @fierycushman @mlittmancs

People Teach with Rewards and Punishments as Communication not Reinforcements

Carrots and sticks motivate behavior, and people can teach new behaviors to other organisms, such as children or non-human animals, by tapping into their reward learning mechanisms. But how people...

osf.io

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

2 years

Caught a few utils last week visiting the auto-icon (mummified body of Jeremy Bentham) at the UCL Student Center I have my complaints about utilitarianism, but I can respect the commitment to the ideas! (He thought widespread voluntary mummification would maximize utility)

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

2 years

Excited to be in SF for jam-packed @CogCompNeuro 2022! First, I’ll be presenting recent work w Jon Cohen and @cocosci_lab on *rigidity in planning* 🤔💭 Poster P1.24: Tonight at 7:30 Talk: Tomorrow at the 10:30-12 session

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

5 years

New preprint w @JoeAusterweil @fierycushman @mlittmancs on communicative demonstrations! We model how people communicate with their intentional actions as well as report new experiments + reanalyze prior developmental work. Reach out if you have feedback!

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

5 years

Our paper on what makes abstractions useful is out! We provide a bird's eye view of how abstract representations help solve hard RL problems and what this may tell us about people. Really enjoyed working on this w @dabelcs T Griffiths and @mlittmancs !

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

1 year

Had such an amazing time at Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute last week, catching up with old friends and making new ones!! Until next time!🦋👶🐵🤖👾👽🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 #disi2023 #standrews #scotland

Emerging Minds Lab

@EmergingMindsAZ

1 year

thank you @DivIntelligence for a week of science, storytelling, and (a little!) Scottish sunshine! ☀️ #disi2023

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

2 years

New paper in Cognition led by the amazing @tedsumers !! We examined how people teach using demonstrations ✋versus language 🗣, and under what conditions each strategy works better (eg the complexity of what’s being taught). Check it out!

Ted Sumers

@tedsumers

2 years

Humans use a wide variety of teaching strategies. To teach you chess, I could *demonstrate* how rooks move (dragging one across the board) or use *language* to explain ("this piece moves in straight lines"). Our new work in #cognition compares modalities!

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

2 years

Our generative adversarial collaboration (GAC) proposal was accepted by @CogCompNeuro 🔥🎉 The theme: What is the place of planning? The team: Malcolm MacIver, @nathanieldaw , German Espinosa, @jhamrick , @adredish , Bradly Stadie, @janexwang The Qs: 1/3

GACs - 2022-3

What is the place of planning? Authors: Malcolm A. MacIver, Northwestern University Nathaniel D. Daw, Princeton University German Espinosa, Northwestern University Jessica B. Hamrick, DeepMind Mark...

sites.google.com

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

2 years

Daniel Kahneman at last week’s @EffortMental workshop: “I don’t think people are rational but I do think they’re reasonable, and rational can be a good approximation for reasonable”

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

2 years

As the old saying goes: instruct someone to fish, feed them for a day; describe to them how to catch fish, feed them for a lifetime (or something like that? 😋🎣) Anyway check out our new pre-print on teaching with *descriptions* vs *instructions* in RL, led by @tedsumers 🎉

Ted Sumers

@tedsumers

2 years

What kinds of language afford generalization for RL agents? Our new preprint presents a formal framework for inferring humans' reward functions from utterances. We show that *descriptions* generalize better than *instructions*.

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

2 years

5/ Our paper develops a formal theory of this intuitive notion of value-guided construal. The key idea is that planning involves not only selectively simulating *actions* (as is standardly assumed), but also selectively representing *problems* (i.e. forming task construals)

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

2 years

I had such a great time at #RLDM2022 revisiting PVD, seeing old friends, and making new ones! Special thanks to @dabelcs @aharutyu @aronowitzzz @brianchristian @nanjiang_cs @eckstein_maria , the contributors, and attendees for making the workshop a success 🎉🎉🎉 I definitely...

Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

2 years

So excited for #RLDM2022 and Saturday's #RLasAgency workshop, organized with the amazing @aharutyu + @dabelcs 🤩🤩 We'll be discussing the limits+possibilities of RL as a model of agency in cog sci/neuro/philosphy/AI with a brilliant group of scholars...

