Ryan Truong

Lance Ying, Ryan Truong, Prafull Sharma et al.

Rigorously evaluating machine intelligence against the broad spectrum of human general intelligence has become increasingly important and challenging in this era of rapid technological advance. Conventional AI benchmarks typically assess only narrow capabilities in a limited range of human activity. Most are also static, quickly saturating as developers explicitly or implicitly optimize for them. We propose that a more promising way to evaluate human-like general intelligence in AI systems is through a particularly strong form of general game playing: studying how and how well they play and learn to play \textbf{all conceivable human games}, in comparison to human players with the same level of experience, time, or other resources. We define a "human game" to be a game designed by humans for humans, and argue for the evaluative suitability of this space of all such games people can imagine and enjoy -- the "Multiverse of Human Games". Taking a first step towards this vision, we introduce the AI GameStore, a scalable and open-ended platform that uses LLMs with humans-in-the-loop to synthesize new representative human games, by automatically sourcing and adapting standardized and containerized variants of game environments from popular human digital gaming platforms. As a proof of concept, we generated 100 such games based on the top charts of Apple App Store and Steam, and evaluated seven frontier vision-language models (VLMs) on short episodes of play. The best models achieved less than 10\% of the human average score on the majority of the games, and especially struggled with games that challenge world-model learning, memory and planning. We conclude with a set of next steps for building out the AI GameStore as a practical way to measure and drive progress toward human-like general intelligence in machines.

Lance Ying, Ryan Truong, Katherine M. Collins et al. · mit

Drawing real world social inferences usually requires taking into account information from multiple modalities. Language is a particularly powerful source of information in social settings, especially in novel situations where language can provide both abstract information about the environment dynamics and concrete specifics about an agent that cannot be easily visually observed. In this paper, we propose Language-Informed Rational Agent Synthesis (LIRAS), a framework for drawing context-specific social inferences that integrate linguistic and visual inputs. LIRAS frames multimodal social reasoning as a process of constructing structured but situation-specific agent and environment representations - leveraging multimodal language models to parse language and visual inputs into unified symbolic representations, over which a Bayesian inverse planning engine can be run to produce granular probabilistic judgments. On a range of existing and new social reasoning tasks derived from cognitive science experiments, we find that our model (instantiated with a comparatively lightweight VLM) outperforms ablations and state-of-the-art models in capturing human judgments across all domains.

Lance Ying, Almog Hillel, Ryan Truong et al. · mit

A key feature of human theory-of-mind is the ability to attribute beliefs to other agents as mentalistic explanations for their behavior. But given the wide variety of beliefs that agents may hold about the world and the rich language we can use to express them, which specific beliefs are people inclined to attribute to others? In this paper, we investigate the hypothesis that people prefer to attribute beliefs that are good explanations for the behavior they observe. We develop a computational model that quantifies the explanatory strength of a (natural language) statement about an agent's beliefs via three factors: accuracy, informativity, and causal relevance to actions, each of which can be computed from a probabilistic generative model of belief-driven behavior. Using this model, we study the role of each factor in how people selectively attribute beliefs to other agents. We investigate this via an experiment where participants watch an agent collect keys hidden in boxes in order to reach a goal, then rank a set of statements describing the agent's beliefs about the boxes' contents. We find that accuracy and informativity perform reasonably well at predicting these rankings when combined, but that causal relevance is the single factor that best explains participants' responses.