Robert Hawkins
@rdhawkins.bsky.social
asst prof @Stanford linguistics | director of social interaction lab 🌱 | bluskies about computational cognitive science & language
Reposted by Robert Hawkins
I have news. Wonderful news.
New paper on #disinformation. The title is the thesis. Think of disinformation as content that functions to optimise the decisions of the audience for the disinformant. This doesn't require deception or content that induces false belief.
philpapers.org/rec/LITDIF
New paper on #disinformation. The title is the thesis. Think of disinformation as content that functions to optimise the decisions of the audience for the disinformant. This doesn't require deception or content that induces false belief.
philpapers.org/rec/LITDIF
Clayton Littlejohn, Disinformation is for Degrading the Value of Information, not Confirming Falsehoods - PhilPapers
According to a recent account of disinformation, disinformation is content that “generates ignorance” (Simion 2024a; 2024b). The view improves upon previous accounts that focused upon the potential fo...
philpapers.org
November 29, 2025 at 12:40 AM
I have news. Wonderful news.
New paper on #disinformation. The title is the thesis. Think of disinformation as content that functions to optimise the decisions of the audience for the disinformant. This doesn't require deception or content that induces false belief.
philpapers.org/rec/LITDIF
New paper on #disinformation. The title is the thesis. Think of disinformation as content that functions to optimise the decisions of the audience for the disinformant. This doesn't require deception or content that induces false belief.
philpapers.org/rec/LITDIF
Reposted by Robert Hawkins
On major questions of university governance, a 99.3% majority vote of the faculty means nothing to the people who are actually in charge. This is a fact all of us need to take much more seriously.
November 29, 2025 at 1:18 AM
On major questions of university governance, a 99.3% majority vote of the faculty means nothing to the people who are actually in charge. This is a fact all of us need to take much more seriously.
Reposted by Robert Hawkins
My alma mater, Northwestern, has decided to grovel to a desperate loser, at vulnerable people’s expense
TL;DR: basically the same contemptible garbage as all the other schools, anti-trans, anti-protest, more restrictive on admissions than the court held in SFFA. 75 million dollar tribute payment. At least no surveillance of teaching evaluations I guess?
November 29, 2025 at 2:03 AM
My alma mater, Northwestern, has decided to grovel to a desperate loser, at vulnerable people’s expense
Reposted by Robert Hawkins
New in Science, Macaques tap to the beat.
Very cool study for its main result and its null one: consistent with nearly every other comparative study of music, monkeys don't differentiate beats by their relative strength—which even young children do innately. Monkeys have rhythm but not meter!
Very cool study for its main result and its null one: consistent with nearly every other comparative study of music, monkeys don't differentiate beats by their relative strength—which even young children do innately. Monkeys have rhythm but not meter!
Monkeys have rhythm
Synchronizing movements to music is a hallmark of human culture, but its evolutionary and neurobiological origins remain unknown. This ability requires (i) extracting a steady rhythmic pulse, or beat,...
www.science.org
November 28, 2025 at 11:45 PM
New in Science, Macaques tap to the beat.
Very cool study for its main result and its null one: consistent with nearly every other comparative study of music, monkeys don't differentiate beats by their relative strength—which even young children do innately. Monkeys have rhythm but not meter!
Very cool study for its main result and its null one: consistent with nearly every other comparative study of music, monkeys don't differentiate beats by their relative strength—which even young children do innately. Monkeys have rhythm but not meter!
Reposted by Robert Hawkins
Almost off to @euripsconf.bsky.social in Copenhagen 🇩🇰 🇪🇺! I'll present 3 posters:
🧠 Neurosymbolic Diffusion Models: Thursday's poster session.
Going to NeurIPS? @edoardo-ponti.bsky.social and @nolovedeeplearning.bsky.social will present the paper in San Diego Thu 13:00
arxiv.org/abs/2505.13138
🧠 Neurosymbolic Diffusion Models: Thursday's poster session.
