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Kempner Institute at Harvard University
@kempnerinstitute.bsky.social
The Kempner Institute for the Study of Natural and Artificial Intelligence at Harvard University.
In the latest #KempnerInstitute Seminar Series talk, Kamalika Chaudhuri from FAIR @ Meta discussed the ways in which fundamental challenges of trustworthy AI currently manifest within LLMs.

Watch the talk: youtu.be/T2Cyv5YpNCs
#AI #LLMs
Trustworthy AI in Context with Kamalika Chaudhuri
YouTube video by Kempner Institute at Harvard University
youtu.be
November 12, 2025 at 7:00 PM
🐇Into the Rabbit Hull — Part 1: A Deep Dive into DINOv2🧠
Our latest Deeper Learning blog post is an #interpretability deep dive into one of today’s leading vision foundation models: DINOv2.
📖Read now: bit.ly/4nNfq8D
Stay tuned — Part 2 coming soon.
#AI #VLMs #DINOv2
Into the Rabbit Hull – Part I - Kempner Institute
This blog post offers an interpretability deep dive, examining the most important concepts emerging in one of today’s central vision foundation models, DINOv2. This blogpost is the first of a […]
bit.ly
November 12, 2025 at 3:49 PM
From Cambridge to Johannesburg🌍— our “Building a Transformer from Scratch” workshop brought together students from the #KempnerInstitute and MIND Institute Wits University for collaboration, creativity and discovery!
🙌39 students, 8 facilitators, global #AI learning in action.
November 7, 2025 at 4:21 PM
Congratulations to #KempnerInstitute community members @msalbergo.bsky.social and @mweber.bsky.social — recipients of @schmidtsciences.bsky.social AI2050 Fellowships! 🎉
Discover their innovative research shaping the future of AI 👉 bit.ly/47Do4R3
#AI
Schmidt Sciences Awards Early Career Fellowships to Michael Albergo, Melanie Weber - Kempner Institute
Two Kempner Institute community members have received AI2050 Fellowships from Schmidt Sciences, a nonprofit organization aimed at accelerating scientific knowledge and breakthroughs. The AI2050 Progra...
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November 6, 2025 at 8:10 PM
🧠💻Kempner researchers are using the new #DGXSpark to map how genes shape the brain — bringing the power of #AI straight to the bench and accelerating the pace of discovery.🚀
bit.ly/4ogQabW
@blsabatini.bsky.social @harvardmed.bsky.social @bethstevenslab.bsky.social @bostonchildrens.bsky.social
Decoding Epilepsy with the Power of AI - Kempner Institute
The Kempner Institute for the Study of Natural and Artificial Intelligence has launched an ambitious new project that brings together the frontiers of biology and computing to uncover how genetic […]
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November 4, 2025 at 4:13 PM
🧠Discover what’s new at the #KempnerInstitute!
Our October Research Roundup brings together the latest preprints and publications from our researchers.
🔗Explore more: bit.ly/3LdVbUh
#Neuroscience #AI #Research
Research Roundup - Kempner Institute
The Kempner Research Roundup compiles publications, preprints and announcements authored by members of the Kempner Institute community. We publish the Roundup approximately three times each academic y...
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November 3, 2025 at 5:53 PM
💡One training run. Many LLMs.
Discover Boomerang Distillation — a new way to “recombine” large + small models into a whole family of LLMs.
More in the Deeper Learning blog 👇
bit.ly/3WtMWWw
Post by Sara Kangaslahti, Jonathan Geuter, and Nihal Nayak
Boomerang Distillation Enables Zero-Shot Model Size Interpolation - Kempner Institute
Real-world deployments of LLMs require models of different sizes to meet performance, latency, and cost targets. Yet pretraining every size is prohibitively expensive, leaving large gaps in size-perfo...
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October 29, 2025 at 2:14 PM
How do LLMs think about thinking? 🤔
In the latest Kempner Seminar Series talk, @profsanjeevarora.bsky.social (Princeton University and Princeton PLI) explores how “metacognition” shapes problem-solving in large language models.
Watch here: youtu.be/Tl48e0Euois
#KempnerInstitute #AI #LLM #CS
LLM Skills and Metacognition: Scaffolding for New Forms of Learning? with Sanjeev Arora
YouTube video by Kempner Institute at Harvard University
youtu.be
October 27, 2025 at 2:45 PM
In the latest Kempner Seminar Series talk, Hannah Choi of Georgia Institute of Technology discusses recent work that investigates cortical mechanisms underlying predictive coding.

