working papers
TR Sumers*, S Kumar*, T Yamakoshi, KA Norman, U Hasson, TL Griffiths, RD Hawkins, SA Nastase (under review). Reconstructing the cascade of language processing in the brain using the internal structure of transformer-based language models.
AM Chen, A Palacci, N Vélez, RD Hawkins*, SJ Gershman* (under review). Learning to teach, teaching to learn.
[preprint]
A Leung, D Yurovsky, RD Hawkins (under review). Parents scaffold the formation of conversational pacts with their children.
an earlier iteration of this paper appeared in the Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.
2023
RD Hawkins, A Berdahl, AS Pentland, ND Goodman, JB Tenenbaum, PM Krafft (2023). Flexible social inference facilitates targeted social learning when rewards are not observable.
Nature Human Behavior.
an earlier iteration of this paper won the prize for computational modeling in applied cognition when it appeared in the Proceedings of the 37th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.
RD Hawkins, M Sano, ND Goodman, J Fan (2023). Visual resemblance and interaction history jointly constrain pictorial meaning.
Nature Communications.
an earlier iteration of this paper appeared in the Proceedings of the 41st Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.
[pdf]
TR Sumers, MK Ho, TL Griffiths, RD Hawkins (2023). Reconciling truthfulness and relevance as epistemic and decision-theoretic utility.
Psychological Review.
an earlier iteration of this paper appeared in the Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.
[preprint]
T Sumers, M Ho, RD Hawkins, TL Griffiths (2023). Show or tell? Teaching with language outperforms demonstration but only when context is shared.
Cognition.
[pdf]
RL Goldstone, E Andrade-Lotero, RD Hawkins, ME Roberts (2023). The emergence of specialized roles within groups.
Topics in Cognitive Science.
[pdf]
T Yamakoshi, JL McClelland, AE Goldberg, RD Hawkins (2023). Causal interventions expose implicit situation models for commonsense language understanding.
Findings of ACL.
R Eliav, A Ji, Y Artzi, RD Hawkins (2023). Semantic uncertainty guides the extension of conventions to new referents.
Proceedings of the 45th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.
[pdf]
[open materials]
P Tsvilodub, RD Hawkins, ND Goodman, M Franke (2023). Overinformative question answering by humans and machines.
Proceedings of the 45th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.
[pdf]
[open materials]
2022
RD Hawkins, M Franke, MC Frank, AE Goldberg, K Smith, TL Griffiths, ND Goodman (2022). From partners to populations: A hierarchical Bayesian account of coordination and convention.
Psychological Review.
This paper is partially based on earlier work that appeared in the Proceedings of the 39th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society and the Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, where it received the prize for computational modeling in language.
S Murthy, TL Griffiths, RD Hawkins (2022). Shades of confusion: Lexical uncertainty modulates ad hoc coordination in an interactive communication task.
Cognition.
SA Barnett, TL Griffiths, RD Hawkins (2022). A pragmatic account of the weak evidence effect.
Open Mind.
[pdf]
J White, ND Goodman, RD Hawkins (2022). Mixed-effects transformers for hierarchical adaptation.
EMNLP.
[preprint]
A Ji, N Kojima, N Rush, A Suhr, WK Vong, RD Hawkins, Y Artzi (2022). Abstract visual reasoning with tangram shapes.
EMNLP.
winner of EMNLP best long paper award
T Yamakoshi, TL Griffiths, RD Hawkins (2022). Probing BERT’s priors with serial reproduction chains.
Findings of ACL.
J Antony, A Romero, A Vierra, R Luenser, RD Hawkins, K Bennion. (2022). Semantic relatedness retroactively boosts memory and promotes memory interdependence across episodes.
eLife.
[pdf]
S Kumar, C Correa, I Dasgupta, R Marjieh, M Hu, RD Hawkins, J Cohen, N Daw, KR Narasimhan, TL Griffiths (2022). Using natural language and program abstractions to instill human inductive biases in machines.
NeurIPS.
winner of NeurIPS outstanding paper award
[pdf]
[open materials TBA]
TR Sumers, RD Hawkins, MK Ho, TL Griffiths, D Hadfield-Menell (2022). How to talk so your robot will learn: Instructions, descriptions, and pragmatics.
NeurIPS.
winner of best paper prize at 2022 NeurIPS Workshop on Language and Reinforcement Learning (LaReL)
[pdf]
V Boyce, RD Hawkins, ND Goodman, MC Frank (2022). Two’s company but six is a crowd: Emergence of conventions in multiparty communication games. Proceedings of the 44th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. [pdf] [open materials]
C Wong, W McCarthy, G Grand, Y Friedman, J Tenenbaum, J Andreas, RD Hawkins, JE Fan (2022). Identifying concept libraries from language about object structure. Proceedings of the 44th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. [pdf] [open materials]
2021
RD Hawkins, H Gweon, ND Goodman (2021). The division of labor in communication: Speakers help listeners account for asymmetries in visual perspective.