Going to NeurIPS? @edoardo-ponti.bsky.social and @nolovedeeplearning.bsky.social will present the paper in San Diego Thu 13:00
arxiv.org/abs/2505.13138
November 28, 2025 at 5:31 PM
Almost off to @euripsconf.bsky.social in Copenhagen 🇩🇰 🇪🇺! I'll present 3 posters:
🧠 Neurosymbolic Diffusion Models: Thursday's poster session.
Going to NeurIPS? @edoardo-ponti.bsky.social and @nolovedeeplearning.bsky.social will present the paper in San Diego Thu 13:00
arxiv.org/abs/2505.13138
🧠 Neurosymbolic Diffusion Models: Thursday's poster session.
Going to NeurIPS? @edoardo-ponti.bsky.social and @nolovedeeplearning.bsky.social will present the paper in San Diego Thu 13:00
arxiv.org/abs/2505.13138
Reposted by Robert Hawkins
"There is a power law of joint communicative effort and it reflects communicative work"
📢New paper from: Sara Bögels (sarabogels.bsky.social), Tianyi Li, Marlou Rasenberg, Lotte Eijk, Ivan Toni, & Wim Pouw (wimpouw.bsky.social)
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
📢New paper from: Sara Bögels (sarabogels.bsky.social), Tianyi Li, Marlou Rasenberg, Lotte Eijk, Ivan Toni, & Wim Pouw (wimpouw.bsky.social)
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
November 27, 2025 at 6:49 PM
"There is a power law of joint communicative effort and it reflects communicative work"
📢New paper from: Sara Bögels (sarabogels.bsky.social), Tianyi Li, Marlou Rasenberg, Lotte Eijk, Ivan Toni, & Wim Pouw (wimpouw.bsky.social)
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
📢New paper from: Sara Bögels (sarabogels.bsky.social), Tianyi Li, Marlou Rasenberg, Lotte Eijk, Ivan Toni, & Wim Pouw (wimpouw.bsky.social)
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Reposted by Robert Hawkins
Our new paper in Cognitive Science, led by Can! @canavci.bsky.social
"Assessing Others’ Knowledge Through Their Speech Disfluencies and Gestures"
Cognitive Science - Wiley Online Library onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
@kudilvebilis.bsky.social
"Assessing Others’ Knowledge Through Their Speech Disfluencies and Gestures"
Cognitive Science - Wiley Online Library onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
@kudilvebilis.bsky.social
Assessing Others’ Knowledge Through Their Speech Disfluencies and Gestures
As part of the multimodal language system, gestures play a vital role for listeners, by capturing attention and providing information. Similarly, disfluencies serve as a cue for the listeners about o...
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
November 27, 2025 at 1:46 PM
Our new paper in Cognitive Science, led by Can! @canavci.bsky.social
"Assessing Others’ Knowledge Through Their Speech Disfluencies and Gestures"
Cognitive Science - Wiley Online Library onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
@kudilvebilis.bsky.social
"Assessing Others’ Knowledge Through Their Speech Disfluencies and Gestures"
Cognitive Science - Wiley Online Library onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
@kudilvebilis.bsky.social
Reposted by Robert Hawkins
Task learning is compositional, so would behavior be!
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Building compositional tasks with shared neural subspaces - Nature
The brain can flexibly perform multiple tasks by compositionally combining task-relevant neural representations.
www.nature.com
November 27, 2025 at 5:22 PM
Task learning is compositional, so would behavior be!
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Reposted by Robert Hawkins
What does it mean to understand language? We argue that the brain’s core language system is limited, and that *deeply* understanding language requires EXPORTING info to other brain regions.
w/ @neuranna.bsky.social @evfedorenko.bsky.social @nancykanwisher.bsky.social
arxiv.org/abs/2511.19757
1/n🧵👇
w/ @neuranna.bsky.social @evfedorenko.bsky.social @nancykanwisher.bsky.social
arxiv.org/abs/2511.19757
1/n🧵👇
What does it mean to understand language?
