activity
20232026
most citedOverinformative Question Answering by Humans and Machines

3 citations · 3 across the 15 of their papers we have counts for

collaborators

16 papers

cs.CL2026

Bayesian Fine-tuning Yields Language Models that are as Bayesian as their Beliefs Allow

Polina Tsvilodub, Andreas Waldis, Linlu Qiu +2

Language models (LMs) are increasingly used for tasks that require reasoning about hidden variables from a few observations, for which Bayesian inference is the normatively correct…

cs.AI2026

CogGym: Towards Large-Scale Comparative Evaluation of Human and Machine Cognition

Lance Ying, Jinzhou Wu, Yingshan Susan Wang +53

Understanding and modeling human intelligence are parallel goals shared by artificial intelligence (AI) and cognitive science. As AI systems grow increasingly capable, in what ways…

cs.CL2026

Confirming Our Biases? Evaluating the Capabilities, Risks, and Societal Impact of Large Language Models

Mudar Adas, Polina Tsvilodub, Michael Franke +1

It is well established that large language models (LLMs) are sensitive to prompt framing, reflecting patterns in their training data or prior prompts. In this study, we investigate…

cs.CL2026

Rewarding Efficient Reasoning Improves Abstention on Underspecified Tasks in Reasoning Models

Polina Tsvilodub, Max Höth, Michael Franke +2

While modern large reasoning models (LRMs) excel at providing correct answers in many tasks, we provide additional evidence that they often struggle with a critical capability: kno…

cs.CL2026

Computational models of pragmatic reasoning with flexible generation of meaning and expression alternatives

Polina Tsvilodub, Fausto Carcassi, Michael Franke

Pragmatic language use requires reasoning about alternatives: the alternative expressions a speaker might have chosen, or the alternative interpretations a listener might entertain…

cs.CL2026

Post-training makes large language models less human-like

Marcel Binz, Elif Akata, Abdullah Almaatouq +76

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as surrogates for human participants, but it remains unclear which models best capture human behavior and why. To address this, w…

cs.CL2026

On Emergent Social World Models -- Evidence for Functional Integration of Theory of Mind and Pragmatic Reasoning in Language Models

Polina Tsvilodub, Jan-Felix Klumpp, Amir Mohammadpour +2

This paper investigates whether LMs recruit shared computational mechanisms for general Theory of Mind (ToM) and language-specific pragmatic reasoning in order to contribute to the…

cs.CL2026

Act or Clarify? Modeling Sensitivity to Uncertainty and Cost in Communication

Polina Tsvilodub, Karl Mulligan, Todd Snider +2

When deciding how to act under uncertainty, agents may choose to act to reduce uncertainty or they may act despite that uncertainty. In communicative settings, an important way of…

cs.CL2025

Integrating Neural and Symbolic Components in a Model of Pragmatic Question-Answering

Polina Tsvilodub, Robert D. Hawkins, Michael Franke

Computational models of pragmatic language use have traditionally relied on hand-specified sets of utterances and meanings, limiting their applicability to real-world language use.…

cs.CL2025

Non-literal Understanding of Number Words by Language Models

Polina Tsvilodub, Kanishk Gandhi, Haoran Zhao +3

Humans naturally interpret numbers non-literally, effortlessly combining context, world knowledge, and speaker intent. We investigate whether large language models (LLMs) interpret…

cs.CL2024

Cognitive Modeling with Scaffolded LLMs: A Case Study of Referential Expression Generation

Polina Tsvilodub, Michael Franke, Fausto Carcassi

To what extent can LLMs be used as part of a cognitive model of language generation? In this paper, we approach this question by exploring a neuro-symbolic implementation of an alg…

cs.CL2024

Bayesian Statistical Modeling with Predictors from LLMs

Michael Franke, Polina Tsvilodub, Fausto Carcassi

State of the art large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive performance on a variety of benchmark tasks and are increasingly used as components in larger applications, wher…

cs.CL2024

Experimental Pragmatics with Machines: Testing LLM Predictions for the Inferences of Plain and Embedded Disjunctions

Polina Tsvilodub, Paul Marty, Sonia Ramotowska +2

Human communication is based on a variety of inferences that we draw from sentences, often going beyond what is literally said. While there is wide agreement on the basic distincti…

cs.CL2024

Predictions from language models for multiple-choice tasks are not robust under variation of scoring methods

Polina Tsvilodub, Hening Wang, Sharon Grosch +1

This paper systematically compares different methods of deriving item-level predictions of language models for multiple-choice tasks. It compares scoring methods for answer options…

cs.CL2023

Evaluating Pragmatic Abilities of Image Captioners on A3DS

Polina Tsvilodub, Michael Franke

Evaluating grounded neural language model performance with respect to pragmatic qualities like the trade off between truthfulness, contrastivity and overinformativity of generated…

cs.CL2023★ 3 cited

Overinformative Question Answering by Humans and Machines

Polina Tsvilodub, Michael Franke, Robert D. Hawkins +1

When faced with a polar question, speakers often provide overinformative answers going beyond a simple "yes" or "no". But what principles guide the selection of additional informat…