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

2 years

11/ Finally, for some more background on the paper, check out my Behind the Paper post: Thanks for reading!

People construct simplified mental representations to plan

General intelligence relies on the capacity to flexibly and efficiently plan ahead. Our theory of problem simplification sheds new light on the computational principles that underlie this remarkable...

communities.springernature.com

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

5 years

I noticed this morning that the cover of “Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach” (3rd ed) by Russell & Norvig includes... a picture of someone reading “Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach” (3rd ed) by Russell & Norvig. 🤔 #recursion

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

2 years

Dear cat cognition researchers, Are cats generally able to do the kind of planning / look ahead / physical reasoning suggested in this vid? I’m genuinely curious!

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

3 years

New paper with @vaelgates , @callfredaway , and @cocosci_lab ! We examine how people learn about other people's thoughts and preferences based on *how long it takes them to make a decision* ⏲️

Fred Callaway

@callfredaway

3 years

If you ask someone out for coffee, which would you rather hear? Sure! or ... sure. The answer is the same, but their *response time* tells you something about how much they like you. Our paper in Cognition formalizes and tests this idea. 1/6

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

6 years

My first preprint! How do people use rewards+punishments to influence others’ behavior? They tend not to “shape” (in the classic RL sense often assumed) and instead use r+p to communicatively *signal* value. w @JoeAusterweil @fierycushman @mlittmancs

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

9 months

Our paper on functional fixedness is now up!

Rational Simplification and Rigidity in Human Planning - Mark K. Ho, Jonathan D. Cohen, Thomas L....

Planning underpins the impressive flexibility of goal-directed behavior. However, even when planning, people can display surprising rigidity in how they think a...

journals.sagepub.com

Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

1 year

Excited to share a new paper just accepted at Psych Science 🎉 Preprint: We look at one of my all time favorite cognitive biases: ✨💭 Functional Fixedness 💭✨ Have you heard the idiom “To a person with a hammer, everything looks like a nail”? A 🧵

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

2 years

Very excited for this!

Center for Computational Psychiatry

@SinaiCCP

2 years

🧠🗣 The next speaker in the CCP series, Mark Ho, will be presenting on November 4th at 1pm EST -- see details below & spread the word!!

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

4 years

Really excited about new work with @_cgcorrea , @callfredaway , and Tom Griffiths that models hierarchical planning and subgoaling as a resource-rational representation problem. Come check out our poster at #CogSci2020 !

carlos g. correa

@_cgcorrea

4 years

@Mark_Ho_ , @callfredaway , Tom Griffiths and I will present work at #CogSci2020 that models how—and *why*—people decompose big scary tasks 🐲 into smaller, more friendly tasks that make it easier to plan 🧩🐭🐭🐭. Poster P-3-566, Zoom on Aug 1. Preprint:

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

5 months

✨New preprint✨ In this work led by the amazing @_cgcorrea , we examined the hierarchical structure of human problem solving using a novel programming task! 🤔🤖

carlos g. correa

@_cgcorrea

5 months

Human behavior is hierarchically structured. But what determines *which* hierarchies people use? In a preprint, we run an experiment where people create programs that correspond to hierarchies, finding that people prefer structures with more reuse. 1/7

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

2 years

4/ As an answer, we propose that when people plan, they actively construct simplified, but useful, models of the problems they face—much like how maps are simplified but useful models of the world. We call this process of cognitive map-making *value-guided construal*

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

2 years

2/ 50+ years ago, Allen Newell and Herbert Simon introduced the idea that planning consists of two parts: 1. Representing a problem (e.g. modeling the pieces and rules of chess), and 2. Simulating actions within that representation (e.g. doing heuristic search using a model)

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

1 year

Really looking forward to speaking at this week’s Consciousness Club, organized by @smfleming !

Steve Fleming

@smfleming

1 year

We're excited to host @mark_ho_ for Wednesday's Consciousness Club on "Construction of mental representations in human planning" Wed 8th Feb 3pm-430pm GMT For more information and how to join, please see All welcome! @LeverhulmeTrust @EP_UCL @WCHN_UCL

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

1 year

Excited to see our work on diagnosing distribution shifts in AI agents featured on the front page of MIT news 😃

Andi Peng

@TheAndiPenguin

1 year

Excited to see our work featured on the front page of MIT News!

