We're delighted to announce that Prof. Tali Sharot (UCL Psych & Lang Sci, affective.brain) has been awarded £3.5m as part of Wellcome Discovery Award scheme to investigate the 'joy of thinking’. buff.ly/V3oCDFR

Throughout the history of psychology, we have sought evidence of sophisticated cognitive capacities in non-human systems, including vertebrates 🐒 , insects 🐝 , cephalopods 🐙 , plants 🪴 , and bacteria 🦠

🔬 Teaching AI to Understand Health: How #FoundationModels are Reshaping Biomedical Research At #HelmholtzMunich, researchers are developing and using large-scale AI to drive innovations in diagnostics, personalized medicine, and healthcare decision-making. 🧬 Prof. Fabian

1/ 🚨 Updated preprint: “Generating Computational Cognitive Models using Large Language Models” 👥 Co-led by Milena Rmus with Marvin Mathony, Tobias Ludwig & Helmholtz Institute for Human-Centered AI 📄 Check full paper here: arxiv.org/abs/2502.00879

AI Meets Game Theory: New study reveals that while today’s AI is smart, it still has much to learn about social intelligence. Read more:🔗 t1p.de/ifuyh #AI #GPT4 #GameTheory #SocialAI

A new study by @helmholtz_munich, @MPI_Kyb & Universität Tübingen shows GPT-4 excels in logic—but struggles with trust & teamwork. 🧠 Using a technique called Social Chain-of-Thought, researchers made it better at human-like interaction. #AI #GPT4 #SocialAI #GameTheory #TrustInAI

Excited to say our paper got accepted to ICML! We added new findings including this: models fine-tuned on a visual counterfactual reasoning task do not generalize to the underlying factual physical reasoning task, even with test images matched to the fine-tuning data set.

Centaur – An AI That Thinks Like Us 🧠 Researchers at #HelmholtzMunich have developed an artificial intelligence model that simulates human decision-making with remarkable precision. 👉 t1p.de/4kjoy 🤖 The language model – called Centaur – was trained on over ten

Excited to see our Centaur project out in nature. TL;DR: Centaur is a computational model that predicts and simulates human behavior for any experiment described in natural language.

An AI model (Llama 3.1 70B) fine-tuned on the results of 60,000 people in psychology experiments shows some real promise in using LLMs for studying human behavior. It predicts actual human behavior in held-out data & it generalizes to out-of-distribution tasks and experiments.

We are seeking two independent Max Planck Research Groups working in scientific disciplines relevant to our institute. Applications should be sent in PDF format no later than 15th August 2025. Visit our call for applications on our institute website for detailed information!

BREAKING: The first foundation model of cognition just dropped. It’s called Centaur, and it mirrors human behavior across 160+ psychology tasks. Here's everything you need to know:

I recently defended my PhD thesis studying chunking in cognition and machine learning, working with Eric Schulz and Peter Dayan. Helmholtz Institute for Human-Centered AI Here is a summary of my studies during the years in Tuebingen.

The Center for Brains, Minds & Machines [2013-2025]

It is an honor to receive the ZukunftsWissen Award from the German National Academy of the Sciences & Commerzbankstiftung 😊🎉🙏

🎊 Zeynep Akata wird mit dem den „ZukunftsWissen“-Preis von Leopoldina und Commerzbank-Stiftung ausgezeichnet. Geehrt wird die Informatikerin TU München Helmholtz Munich | @HelmholtzMunich für ihre wissenschaftlichen Leistungen auf dem Gebiet der erklärbaren #KI.

Induction heads are surprisingly powerful. In a new preprint, we find that they can learn what to attend to in-context! We study this in a hierarchical prediction task and uncover a possible mechanism giving rise to in-context learning in induction heads. See thread for details!

New paper from my Meta internship! 🚀 We explored dual-architecture communication for latent reasoning in LLMs ☯️ —accepted at the #NeurIPS2025 Foundations of Reasoning in LLMs workshop. Paper: arxiv.org/pdf/2510.00494 1/9 🧵

🎓PhD application season Explainable Machine Learning is back! This year, we’re hiring ONLY through the ELLIS Program and the MCML Program: two fantastic communities shaping the future of AI and ML. 📌Please don’t forget to denote Prof. Dr. Zeynep Akata as one of your preferred supervisors!