Generic statements like "tigers are striped" and "cars have radios" communicate information that is, in general, true. However, while the first statement is true in principle, the second is true only statistically. People are exquisitely sensitive to this principled-vs-statistical distinction. It has been argued that this ability to distinguish between something being true by virtue of it being a category member versus being true because of mere statistical regularity, is a general property of people's conceptual machinery and cannot itself be learned. We investigate whether the distinction between principled and statistical properties can be learned from language itself. If so, it raises the possibility that language experience can bootstrap core conceptual distinctions and that it is possible to learn sophisticated causal models directly from language. We find that language models are all sensitive to statistical prevalence, but struggle with representing the principled-vs-statistical distinction controlling for prevalence. Until GPT-4, which succeeds.
Test-time scaling through iterative self-evolution with environment feedback, as demonstrated by AlphaEvolve, shows remarkable performance gains. We hypothesize that the success of such evolution frameworks hinges on meta-skills, such as self-reflection with environment feedback,…
Chain-of-thought prompting improves language-model reasoning by carrying intermediate states across successive computation steps. However, relying on natural language as the only recurrent interface is overly restrictive, since many transient computations do not need to be fully…
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as tutors and thought partners, helping users reason through problems. While guidance from AI assistants can scaffold thinking and foster learning, such benefits depend on how they help--for instance, intervening too early or too…
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are emerging as core reasoning modules for embodied agents, yet it remains unclear how well general-purpose models can solve long-horizon embodied tasks from a single high-level instruction. We introduce MissionBench, a benchmark for missi…
We propose a Reinforcement Learning (RL) method to directly optimize the faithfulness of self-explanations - the extent to which a model's generated reasoning accurately reflects its internal decision-making process. While existing work focuses on evaluating faithfulness or using…
The rapid progress of AI has intensified the long-standing pursuit of automation: replacing human participation with algorithms wherever possible. Implicit in this pursuit is the assumption that humans remain in the loop only because current AI systems are not yet sufficiently ca…