Watch the talk: youtu.be/9gf0lCu8tVc

#KempnerInstitute #AI
Predictive Coding with Cortical Cell Types and Connectivity with Hannah Choi
YouTube video by Kempner Institute at Harvard University
youtu.be
October 20, 2025 at 2:43 PM
NEW in #DeeperLearning blog:

Training quantized LLMs is tough -- the staircase loss landscape kills gradients everywhere.

Meet LOTION🧴: a framework that replaces the quantized loss w/ a smoother objective that preserves the same global minima.

👉 bit.ly/47pg07v
LOTION: Smoothing the Optimization  Landscape for Quantized Training - Kempner Institute
Quantization and low-precision inference are necessary tools to continue leveraging scale for Large Language Model Performance. However, training models for quantized performance is challenging becaus...
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October 15, 2025 at 3:31 PM
In the latest Kempner Seminar Series talk, Leyla Isik of @jhuartssciences.bsky.social discusses researching social interaction perception using computational vision tools.

Watch the talk: youtu.be/YtVV55vjNDg

#KempnerInstitute #CogSci #Vision
Seeing Social Interactions with Leyla Isik
YouTube video by Kempner Institute at Harvard University
youtu.be
October 14, 2025 at 3:30 PM
NEW in the #DeeperLearning blog!

🤖 ToolUniverse turns LLMs into “AI scientists,” tapping 600+ tools for experiments, modeling & discovery.

🔍 Read the post by Shanghua Gao, Richard Zhu, & @marinkazitnik.bsky.social: bit.ly/46KHIvp
From Models to Scientists: Building AI Agents for Scientific Discovery - Kempner Institute
ToolUniverse is a framework for developing AI agents for science, often referred to as “AI scientists.” It provides an environment where LLMs interact with more than six hundred scientific tools, […]
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October 9, 2025 at 8:51 PM
What’s next in intelligence research? Meet our twenty fall 2025 KURE students. These undergraduates are pursuing original projects from tracing alignment faking in LLMs to modeling elephantfish communication.

See the future of the field: bit.ly/3KKUstb

#AI #Neuroscience #KempnerInstitute
Kempner Institute Welcomes Fall 2025 Undergraduate Student Researchers - Kempner Institute
Cambridge, MA – The Kempner Institute for the Study of Natural and Artificial Intelligence at Harvard is pleased to announce the fall 2025 recipients of the Kempner Undergraduate Research Experience [...
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October 8, 2025 at 3:17 PM
NEW on our #DeeperLearning blog

People balance being kind vs. being honest — and #LLMs should too.

New research shows training choices often favor informativeness over kindness, but prompting can induce sycophancy.

Read more: bit.ly/3Wqrtxl
Using Cognitive Models to Reveal Value Trade-offs in Language Models - Kempner Institute
People’s actions and words are the result of a balance of different goals. The authors use a leading cognitive model of this value trade-off in polite speech to systematically examine […]
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October 7, 2025 at 8:23 PM
In the latest Kempner Seminar Series talk, Tatsunori Hashimoto of @stanfordnlp.bsky.social discusses synthetic data and algorithmic approaches to data efficiency.