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

2 years

This is a fantastic example of changing one’s task construal: By refocusing your attention to different affordances in a situation, the right solution becomes immediately obvious!

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

1 year

Pumped to be a part of this!!

Judy Fan

@judyefan

1 year

Cognitive scientists! You don’t want to miss our #CogSci2023 Workshop: “How does the mind discover useful abstractions?” Co-organized w/ the peerless @wkvong + Lio Wong + @marcelomattar !

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

1 year

Currently redoing my academic website and finding @Alpine_JS to be a very nice lightweight way to write responsive components without the overhead of react/vue/etc

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

2 years

What makes something (or someone) an agent? 🤔 Is reinforcement learning a useful way to conceptualize agency? 🧐 If you find such questions interesting, consider submitting to the #RLDM2022 workshop that @dabelcs , @aharutyu and I are organizing! 😁

David Abel

@dabelcs

2 years

🎊 Excited to announce the “RL as a Model of Agency” workshop at RLDM @ Brown! 🎉 We invite submission of 1-3 page papers that draw attention to a question or perspective related to the question "Is RL a suitable model of agency?" Full details:

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

1 year

Our paper on task decomposition is now out in PLOS Comp Bio!! Very happy to have been a part of this project led by the awesome @_cgcorrea 🥳

carlos g. correa

@_cgcorrea

1 year

I'm excited to share that my paper on resource-rational task decomposition has been published in PLOS Computational Biology! 🎉🥳 TLDR: People break large tasks down into smaller ones by balancing efficiency and the computational cost of planning.

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

2 years

Excited to talk about language, RL, and human interaction with @talkingrobotics and @tedsumers next week!

Talking Robotics

@talkingrobotics

2 years

Next session will be all about #learning #rewards from #natural #language with Ted Sumers ( @tedsumers ) & Mark Ho ( @Mark_Ho_ ) @Princeton @PrincetonCS . If you are interested in #robotics & #NLP you cannot miss it 🔥 📅 June 22th - 9am PDT 🤌 Register:

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

2 years

New version of cartpole just dropped

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

11 months

I was invited by @sciencebreaker to write a "break", a short summary for non-academics, about our work on value-guided construals. Excited to see it out!

TheScienceBreaker

@sciencebreaker

11 months

✈️🤔 Ever been stuck due to a canceled flight and had to re-plan your journey? A new study delves into "value-guided construal" – our ability to plan flexibly between utility and complexity. #scicomm #openscience #thesciencebreaker Let's break it down:

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

2 years

Had a great time exploring the universe of social and collective behavior at #COSMOSKonstanz 2022 🚀🛸 Thanks @TheCharleyWu and @WataruToyokawa for bringing together an amazing group of people and introducing us the beautiful city of Konstanz 🤩!!

豊川航 Wataru Toyokawa

@WataruToyokawa

2 years

The (subset of) 1st generation of COSMOnauts #COSMOSKonstanz Thank you all for your contribution! It was a great summer school.

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

10 months

Excited that this is out!! Really enjoyed being a part of this awesome project on language and RL led by the stellar @tedsumers

Ted Sumers

@tedsumers

10 months

✨ Now out in Psychological Review! ✨ We present a new account of relevance that weighs both **epistemic** and **decision-theoretic** utility: statements are relevant if they improve the listener’s future decision-making.

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

5 years

If you're at #CogSci2019 , come check out our poster on unintentional speech acts!

Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

5 years

What happens when you put your foot 🦶 in your mouth 😮? 🤔 Check out our #cogsci2019 preprint on unintentional speech acts! We model the role of false assumptions about common ground in #awkward situations (eg faux pas). w J Korman & T Griffiths

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

5 months

I recently had the pleasure of writing about some of our work on construal and functional fixedness for the @SPSPnews blog Character and Context - you can check it out here!

