Max Kleiman-Weiner

Excited by our new work on AI contracting! Now that we each have our own agents, they need to be able to find mutual benefit with each other and honor their agreements. This is a promising route to supercooperators!

We won best paper at the COLM Workshop on Agent Behavior for our paper: AI Assistants Overassist! Congratulations @veronateo.bsky.social, Raghav Jain and @tobigerstenberg.bsky.social! Check out the preprint arxiv.org/abs/2607.21306

Everyone is excited about recursive *self* improvement (RSI) but human progress is social and driven by cumulative culture. Individuals stand on the shoulders of past giants. Our new paper tests whether LLM swarms benefit from an alternative RSI: recursive *social* improvement.

Our newest work unifying game theoretic ideas about the evolution of cooperation with the emergence of computation itself. Self-replicating programs first emerge through random mutation and then spread by cooperating.

New lab preprint! AI assistants are myopically helpful. Unlike caregivers that want to empower people and grow their long term autonomy, AI assistants interrupt independent thinking and jump right to the answer.

Just arrived in Rio for #CogSci2026! I'll be at the Cognitive Science of AI Alignment workshop on Wednesay afternoon to talk about "Machines That Care Like Us"

Excited about our new work measuring multi-turn persuasion in AI-human interactions and how to simulate human persuadability!

LLMs can shift people's beliefs. But most persuasion studies only check beliefs before and after a conversation. We built PersuasionTrace to measure beliefs turn by turn, so we can study how belief updates actually unfold.

Task diversity is supposedly key to generalization in RL. But what does it do to continual RL, where agents face one new task distribution after another? We find that past a point, more diversity actually inhibits continual reinforcement learning 🧵

Really excited to have the opportunity to give a talk on this work @cogscisociety.bsky.social !!! last year was a blast can’t wait to go back to Rio in July 🇧🇷 HUGE thanks to my collaborators for the support @aydanhuang265.bsky.social @EricYe29011995 @natashajaques.bsky.social @maxkw.bsky.social 🙏

Our new short piece in TiCS on intuitive theories of truth: how people judge whether statements could be true, whether statements are true, and whether to assert them as true. A great collab with @keremoktar.bsky.social @ihandleyminer.bsky.social @kevinzollman.com @lianeleeyoung.bsky.social

Can't wait to present this work @iclr-conf.bsky.social this year!!! Looking forward to hearing everyone's thoughts on the paper and learning more about peoples' research! Thanks again to my collaborators for all of their help on this project!

🤔💭What even is reasoning? It's time to answer the hard questions! We built the first unified taxonomy of 28 cognitive elements underlying reasoning Spoiler—LLMs commonly employ sequential reasoning, rarely self-awareness, and often fail to use correct reasoning structures🧠

Forget modeling every belief and goal! What if we represented people as following simple scripts instead (i.e "cross the crosswalk")? Our new paper shows AI which models others’ minds as Python code 💻 can quickly and accurately predict human behavior! shorturl.at/siUYI%F0%9F%...

Claire's new work showing that when an assistant aims to optimize another's empowerment, it can lead to others being disempowered (both as a side effect and as an intentional outcome)!

Still catching up on my notes after my first #cogsci2025, but I'm so grateful for all the conversations and new friends and connections! I presented my poster "When Empowerment Disempowers" -- if we didn't get the chance to chat or you would like to chat more, please reach out!

lol this may be the most cogsci cogsci slide I've ever seen, from @maxkw.bsky.social "before I got married I had six theories about raising children, now I have six kids and no theories"......but here's another theory #cogsci2025

As always, CogSci has a fantastic lineup of workshops this year. An embarrassment of riches! Still deciding which to pick? If you are interested in building computational models of social cognition, I hope you consider joining @maxkw.bsky.social, @dae.bsky.social, and me for a crash course on memo!

Very excited for this workshop!

#Workshop at #CogSci2025 Building computational models of social cognition in memo 🗓️ Wednesday, July 30 📍 Pacifica I - 8:30-10:00 🗣️ Kartik Chandra, Sean Dae Houlihan, and Max Kleiman-Weiner 🧑‍💻 underline.io/events/489/s...

'Cross-environment Cooperation Enables Zero-shot Multi-agent Coordination' @kjha02.bsky.social · Wilka Carvalho · Yancheng Liang · Simon Du · @maxkw.bsky.social · @natashajaques.bsky.social doi.org/10.48550/arX... (3/20)

Settling in for my flight and apparently A.I. DOOM is now a movie genre between Harry Potter and Classics. Nothing better than an existential crisis with pretzels and a ginger ale.

Thanks to the Diverse Intelligence Community for all these inspiring days & impressions in Sydney 🙏🏻 @chriskrupenye.bsky.social @katelaskowski.bsky.social @divintelligence.bsky.social @maxkw.bsky.social

Excited to speak about some new work on Bayesian Cooperation at this workshop! Join us virtually

Now out in JPSP ‼️ "Inference from social evaluation" with Zach Davis, Kelsey Allen, @maxkw.bsky.social, and @julianje.bsky.social 📃 (paper): psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-... 📜 (preprint): osf.io/preprints/ps...

Our new paper (first one of my PhD!) on cooperative AI reveals a surprising insight: Environment Diversity > Partner Diversity. Agents trained in self-play across many environments learn cooperative norms that transfer to humans on novel tasks. shorturl.at/fqsNN%F0%9F%...

Awesome new work from my lab led by @kjha02.bsky.social scaling cooperative AI! True cooperation requires adapting to both unfamiliar partners and novel environments. Agents trained with CEC get us closer to agents that can act with general cooperative principles rather than memorized strategies.

How AlphaGo like architectures can explain human insight. Out now in Cognition!

my paper with max, @maxkw.bsky.social, tuomas, and @fierycushman.bsky.social out in cognition at long last www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... We explain why humans and successful AI planners both fail on a certain kind of problem that we might describe as requiring insight or creativity

Accepted as a Spotlight in ICLR2025!

Emergent transition from code to natural language for reasoning tasks when RL tuning a language model for math. Interesting to consider implications for "Language of Thought" style theories in cognition. hkust-nlp.notion.site/simplerl-rea...