Watch the talk: youtu.be/pookfyF5Vu4

#KempnerInstitute #AI #scaling
Back to the Future – Data Efficient Language Modeling with Tatsunori Hashimoto
YouTube video by Kempner Institute at Harvard University
youtu.be
October 6, 2025 at 2:55 PM
In the latest Kempner Seminar Series talk, Kevin Ellis of Cornell University discusses how an AI system could acquire, transfer, and communicate its knowledge of how things work.

Watch the talk: youtu.be/b0_BXShGgno

#KempnerInstitute #AI
Mental Programs in Humans and Machines with Kevin Ellis
YouTube video by Kempner Institute at Harvard University
youtu.be
September 29, 2025 at 5:46 PM
⌛️ Deadline approaching!

Applications for the #KempnerInstitute Research Fellowships close Oct. 1.

We welcome postdocs exploring the foundations of #intelligence or applications of #AI to apply.

👉 Learn more & apply: bit.ly/3UvpSpe
#LLMs #NeuroAI #ML
Kempner Research Fellowship - Kempner Institute
The Kempner brings leading, early-stage postdoctoral scientists to Harvard to work on projects that advance the fundamental understanding of intelligence.
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September 24, 2025 at 7:49 PM
NEW: #KempnerInstitute's Naomi Saphra and her work on #interpretability featured in @quantamagazine.bsky.social! Read the article by @benbenbrubaker.bsky.social here: t.co/40Tw1mmESe
https://www.quantamagazine.org/to-understand-ai-watch-how-it-evolves-20250924/
t.co
September 24, 2025 at 4:10 PM
News from the #KempnerInstitute!

We’re thrilled to welcome Yonatan Belinkov (expert in #NLP) and Daphna Weinshall (expert in human & machine vision) as visiting scholars for the 2025–26 academic year.

📖 Read more: bit.ly/47QkDID

#AI #MachineVision @boknilev.bsky.social
Kempner Institute Welcomes Yonatan Belinkov and Daphna Weinshall as Visiting Scholars for the 2025-2026 Academic Year - Kempner Institute
The Kempner Institute is pleased to welcome Yonatan Belinkov and Daphna Weinshall as visiting scholars for the 2025-26 academic year. Both are preeminent researchers in the field of intelligence, help...
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September 22, 2025 at 6:10 PM
Happy #OpenScienceWeek!

Explore #KempnerInstitute #OpenScience resources:

📗HPC Handbook: bit.ly/4gtUzFj
💻GitHub: github.com/KempnerInsti...
💻HuggingFace: huggingface.co/KempnerInsti...
📽️Talks on YouTube: www.youtube.com/@KempnerInst...
September 19, 2025 at 3:26 PM
Reposted by Kempner Institute at Harvard University
(1/8) New paper from our team!

Yu Duan & Hamza Chaudhry introduce POCO, a tool for predicting brain activity at the cellular & network level during spontaneous behavior.

Find out how we built POCO & how it changes neurobehavioral research 👇

arxiv.org/abs/2506.14957
September 12, 2025 at 8:33 PM
Reposted by Kempner Institute at Harvard University
@robinjia.bsky.social
speaking at
@kempnerinstitute.bsky.social
on Auditing, Dissecting, and Evaluating LLMs
September 18, 2025 at 5:22 PM
In the first Kempner Seminar Series talk of the semester @moiradillon.bsky.social of New York University discusses the cognitive origins of spatial and social intelligence. Watch the talk: youtu.be/YcgOj1wZVkg

#psychology #cogsci #KempnerInstitute
Developing Intelligence: Insights from Spatial and Social Cognition with Moira Dillon
YouTube video by Kempner Institute at Harvard University
youtu.be
September 15, 2025 at 6:51 PM
How can scientists apply efficient #AI tools to cognitive science? And what does it mean for how robots learn in new environments? #KempnerInstitute fellow Wilka Carvalho (@cogscikid.bsky.social l) + collaborators outline a new framework in 3 papers.
Read more: bit.ly/47Fk9F9
#NeuroAI
September 15, 2025 at 6:42 PM