Maria Ryskina
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mryskina.bsky.social
Maria Ryskina
@mryskina.bsky.social
Postdoc @vectorinstitute.ai | organizer @queerinai.com | previously MIT, CMU LTI | 🐀 rodent enthusiast | she/they

🌐 https://ryskina.github.io/
Congratulations!!!
November 8, 2025 at 12:14 AM
Btw the PI of this work, Dr Kelly Lambert, has a cool book called "The Lab Rat Chronicles" that describes lots of behavioral findings from rat experiments! (Written pre-driving rats, unfortunately)
November 6, 2025 at 4:30 PM
Congratulations! Took me a second to understand you weren't talking about Lexical Functional Grammar though...
November 5, 2025 at 1:22 PM
Isn't mis- (or at least under-)specification inevitable? (I'm thinking of arxiv.org/abs/1804.04268)
Incomplete Contracting and AI Alignment
We suggest that the analysis of incomplete contracting developed by law and economics researchers can provide a useful framework for understanding the AI alignment problem and help to generate a syste...
arxiv.org
October 21, 2025 at 7:22 PM
DM'd you, thanks!
October 19, 2025 at 2:04 PM
The organizers mentioned that the videos will be up a few weeks after the conference! I expect it'll be at www.youtube.com/@colm_conf
October 19, 2025 at 12:19 AM
I still have that card! Still working on that second ice cream 🥲
October 17, 2025 at 5:59 PM
It used to be 5 "no"s for ice cream/pizza! Has the exchange rate gone up?
October 17, 2025 at 5:36 PM
LLMs Assume People Are More Rational Than We Really Are by Ryan Liu* & Jiayi Geng* et al.:

LMs are bad (too rational) at predicting human behaviour, but aligned with humans in assuming rationality in others’ choices.

arxiv.org/abs/2406.17055
October 14, 2025 at 12:43 AM
Neologism Learning by John Hewitt et al.:

Training new token embeddings on examples with a specific property (e.g., short answers) leads to finding “machine-only synonyms” for these tokens that elicit the same behaviour (short answers=’lack’).

arxiv.org/abs/2510.08506
October 14, 2025 at 12:43 AM
Hidden in Plain Sight by Stephanie Fu et al. [Outstanding paper award]:

VLMs are worse than vision-only models on vision-only tasks – LMs are biased and underutilize their (easily accessible) visual representations!

hidden-plain-sight.github.io
October 14, 2025 at 12:43 AM
UnveiLing by Mukund Choudhary* & KV Aditya Srivatsa* et al.:

Linguistic olympiad problems about certain linguistic features (e.g., morphological ones) are tougher for LMs, but morphological pre-tokenization helps!

arxiv.org/abs/2508.11260
October 14, 2025 at 12:43 AM
A Taxonomy of Transcendence by Natalie Abreu et al.:

LMs outperform the experts they are trained on through skill denoising (averaging out experts’ errors), skill selection (relying on the most appropriate expert), and skill generalization (combining experts’ knowledge).

arxiv.org/abs/2508.17669
October 14, 2025 at 12:43 AM
The Zero Body Problem by @rmmhicke.bsky.social et al.:

LMs use sensory language (olfactory, auditory, …) differently from people + evidence that RLHF may discourage sensory language.

arxiv.org/abs/2504.06393
October 14, 2025 at 12:43 AM
Readability ≠ Learnability by Ivan Lee & Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick:

Developmentally plausible LM training works not because of simpler language but because of lower n-gram diversity! Warning against anthropomorphizing / equating learning in LMs and in children.

openreview.net/pdf?id=AFMGb...
October 14, 2025 at 12:43 AM