Language understanding entails not just extracting the surface-level meaning of the linguistic input, but constructing rich mental models of the situation it describes. Here we propose that because pr...
arxiv.org
November 26, 2025 at 4:26 PM
What does it mean to understand language? We argue that the brain’s core language system is limited, and that *deeply* understanding language requires EXPORTING info to other brain regions.
w/ @neuranna.bsky.social @evfedorenko.bsky.social @nancykanwisher.bsky.social
arxiv.org/abs/2511.19757
1/n🧵👇
w/ @neuranna.bsky.social @evfedorenko.bsky.social @nancykanwisher.bsky.social
arxiv.org/abs/2511.19757
1/n🧵👇
Reposted by Robert Hawkins
In our new tutorial, @meanwhileina.bsky.social and I walk you through meaningful hypothesis testing using a less known form of calculating Bayes Factor.
osf.io/preprints/ps...
People transitioning to Bayes often wonder how to decide if an effect is meaningful or not. Here you go... 1/🧵
osf.io/preprints/ps...
People transitioning to Bayes often wonder how to decide if an effect is meaningful or not. Here you go... 1/🧵
November 26, 2025 at 6:47 PM
In our new tutorial, @meanwhileina.bsky.social and I walk you through meaningful hypothesis testing using a less known form of calculating Bayes Factor.
osf.io/preprints/ps...
People transitioning to Bayes often wonder how to decide if an effect is meaningful or not. Here you go... 1/🧵
osf.io/preprints/ps...
People transitioning to Bayes often wonder how to decide if an effect is meaningful or not. Here you go... 1/🧵
Reposted by Robert Hawkins
We recently released OlmoEarth—an open spatio-temporal foundation model for planetary intelligence, trained on multimodal Earth observation, OpenStreetMap, & other open data. It sets a new accuracy/efficiency Pareto frontier and powers our OlmoEarth Platform. Technical report now on arXiv. 👇
November 26, 2025 at 7:23 PM
We recently released OlmoEarth—an open spatio-temporal foundation model for planetary intelligence, trained on multimodal Earth observation, OpenStreetMap, & other open data. It sets a new accuracy/efficiency Pareto frontier and powers our OlmoEarth Platform. Technical report now on arXiv. 👇
Reposted by Robert Hawkins
I am very excited to share our new preprint, spearheaded by the brilliant @lunahuestegge.bsky.social, w/ @peterkok.bsky.social and others: ‘An attempt to push mental imagery over the reality threshold using non-invasive brain stimulation’
doi.org/10.31234/osf...
doi.org/10.31234/osf...
OSF
doi.org
November 27, 2025 at 10:53 AM
I am very excited to share our new preprint, spearheaded by the brilliant @lunahuestegge.bsky.social, w/ @peterkok.bsky.social and others: ‘An attempt to push mental imagery over the reality threshold using non-invasive brain stimulation’
doi.org/10.31234/osf...
doi.org/10.31234/osf...
Reposted by Robert Hawkins
CogSci in Aarhus is hiring, open rank (assi, asso or full prof).
We want somebody working on and teaching computational modelling of cognitive processes and/or social processes. Students are amazing, work/life balance very satisfactory, and colleagues are nice!
international.au.dk/about/profil...
We want somebody working on and teaching computational modelling of cognitive processes and/or social processes. Students are amazing, work/life balance very satisfactory, and colleagues are nice!
international.au.dk/about/profil...
Assistant Professor, Associate Professor or Full Professor of Cognitive Science - Vacancy at Aarhus University
Vacancy at School of Communication and Culture - Linguistics, Cognitive Science and Semiotics, Dept. of, Aarhus University
international.au.dk
November 26, 2025 at 11:38 AM
CogSci in Aarhus is hiring, open rank (assi, asso or full prof).
We want somebody working on and teaching computational modelling of cognitive processes and/or social processes. Students are amazing, work/life balance very satisfactory, and colleagues are nice!
international.au.dk/about/profil...
We want somebody working on and teaching computational modelling of cognitive processes and/or social processes. Students are amazing, work/life balance very satisfactory, and colleagues are nice!
international.au.dk/about/profil...
