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Raja Marjieh

8 accepted papers

2026

Bound by semanticity: universal laws governing the generalization-identification tradeoff

ICLR 2026poster

Intelligent systems must form internal representations that support both broad generalization and precise identification. Here, we show that these two goals are fundamentally in tension with one another. We derive closed-form expressions proving that any model whose representations have a finite s…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

Characterizing Similarities and Divergences in Conversational Tones in Humans and LLMs by Sampling with People

ACL 2024long

Conversational tones — the manners and attitudes in which speakers communicate — are essential to effective communication. As Large Language Models (LLMs) become increasingly popular, it is necessary to characterize the divergences in their conversational tones relative to humans. Prior research rel…

2024

MacGyver: Are Large Language Models Creative Problem Solvers?

NAACL 2024long

We explore the creative problem-solving capabilities of modern LLMs in a novel constrained setting. To this end, we create MACGYVER, an automatically generated dataset consisting of over 1,600 real-world problems deliberately designed to trigger innovative usage of objects and necessitate out-of-the…

2023

Analyzing Diffusion as Serial Reproduction

ICML 2023poster

Diffusion models are a class of generative models that learn to synthesize samples by inverting a diffusion process that gradually maps data into noise. While these models have enjoyed great success recently, a full theoretical understanding of their observed properties is still lacking, in particul…

Cited by 3SourcePDFScholar
2023

On the informativeness of supervision signals

UAI 2023poster

Supervised learning typically focuses on learning transferable representations from training examples annotated by humans. While rich annotations (like soft labels) carry more information than sparse annotations (like hard labels), they are also more expensive to collect. For example, while hard lab…

Cited by 17SourcePDFScholar
2023

Words are all you need? Language as an approximation for human similarity judgments

ICLR 2023poster

Human similarity judgments are a powerful supervision signal for machine learning applications based on techniques such as contrastive learning, information retrieval, and model alignment, but classical methods for collecting human similarity judgments are too expensive to be used at scale. Recent m…

Cited by 21SourcePDFScholar
2022

Using natural language and program abstractions to instill human inductive biases in machines

NeurIPS 2022accept

Strong inductive biases give humans the ability to quickly learn to perform a variety of tasks. Although meta-learning is a method to endow neural networks with useful inductive biases, agents trained by meta-learning may sometimes acquire very different strategies from humans. We show that co-train…

2020

Gibbs Sampling with People

NeurIPS 2020oral

A core problem in cognitive science and machine learning is to understand how humans derive semantic representations from perceptual objects, such as color from an apple, pleasantness from a musical chord, or seriousness from a face. Markov Chain Monte Carlo with People (MCMCP) is a prominent method…

Cited by 97SourcePDFScholar