Society for Personality and Social Psychology

@SPSPnews

5 months

"As our research shows, these errors follow from the reasonable desire to simplify the world and the ease of sticking with an initial simplification. " - @mark_ho_

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

6 years

If you're at #ccn2018 , come hear us talk at 4:30 about how people interpret others' problem solving behavior using hierarchical representations! (Poster Session 1A #38 ) Joint work with @sophia_sanborn , Fred Callaway, David Bourgin, & Tom Griffiths

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

1 year

What a way to start an abstract: “Does gravity affect decision-making? This question comes into sharp focus as plans for interplanetary human space missions solidify. […]”

Steve Fleming

@smfleming

1 year

Metacognition in space! 🚀 Microgravity Induces Overconfidence in Perceptual Decision-making

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

2 years

6/ We ran several experiments to test the pre-registered predictions of our account and also compared them to 10 alternative models/processes. Across these studies, we found consistent evidence that people engage in a process of value-guided construal.

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

2 years

3/ Since Newell & Simon’s time, a lot of work has examined how we simulate actions to plan (part 2), but there’s still a lot unknown about how we represent problems to plan (part 1) Hence the question “How do we represent problems when planning?”

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

3 years

New preprint with R Dubey, H Mehta and T Griffiths! We analyze Aha moments 🤔💡 as *meta-cognitive prediction errors* to account for key findings in the literature. We also ran a big anagram study! Can you unscramble MARNOD🤔? No? Read the paper and maybe you'll figure it out😜

Griffiths Computational Cognitive Science Lab

@cocosci_lab

3 years

A computational theory of Aha! moments! New preprint from our lab on why Aha! moments occur and why they feel so good. TLDR: They are a form of meta-cognitive prediction errors i.e. they occur when we surprise ourselves about our own abilities!

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

1 year

🤔

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

2 years

7/ In the supplement, we discuss algorithms for construal optimization, and also report several *construal modification* variants of the model designed to capture, at variable levels of resolution, the fine-grained dynamics of the construal process (see image).

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

4 years

Had a really great time virtually meeting with the Causality in Cognition lab today! Thanks for having me!

Tobias Gerstenberg

@tobigerstenberg

4 years

Super fun and stimulating talk by @Mark_Ho_ () today in our lab meeting! Mark builds computational models of social reasoning. He talked about how doing and showing differ, and how Saul Steinberg paints a better picture of planning than google maps does.

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

2 years

9/ A deep thanks to my incredible, brilliant collaborators on this work: @dabelcs , @_cgcorrea , @mlittmancs , Jon Cohen & @cocosci_lab

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

5 years

What happens when you put your foot 🦶 in your mouth 😮? 🤔 Check out our #cogsci2019 preprint on unintentional speech acts! We model the role of false assumptions about common ground in #awkward situations (eg faux pas). w J Korman & T Griffiths

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

2 years

Why do initially rewarding things eventually lose their luster? Why does the hedonic treadmill exist?🏃 This fascinating project led by Rachit Dubey uses RL and reward design to understand such vexing existential questions!

Griffiths Computational Cognitive Science Lab

@cocosci_lab

2 years

Habituation and comparisons can result in depression, materialism, and overconsumption. Why are these disruptive features even part of human cognition? New paper with Rachit Dubey and Peter Dayan in @PLOSCompBiol provides a RL perspective on this question

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

2 years

8/ Collectively, these findings paint a striking picture of how people plan by strategically perceiving and conceiving problems.

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

2 years

Really cool paper by @ManasiMalik and @leylaisi on how human social inferences can be captured by NNs that represent relational visual info! Interesting to think about as a computationally cheaper alternative to explicit theory of mind

Manasi Malik

@ManasiMalik

2 years

Is purely visual information sufficient to explain human social interaction judgments? See new preprint w @leylaisi "Relational Visual Information explains Human Social Inference:A Graph Neural Network model for Social Interaction Recognition" to find out!

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

2 years

Starts today at 1pm in MacMillan Hall rm 117! Some planned topics of discussion: - rethinking the agent/env boundary 🐭🌍 - filling in the perception-action loop 👀🔄🤘 - interdisciplinary similarities/diffs in conceptualizing agency 🙈🙉🙊 and more! #RLDM2022

Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

2 years

So excited for #RLDM2022 and Saturday's #RLasAgency workshop, organized with the amazing @aharutyu + @dabelcs 🤩🤩 We'll be discussing the limits+possibilities of RL as a model of agency in cog sci/neuro/philosphy/AI with a brilliant group of scholars...

