Sonia Murthy

cs phd student @harvard · prev @allen_ai, @cocosci_lab, undergrad @princeton · she/her

[Sonia Murthy @soniakmurthy]

Excited to be presenting our work on using cognitive models to interpret pluralistic values in LLMs once again as a spotlight talk 🌟 at the NeurIPS CogInterp workshop!

Come by upper level room 5AB today and check out the paper here: https://t.co/feDaH3RvKY

[CogInterp Workshop @ NeurIPS 2025 @CogInterp]

The spotlight talks will cover all aspects of interpreting cognition in deep learning models: from behavior to algorithms to representations! Also check out the list of poster presentations at https://t.co/P3t6R1A3on

(3/3)

[Sonia Murthy @soniakmurthy]

@SaleemaAmershi @adamfourney @ASwearngin77874 @bansalg_ @HsseinMzannar @HuaWenyue31539 @w_epperson @ZacharyHuang12 @MayaMurad0 @ecekamar @HosnRafa hi all! I'll be at neurips and would love to learn more about the phd internships on your team, especially any projects in human-AI interaction and safety. my dms should be open 🙂

[Sonia Murthy @soniakmurthy]

bruce is great at making research resources and this one has been a huge help for my human studies in the stream! check it out ✨

[Bruce W. Lee @BruceWLee2]

New AI Control Toolkit - Mini Control Arena

For the past few months, we have been doing research with our custom AI Control evaluation library, Mini Control Arena.

Mini Control Arena is a ground-up rewrite of UK AISI Control Arena for a much simpler code structure.

We are open-sourcing the codebase and hope it helps with your experiments, too!

https://t.co/JpetVLvUg4

[Tomek Korbak @tomekkorbak]

My rockstar MATS mentee @BruceWLee2 has just open-sourced his sleek and elegant codebase for AI control research, ppl should give it a try!

[Sonia Murthy @soniakmurthy]

@sarahcat21 Hi Sarah! I just gave a talk today where I proposed versions of each of these directions, so was really surprised to see this pop up on my feed - I’ll be at NeurIPS and would love to chat!

[Sonia Murthy @soniakmurthy]

@aurielws @NeurIPSConf I’d love to join!

[Eric Bigelow @EricBigelow]

📝 New paper! Two strategies have emerged for controlling LLM behavior at inference time: in-context learning (ICL; i.e. prompting) and activation steering. We propose that both can be understood as altering model beliefs, formally in the sense of Bayesian belief updating.

1/9

[Kushin Mukherjee @kushin_m]

Zach did a stellar job on our new paper looking at what recipes make for language models that are representationally aligned with humans! Read his tweetprint and recruit him for grad school!

[Sonia Murthy @soniakmurthy]

@ZachStuddiford @siddsuresh97 @kushin_m hi this is cool work! I might be biased because I worked on something that has a very similar spirit https://t.co/feDaH3QXVq, but was excited to see y'all support the motivations and importance we saw around this kind of LLM analysis 😀

[Sonia Murthy @soniakmurthy]

@kiran_tomlinson hey Kiran! couldn’t message you but I’d love to learn more about these openings/projects if you have some time to chat this week? 🙂

[Sonia Murthy @soniakmurthy]

Thanks to my lovely collaborators @rosieyzh, @_jennhu, @ShamKakade6, @m_wulfmeier, Peng Qian, and @TomerUllman and the Kempner Institute! 🧠
[end]

[Sonia Murthy @soniakmurthy]

Excited to present our new paper as a spotlight talk 🌟 at the Pragmatic Reasoning in LMs workshop at #COLM2025 this Friday! 🍁

Come by room 520B @ 11:30am tomorrow to learn more about how LLMs' pluralistic values evolve over reasoning budgets and alignment 🧵

[Sonia Murthy @soniakmurthy]

We also trace the evolution of value trade-offs during alignment by evaluating model checkpoints for 8 unique base model x feedback dataset x alignment algorithm.

We see the largest shifts in values early on in training, with strongest effects of base model choice.

[Apoorv Khandelwal @apoorvkh]

In our new paper, we ask whether language models solve compositional tasks using compositional mechanisms. 🧵

[Sonia Murthy @soniakmurthy]

Presenting this today (5/1) at the 4pm poster session (Hall 3) at #NAACL2025!

Come chat about alignment, personalization, and all things cognitive science 🐟

[Sonia Murthy @soniakmurthy]

(1/9) Excited to share my recent work on "Alignment reduces LM's conceptual diversity" with @TomerUllman and @jennhu, to appear at #NAACL2025! 🐟

We want models that match our values...but could this hurt their diversity of thought?
Preprint: https://t.co/C4icfhCDGz

[Kempner Institute at Harvard University @KempnerInst]

NEW blog post: Do modern #LLMs capture the conceptual diversity of human populations? #KempnerInstitute researchers find #alignment reduces conceptual diversity of language models. Read more: https://t.co/CbzUj5dIkF

@soniakmurthy @tomerullman @_jennhu

[Sonia Murthy @soniakmurthy]

Many thanks to my collaborators and @KempnerInst for helping make this idea come to life!🌱

[Sonia Murthy @soniakmurthy]

(1/9) Excited to share my recent work on "Alignment reduces LM's conceptual diversity" with @TomerUllman and @jennhu, to appear at #NAACL2025! 🐟

We want models that match our values...but could this hurt their diversity of thought?
Preprint: https://t.co/C4icfhCDGz

[Sonia Murthy @soniakmurthy]

(9/9) Code and data for our experiments can be found at: https://t.co/CSicsUKs64
Preprint: https://t.co/C4icfhCDGz

Also, check out our feature in the @KempnerInst Deeper Learning Blog! https://t.co/kHScIMxsDn