Reposted by Robert Hawkins
New paper from the lab, "Perceiving Event Structure in Brief Actions," now out in Cognitive Psychology :)
Led by the inimitable Zekun Sun
This was my lab's first foray into event cognition
gift link: sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Led by the inimitable Zekun Sun
This was my lab's first foray into event cognition
gift link: sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
November 25, 2025 at 3:40 PM
New paper from the lab, "Perceiving Event Structure in Brief Actions," now out in Cognitive Psychology :)
Led by the inimitable Zekun Sun
This was my lab's first foray into event cognition
gift link: sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Led by the inimitable Zekun Sun
This was my lab's first foray into event cognition
gift link: sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Reposted by Robert Hawkins
New perspective paper (w/ @sedaakbiyik.bsky.social, Joseph Outa, & @minjaek.bsky.social ) in @natrevpsychol.nature.com ⚽💭🧠👶 : www.nature.com/articles/s44...
How physical information is used to make sense of the psychological world - Nature Reviews Psychology
Reasoning about minds and reasoning about physical objects are governed by two distinct systems. In this Perspective, Liu et al. review research from developmental psychology and cognitive neuroscienc...
www.nature.com
November 24, 2025 at 11:14 PM
New perspective paper (w/ @sedaakbiyik.bsky.social, Joseph Outa, & @minjaek.bsky.social ) in @natrevpsychol.nature.com ⚽💭🧠👶 : www.nature.com/articles/s44...
Reposted by Robert Hawkins
I'm excited to announce that I have been asked to join the Mamdani Transition Team to work on community safety issues. A New Era for NYC.
November 24, 2025 at 8:23 PM
I'm excited to announce that I have been asked to join the Mamdani Transition Team to work on community safety issues. A New Era for NYC.
Reposted by Robert Hawkins
We have a new paper in Science Advances proposing a simple test for bias:
Is the same person treated differently when their race is perceived differently?
Specifically, we study: is the same driver likelier to be searched by police when they are perceived as Hispanic rather than white?
1/
Is the same person treated differently when their race is perceived differently?
Specifically, we study: is the same driver likelier to be searched by police when they are perceived as Hispanic rather than white?
1/
November 24, 2025 at 6:14 PM
We have a new paper in Science Advances proposing a simple test for bias:
Is the same person treated differently when their race is perceived differently?
Specifically, we study: is the same driver likelier to be searched by police when they are perceived as Hispanic rather than white?
1/
Is the same person treated differently when their race is perceived differently?
Specifically, we study: is the same driver likelier to be searched by police when they are perceived as Hispanic rather than white?
1/
Reposted by Robert Hawkins
📍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?
🧵⬇️
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?
🧵⬇️
November 24, 2025 at 4:43 PM
📍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?
🧵⬇️
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?
🧵⬇️
Reposted by Robert Hawkins
My collaborator @aditijh.bsky.social has some cool work on cell-type LDS :)
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Disentangling the Roles of Distinct Cell Classes with Cell-Type Dynamical Systems
Latent dynamical systems have been widely used to characterize the dynamics of neural population activity in the brain. However, these models typically ignore the fact that the brain contains multiple...
www.biorxiv.org
November 23, 2025 at 6:30 PM
My collaborator @aditijh.bsky.social has some cool work on cell-type LDS :)
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Reposted by Robert Hawkins
Tokenisers are a vital part of LLMs, but how hard is it to find an optimal one? 🤔 Considering arbitrarily large alphabets, prior work showed this is NP-hard. But what if we use bytes instead? Or unary strings like a, aa, aaa, ...? In our new paper, we show this is still hard, NP-hard!
November 20, 2025 at 3:05 PM
Tokenisers are a vital part of LLMs, but how hard is it to find an optimal one? 🤔 Considering arbitrarily large alphabets, prior work showed this is NP-hard. But what if we use bytes instead? Or unary strings like a, aa, aaa, ...? In our new paper, we show this is still hard, NP-hard!