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

2 years

10/ I’m also grateful to @weijima01 , @RedmondOConnell and the anonymous reviewer for their incisive reviews. The feedback we received during the review process at @Nature was crucial for sharpening our thinking about this project and greatly expanding its scope.

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

3 years

This is a really exciting line of work. It's not only an impressive experimental accomplishment (90 games!), it also does a deep dive into the consequences that rich conceptual models (theories) of tasks can have on how humans learn, plan, and explore.

Sam Gershman

@gershbrain

3 years

Our work, led by Pedro Tsividis, on theory-based reinforcement learning: @MITCoCoSci

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

2 years

I’m incredibly grateful to the @CogCompNeuro #ccneuro22 community and organizers for giving us the opportunity to share our work and creating such a dynamic and interdisciplinary space to do science Can’t wait for #ccneuro23 😄 Also, a special shout-out to the GAC3 team …

Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

2 years

Excited to be in SF for jam-packed @CogCompNeuro 2022! First, I’ll be presenting recent work w Jon Cohen and @cocosci_lab on *rigidity in planning* 🤔💭 Poster P1.24: Tonight at 7:30 Talk: Tomorrow at the 10:30-12 session

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

2 years

This is a great review of current work studying interactions between value-guided decision making and representations!

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

3 years

Really exciting to be a part of this project, spearheaded by @dabelcs ! Dave's thread is a great general overview of the paper. Here, I'll share some thoughts on why this work is relevant for cognitive scientists/psychologists/neuroscientists (short 🧵)

David Abel

@dabelcs

3 years

Really excited to share our upcoming #NeurIPS2021 paper! "On the Expressivity of Markov Reward" Joint with @wwdabney , @aharutyu , @Mark_Ho_ , @mlittmancs , Doina Precup, and Satinder Singh. We ask: What can Markov reward express? (1/5; a quick 🧵--> )

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

1 year

I’ve always wondered whether resource rationality could be the key to unlocking a number of puzzles in moral psychology/philosophy. Really excited to dive into this!!

Sydney Levine

@sydneymlevine

1 year

“Resource-rational contractualism: A triple theory of moral cognition.” With my incredible co-authors @NickJChater , Josh Tenenbaum, and @fierycushman . Available here: (1/n)

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

4 years

Our poster is today from 11a-12:40p! We'll be in the official #CogSci2020 , in the upper-left. To find us: click on one of our names in the "Participants" list, then click "locate". Poster:

carlos g. correa

@_cgcorrea

4 years

@Mark_Ho_ , @callfredaway , Tom Griffiths and I will present work at #CogSci2020 that models how—and *why*—people decompose big scary tasks 🐲 into smaller, more friendly tasks that make it easier to plan 🧩🐭🐭🐭. Poster P-3-566, Zoom on Aug 1. Preprint:

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

1 year

To answer this question, we propose that functional fixedness occurs bc people try to minimize cognitive effort by doing two things: 1. Simplifying their representation of a problem, and 2. Sticking with the same kind of simplification on new problems

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

4 years

If you're at all interested in cognition, collective intelligence, and/or their connections to culture, tune into the #cogcultureworkshop this Wed (or watch the videos at your own convenience)! Organized with @TheCharleyWu , @natvelali , and @Boreel3 at @cogsci_soc 🙌

Charley Wu (@[email protected])

@TheCharleyWu

4 years

Tired of social distancing and lockdown? Then check out our #cogsci2020 workshop on Wednesday! Can't attend live because of timezone/childcare? 90% of talks are already available for asynchronous viewing on our website #cogcultureworkshop

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

2 years

I'm just so grateful to the workshop chairs (Michael Browning and @katjahofmann ) and the organizers ( @hartleylabnyu @mlittmancs @CoolsControl @PeterStone_TX @LnccBrown George Konidaris, @docqhuys @marcgbellemare @criticalneuro @j_a_westbrook @amitaishenhav Omer Gottesman, ...

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

1 year

I largely agree with these points It takes less mental effort to do 100% of a task yourself than to continuously monitor a machine that does 99% of a task perfectly but fails catastrophically on the last 1% (esp if the 1% is unpredictable!)

