Surabhi S. Nath

Surabhi S. Nath, Peter Dayan, Claire Stevenson

Large language models appear quite creative, often performing on par with the average human on creative tasks. However, research on LLM creativity has focused solely on \textit{products}, with little attention on the creative \textit{process}. Process analyses of human creativity often require hand-coded categories or exploit response times, which do not apply to LLMs. We provide an automated method to characterise how humans and LLMs explore semantic spaces on the Alternate Uses Task, and contrast with behaviour in a Verbal Fluency Task. We use sentence embeddings to identify response categories and compute semantic similarities, which we use to generate jump profiles. Our results corroborate earlier work in humans reporting both persistent (deep search in few semantic spaces) and flexible (broad search across multiple semantic spaces) pathways to creativity, where both pathways lead to similar creativity scores. LLMs were found to be biased towards either persistent or flexible paths, that varied across tasks. Though LLMs as a population match human profiles, their relationship with creativity is different, where the more flexible models score higher on creativity. Our dataset and scripts are available on \href{https://github.com/surabhisnath/Creative_Process}{GitHub}.

Vishaal Udandarao, Shyamgopal Karthik, Surabhi S. Nath et al.

Cambrian-S aims to take the first steps towards improving video world models with spatial supersensing by introducing (i) two benchmarks, VSI-Super-Recall (VSR) and VSI-Super-Counting (VSC), and (ii) bespoke predictive sensing inference strategies tailored to each benchmark. In this work, we conduct a critical analysis of Cambrian-S across both these fronts. First, we introduce a simple baseline, NoSense, which discards almost all temporal structure and uses only a bag-of-words SigLIP model, yet near-perfectly solves VSR, achieving 95% accuracy even on 4-hour videos. This shows benchmarks like VSR can be nearly solved without spatial cognition, world modeling or spatial supersensing. Second, we hypothesize that the tailored inference methods proposed by Cambrian-S likely exploit shortcut heuristics in the benchmark. We illustrate this with a simple sanity check on the VSC benchmark, called VSC-Repeat: We concatenate each video with itself 1-5 times, which does not change the number of unique objects. However, this simple perturbation entirely collapses the mean relative accuracy of Cambrian-S from 42% to 0%. A system that performs spatial supersensing and integrates information across experiences should recognize views of the same scene and keep object-count predictions unchanged; instead, Cambrian-S inference algorithm relies largely on a shortcut in the VSC benchmark that rooms are never revisited. Taken together, our findings suggest that (i) current VSI-Super benchmarks do not yet reliably measure spatial supersensing, and (ii) predictive-sensing inference recipes used by Cambrian-S improve performance by inadvertently exploiting shortcuts rather than from robust spatial supersensing. We include the response from the Cambrian-S authors (in Appendix A) to provide a balanced perspective alongside our claims. We release our code at: https://github.com/bethgelab/supersanity

Marcel Binz, Elif Akata, Abdullah Almaatouq et al.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as surrogates for human participants, but it remains unclear which models best capture human behavior and why. To address this, we introduce Psych-201, a novel dataset that enables us to measure behavioral alignment at scale. We find that post-training -- the stage that turns base models into useful assistants -- consistently reduces alignment with human behavior across model families, sizes, and objectives. Moreover, this misalignment widens in newer model generations even as base models continue to improve. Finally, we find that persona-induction -- a popular technique for eliciting human-like behavior by conditioning models on participant-specific information -- does not improve predictions at the level of individuals. Taken together, our results suggest that the very processes that are currently employed to turn LLMs into useful assistants also make them less accurate models of human behavior.

Marcel Binz, Elif Akata, Matthias Bethge et al. · princeton

Establishing a unified theory of cognition has been a major goal of psychology. While there have been previous attempts to instantiate such theories by building computational models, we currently do not have one model that captures the human mind in its entirety. A first step in this direction is to create a model that can predict human behavior in a wide range of settings. Here we introduce Centaur, a computational model that can predict and simulate human behavior in any experiment expressible in natural language. We derived Centaur by finetuning a state-of-the-art language model on a novel, large-scale data set called Psych-101. Psych-101 reaches an unprecedented scale, covering trial-by-trial data from over 60,000 participants performing over 10,000,000 choices in 160 experiments. Centaur not only captures the behavior of held-out participants better than existing cognitive models, but also generalizes to new cover stories, structural task modifications, and entirely new domains. Furthermore, we find that the model's internal representations become more aligned with human neural activity after finetuning. Taken together, our results demonstrate that it is possible to discover computational models that capture human behavior across a wide range of domains. We believe that such models provide tremendous potential for guiding the development of cognitive theories and present a case study to demonstrate this.

Surabhi S. Nath, Vishaal Udandarao, Jainendra Shukla

In recent years, great strides have been made in the field of affective computing. Several models have been developed to represent and quantify emotions. Two popular ones include (i) categorical models which represent emotions as discrete labels, and (ii) dimensional models which represent emotions in a Valence-Arousal (VA) circumplex domain. However, there is no standard for annotation mapping between the two labelling methods. We build a novel algorithm for mapping categorical and dimensional model labels using annotation transfer across affective facial image datasets. Further, we utilize the transferred annotations to learn rich and interpretable data representations using a variational autoencoder (VAE). We present "LeVAsa", a VAE model that learns implicit structure by aligning the latent space with the VA space. We evaluate the efficacy of LeVAsa by comparing performance with the Vanilla VAE using quantitative and qualitative analysis on two benchmark affective image datasets. Our results reveal that LeVAsa achieves high latent-circumplex alignment which leads to improved downstream categorical emotion prediction. The work also demonstrates the trade-off between degree of alignment and quality of reconstructions.