Reposted by Robert Hawkins
we released Olmo 3! lot of exciting stuff but wanna focus on:
🐟Olmo 3 32B Base, the best fully-open base model to-date, near Qwen 2.5 & Gemma 3 on diverse evals
🐠Olmo 3 32B Think, first fully-open reasoning model approaching Qwen 3 levels
🐡12 training datasets corresp to different staged training
🐟Olmo 3 32B Base, the best fully-open base model to-date, near Qwen 2.5 & Gemma 3 on diverse evals
🐠Olmo 3 32B Think, first fully-open reasoning model approaching Qwen 3 levels
🐡12 training datasets corresp to different staged training
November 20, 2025 at 6:20 PM
we released Olmo 3! lot of exciting stuff but wanna focus on:
🐟Olmo 3 32B Base, the best fully-open base model to-date, near Qwen 2.5 & Gemma 3 on diverse evals
🐠Olmo 3 32B Think, first fully-open reasoning model approaching Qwen 3 levels
🐡12 training datasets corresp to different staged training
🐟Olmo 3 32B Base, the best fully-open base model to-date, near Qwen 2.5 & Gemma 3 on diverse evals
🐠Olmo 3 32B Think, first fully-open reasoning model approaching Qwen 3 levels
🐡12 training datasets corresp to different staged training
Reposted by Robert Hawkins
proud to share this work, led by the brilliant @ilinabg.bsky.social, now out in Nature! Ilina finds that speech-sound neural processing is VERY similar in a language you know and one you don't. differences only emerge at the level of word boundaries and learnt statistical structure 🧠✨
The human brain responds to the sounds of both familiar and unfamiliar languages in a similar way, according to research in Nature. The findings might guide future approaches to language learning and rehabilitation. go.nature.com/4ppvsHb #Neuroskyence 🧪
November 20, 2025 at 7:11 PM
proud to share this work, led by the brilliant @ilinabg.bsky.social, now out in Nature! Ilina finds that speech-sound neural processing is VERY similar in a language you know and one you don't. differences only emerge at the level of word boundaries and learnt statistical structure 🧠✨
Reposted by Robert Hawkins
aclanthology.org/2025.finding...
"annotators strongly took the LLM suggestions, significantly changing the label distribution compared to the baseline. We show that when these labels created with LLM assistance are used to evaluate LLM performance, reported model performance significantly increases"
"annotators strongly took the LLM suggestions, significantly changing the label distribution compared to the baseline. We show that when these labels created with LLM assistance are used to evaluate LLM performance, reported model performance significantly increases"
Just Put a Human in the Loop? Investigating LLM-Assisted Annotation for Subjective Tasks
Hope Schroeder, Deb Roy, Jad Kabbara. Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025. 2025.
aclanthology.org
November 20, 2025 at 11:06 PM
aclanthology.org/2025.finding...
"annotators strongly took the LLM suggestions, significantly changing the label distribution compared to the baseline. We show that when these labels created with LLM assistance are used to evaluate LLM performance, reported model performance significantly increases"
"annotators strongly took the LLM suggestions, significantly changing the label distribution compared to the baseline. We show that when these labels created with LLM assistance are used to evaluate LLM performance, reported model performance significantly increases"
Reposted by Robert Hawkins
New paper: Evidence of crossmodal compensation in the conceptual representation of blind people: while they share visual associations with sighted people, blind people more strongly associate concepts with touch direct.mit.edu/opmi/article...
November 20, 2025 at 8:52 AM
New paper: Evidence of crossmodal compensation in the conceptual representation of blind people: while they share visual associations with sighted people, blind people more strongly associate concepts with touch direct.mit.edu/opmi/article...
Reposted by Robert Hawkins
Our paper “The cost of thinking is similar between large reasoning models and humans” is now out in PNAS! 🤖🧠
w/ @fepdelia.bsky.social, @hopekean.bsky.social, @lampinen.bsky.social, and @evfedorenko.bsky.social
Link: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... (1/6)
w/ @fepdelia.bsky.social, @hopekean.bsky.social, @lampinen.bsky.social, and @evfedorenko.bsky.social
Link: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... (1/6)
PNAS
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...
www.pnas.org
November 19, 2025 at 8:14 PM
Our paper “The cost of thinking is similar between large reasoning models and humans” is now out in PNAS! 🤖🧠
w/ @fepdelia.bsky.social, @hopekean.bsky.social, @lampinen.bsky.social, and @evfedorenko.bsky.social
Link: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... (1/6)
w/ @fepdelia.bsky.social, @hopekean.bsky.social, @lampinen.bsky.social, and @evfedorenko.bsky.social
Link: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... (1/6)