Cognitive Science.
This paper is partially based on earlier work that appeared in the Proceedings of the 38th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.
RD Hawkins, I Liu, AE Goldberg, TL Griffiths. (2021). Respect the code: Speakers expect novel conventions to generalize within but not across social group boundaries.
Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.
[pdf]
W McCarthy*, RD Hawkins*, C Holdaway, H Wang, J Fan (2021). Learning to communicate about shared procedural abstractions.
Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.
A Kumar, K Garg, RD Hawkins (2021). Contextual flexibility guides communication in a cooperative language game.
Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.
[pdf]
J White, G Poesia, RD Hawkins, D Sadigh, N Goodman (2021). Generating informative, open-domain clarification questions without question examples.
EMNLP.
[pdf]
T Sumers, M Ho, RD Hawkins, K Narasimhan, TL Griffiths (2021). Learning rewards from linguistic feedback.
AAAI.
[pdf]
2020
RD Hawkins, MC Frank, ND Goodman (2020). Characterizing the dynamics of learning in repeated reference games.
Cognitive Science.
[pdf]
RD Hawkins, M Kwon, D Sadigh, ND Goodman (2020). Continual adaptation for efficient machine communication.
CoNLL.
winner of best paper prize at 2019 ICML Workshop on Adaptive & Multitask Learning: Algorithms & Systems (AMTL)
RD Hawkins*, T Yamakoshi*, TL Griffiths, AE Goldberg (2020). Investigating representations of verb bias in neural language models.
EMNLP.
J Degen, RD Hawkins, C Graf, E Kreiss, ND Goodman (2020). When redundancy is useful: A Bayesian approach to ‘overinformative’ referring expressions.
Psychological Review.
partly based on earlier work appearing in the Proceedings of the 38th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.
[pdf]
JE Fan, RD Hawkins, M Wu, ND Goodman (2020). Pragmatic inference and visual abstraction enable contextual flexibility during visual communication.
Computational Brain & Behavior.
[pdf]
2019
RD Hawkins, ND Goodman, RL Goldstone (2019). The emergence of social norms and conventions.
Trends in Cognitive Sciences.
[pdf]
P Achlioptas, JE Fan, RD Hawkins, ND Goodman, L Guibas (2019). ShapeGlot: Learning language for shape differentiation.
ICCV.
K Mukherjee, RD Hawkins, JE Fan (2019). Communicating semantic part information in drawings. Proceedings of the 41st Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. [pdf] [open materials]
2018
RD Hawkins*, EN Smith*, C Au, JM Arias, R Catapano, E Hermann, M Keil, A Lampinen, S Raposo, J Reynolds, S Salehi, J Salloum, J Tan, MC Frank (2018). Improving the replicability of psychological science through pedagogy.
Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science.
[pdf]
RD Hawkins, M Franke, K Smith, ND Goodman (2018). Emerging abstractions: Lexical conventions are shaped by communicative context.
Proceedings of the 40th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.
[pdf]
2017
W Monroe, RD Hawkins, ND Goodman, C Potts (2017). Colors in context: A pragmatic neural model for grounded language understanding.
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics.
A Avena-Koenigsberger, B Misic, RD Hawkins, A Griffa, P Hagmann, J Goñi, O Sporns (2017). Path ensembles and a tradeoff between communication efficiency and resilience in the human connectome.
Brain Structure and Function.
[pdf]
2016
RD Hawkins, RL Goldstone (2016). The formation of social conventions in real-time environments.
PLoS ONE.
[pdf]
RD Hawkins, JW Houpt, A Eidels, JT Townsend (2016). Can two dots form a Gestalt? Measuring emergent features with the capacity coefficient.
Vision Research.
[pdf]
NH Silbert, RD Hawkins (2016). A tutorial on general recognition theory.
Journal of Mathematical Psychology.
2015
RD Hawkins (2015). Conducting real-time multiplayer experiments on the web.
Behavior Research Methods.
RD Hawkins, A Stuhlmüller, J Degen, ND Goodman. (2015) Why do you ask? Good questions provoke informative answers.
Proceedings of the 37th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.
an extended version of this manuscript is available as a technical report (with open materials)
[pdf]
A Stuhlmüller, RD Hawkins, N Siddharth, ND Goodman. (2015). Coarse-to-fine sequential Monte Carlo for probabilistic programs. Technical report: arXiv:1509.02962. [pdf]
D Algom, A Eidels, RD Hawkins, B Jefferson, JT Townsend. (2015). Features of response times: Identification of cognitive mechanisms through mathematical modeling. In The Oxford Handbook of Computational and Mathematical Psychology, Oxford University Press. [pdf]
S DeDeo, RD Hawkins, S Klingenstein, T Hitchcock (2013). Bootstrap methods for the empirical study of decision-making and information flows in social systems. Entropy. [pdf] [python package]
Robert Hawkins 