Gary Marcus

@GaryMarcus

1 year

CNET’s Fake New Fiasco, Autopilot, and a mysterious paper by Lex Fridman

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

1 year

It’s unrealistic to think that AI systems will always work perfectly out of the box! 🤖❌😵 This project led by the brilliant @TheAndiPenguin proposes a user-centric approach for diagnosing failures when things go wrong, so they can be fixed! 🤖✅🤗

Andi Peng

@TheAndiPenguin

1 year

I'm excited to share our #ICML2023 paper: we develop a user-informed framework for eliciting feedback to diagnose and fix policy failures. Project page: . [1/8]

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

2 years

Interesting paper that analyzes the relationship between flexible goals and constraints on perception!

Marlene Berke

@MarleneBerke

2 years

Our paper is out in Cognitive Science! We (Robert Walter-Terrill, @JaraEttinger , Brian Scholl, and I) ask to what extent perception is (or, from an evolutionary perspective, ought to be) truthful.

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

1 year

Useful way to think about language models in the context of how humans learn language!

Michael C. Frank

@mcxfrank

1 year

How do we compare the scale of language learning input for large language models vs. humans? I've been trying to come to grips with recent progress in AI. Let me explain these two illustrations I made to help. 🧵

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

1 year

Although functional fixedness was introduced by Karl Duncker nearly 80 years ago, it has been notoriously difficult to formalize! As such, I see this work as an exciting step towards understanding this puzzling and pervasive cognitive bias in modern computational terms 🧠💭

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

4 years

Cool paper by Sara Aronowitz and @TaniaLombrozo that maps out the relationships between learning, inference, and simulation! 🥛🥛💦

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

3 years

Excited for tomorrow's workshop on games in cog sci! My talk (10:30AM EDT/16:30PM CEST) will focus on work with @cocosci_lab on games and resource rational planning representations (e.g., task construal ). Looking forward to seeing everyone (virtually)🎮😊

People construct simplified mental representations to plan

One of the most striking features of human cognition is the capacity to plan. Two aspects of human planning stand out: its efficiency and flexibility. Efficiency is especially impressive because...

arxiv.org

Kelsey Allen

@KelseyRAllen

3 years

Announcing the first Games for Intelligence workshop () 🎮🤯 at CogSci 2021! This workshop will examine how games can be used as an alternative to traditional experiments, unlocking larger scale data collection and more ecologically grounded behavior. 1/

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

6 months

Very cool TiCS paper on applying ideas from RL and computational cog sci to political psychology by @RaBhui and @Lion_Schulz

Rahul Bhui

@RaBhui

6 months

Very excited about this paper with @Lion_Schulz - tweet thread to come soon!

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

3 years

Impressive experimental and computational work on how humans plan by thinking ahead!

Wei Ji Ma

@weijima01

3 years

When I had just started my job at @NYU_CNS @NYUPsych in 2013, I pitched a project to incoming graduate students. It was a wild new direction for me: using board games to understand how people think ahead. 7.5 years later, we have a preprint. 1/

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

2 years

Excited to be participating in this summer school organized by @TheCharleyWu and @WataruToyokawa ! If you're interested in computational models of social and/or collective behavior, you should apply!! 😁

豊川航 Wataru Toyokawa

@WataruToyokawa

2 years

🚨Call for applications!🚨 The Computational Summer school on Modeling Social and collective behavior (COSMOS), taking place in Konstanz, DE, between 4 - 7 July organised by me and @TheCharleyWu . Application deadline: 14 April. Visit👉 　🧵1/3

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

2 years

Hello #ICML2022 Baltimore!! I’ll be presenting a poster on our construal work at Friday’s Beyond Bayes workshop (P04) 📈 Come find me if you want to chat 😄

Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

2 years

1/ I'm excited to share our new paper, now in @Nature ! Paper: PDF: Summary 🧵: We present a new theory of problem simplification to answer an old question in cognitive science and AI: How do we represent problems when planning?

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

2 years

Excited to be in New Orleans for #NeurIPS22 ! If you want to chat hit me up 🤙🏼 it’s already been such a blast catching up with folks I haven’t seen in person since pre-pandemic (or ever!)

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

1 year

To explore this idea, our paper develops a novel experimental paradigm for reliably eliciting functional fixedness—“blocks and notches” mazes...

