Kempner Institute at Harvard University

Three Kempner Undergraduates Awarded 2026 Rhodes Scholarships - Kempner Institute Cambridge, MA—Three Kempner community members have been awarded prestigious Rhodes Scholarships for 2026 in recognition of their academic excellence, personal characteristics, and leadership. The scho...

🎉Huge congratulations to #KempnerInstitute community members Jay Chooi, @emmafinn314.bsky.social, and Helen He on being named 2026 Rhodes Scholars!
We're so proud to see their talent and leadership recognized on the world stage.🌍🎓
Read more➡️ bit.ly/4r9Mcnn
#RhodesScholar

🚀Congratulations to #KempnerInstitute Investigator SueYeon Chung (@sueyeonchung.bsky.social)!
Honored as one of @thetransmitter.bsky.social’s Rising Stars of Neuroscience 2025 for her outstanding achievements in the field.🌟
🔗 bit.ly/4i8uX1J
#AI #NeuroAI #Neuroscience

YouTube video by Kempner Institute at Harvard University Trustworthy AI in Context with Kamalika Chaudhuri

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

With authors @thomasfel.bsky.social, @binxuwang.bsky.social , @michael-lepori.bsky.social, @matthewkowal.bsky.social, @ayjl.bsky.social, Randall Balestriero, Sonia Joseph, @ekdeepl.bsky.social, @taliakonkle.bsky.social, Demba Ba, @wattenberg.bsky.social.

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 […]

🐇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

Thanks to all participants and special thanks to workshop leader @ellabatty.bsky.social, and facilitators Wen Guan Gavin Chen, Mohammad Zaid Moonsamy, Rayhaan Hanslod, @ushabhalla.bsky.social, @cogscikid.bsky.social, Nikhil Anand, @andykeller.bsky.social, and Devon Jarvis!

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.

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...

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

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 […]

🧠💻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

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...

🧠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

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...

💡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

YouTube video by Kempner Institute at Harvard University LLM Skills and Metacognition: Scaffolding for New Forms of Learning? with Sanjeev Arora

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

YouTube video by Kempner Institute at Harvard University Predictive Coding with Cortical Cell Types and Connectivity with Hannah Choi

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

#DeeperLearning blog by Mujin Kwun, Nikhil Anand, and Depen Morwani.

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...

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

YouTube video by Kempner Institute at Harvard University Seeing Social Interactions with Leyla Isik

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

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, […]

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

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 [...

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

Research from
@soniakmurthy.bsky.social, @rosieyzh.bsky.social, @jennhu.bsky.social, @shamkakade.bsky.social, @mwulfmeier.bsky.social, @pqian.bsky.social, and @tomerullman.bsky.social

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 […]

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

YouTube video by Kempner Institute at Harvard University Back to the Future – Data Efficient Language Modeling with Tatsunori Hashimoto

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

YouTube video by Kempner Institute at Harvard University Mental Programs in Humans and Machines with Kevin Ellis

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

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.

⌛️ 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

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

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...

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

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...

(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

@robinjia.bsky.social
speaking at
@kempnerinstitute.bsky.social
on Auditing, Dissecting, and Evaluating LLMs

YouTube video by Kempner Institute at Harvard University Developing Intelligence: Insights from Spatial and Social Cognition with Moira Dillon

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

With collaborators: Andrew Lampinen, Sam Hall-McMaster, Honglak Lee, @gershbrain.bsky.social, Vikram Goddla, Ishaan Sinha, Hoon Shin, Kunal Jha