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

2 months

I’m also incredibly grateful for the time I've spent in the Computer Science department at @FollowStevens It's been such a supportive place to build a computational cog sci group, and I’m looking forward to continuing the collaborations we started there!

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

4 years

Super excited that this work with @SarinArunima , @justin_w_martin , and @fierycushman is now out in Cognition!

Arunima Sarin

@SarinArunima

4 years

People often respond to bad behaviour by punishing the perpetrator. But what makes punishments effective? Find out in our new paper, forthcoming in Cognition!! 🥳🎉 Work with @Mark_Ho_ @justin_w_martin @fierycushman URL: Highlights👇🏽 1/n

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

1 year

‘Functional fixedness’ is the tendency to *fixate* on a specific way of thinking about problems (the proverbial hammer), even if it prevents you from finding better solutions, like in this video (Warning: it looks upsetting at first, but ends happily!!)

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

3 years

Then, we turn to *inverse* models (e.g., human theory of mind), focusing on what cognitive scientists have to say about the basic building blocks of mentalizing as well as how it shapes human communication and teaching. 3/5

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

1 year

Just ordered my copy!! My expectations are pretty high given the high praise the book has already received 😬

Michael Littman

@mlittmancs

1 year

If you are thinking of pre-ordering Code To Joy (), now might be a good time. :-) Apparently, it's easier for the publisher to argue for an audiobook version if there's strong pre-order paperback sales. (Not sure the logic there is sound, but there it is.)

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

2 years

I really appreciate the “Yes, and…”-energy that LLMs bring to the table

Janelle Shane

@JanelleCShane

2 years

The thing about large language models like GPT-3 and Lambda describing the experience of being self-aware is they can also describe the experience of being a squirrel.

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

5 months

Excited for this panel next week! #AAAI24 #Vancouver

Suyog Chandramouli

@suyoghc

5 months

Going to #AAAI24 ? Join our Bridge Program, "Collaborative AI and Modeling of Humans" on Wed, Feb 21st. Keynote talks by @erichorvitz & Cristina Conati. Panel Discussion with @mark_ho_ , @smdvln , @lama_nachman , @PeterStone_TX , Mark Steyvers, & Matt Taylor. 30 posters. For more

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

2 years

Is there any data/analysis from conferences that switched to double-blind peer review? (Eg thinking of @cogsci_soc , which switched over a few years ago)

Brian Nosek (@[email protected])

@BrianNosek

2 years

Massive status bias in peer review. 534 reviewers randomized to review the same paper revealing the low status, high status, or neither author. 65% reject low status, 23% reject high status. Amazing work by Juergen Huber and colleagues. #prc9

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

6 years

Excited to be part of work on inferring task representations that are 1. temporal and 2. boolean (e.g. as an alternative to Markov rewards) from expert demonstrations. This representation helps with interpretability and learning tasks compositionally.

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

5 years

Spotted a duck-rabbit in the wild 🐰?🦆 “I shall call the following figure, derived from Jastrow, the duck-rabbit. It can be seen as a rabbit’s head or as a duck’s.” - Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Part II, §xi #philosophyjokes

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

1 year

Is GPT4 bad at creative tasks (eg indexed by AP English) bc of fundamental limitations on LLMs or bc it’s a product that’s been fine-tuned to not express strong opinions?

Stefan Schubert

@StefanFSchubert

1 year

who are the -cels now

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

2 years

...including our invited speakers/panel: @brianchristian @aronowitzzz @eckstein_maria @nanjiang_cs and paper contributors (11 PDFs now up on the website!): See you there!! (Macmillan Hall, Room 117 at 1pm on Sat 6/11)

RL as Agency - Accepted Works

Active Inference as a Model of Agency by Lancelot Da Costa, Samuel Tenka, Dominic Zhao, and Noor Sajid. Agency, Learning, Functions and Goals by Patrick Butlin. Back for the Future: Hierarchical...

sites.google.com

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Mark Ho

@mark_ho_

2 years

Check out this fun and accessible intro to program synthesis!

evanthebouncy

@evanthebouncy

2 years

want to get into program synthesis but don't know how to started? I wrote a minimalist intro to modern program synthesis that can help you -- from problem formulation to generating code by fine-tuning llm on huggingface.

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