collaborators

7 papers

cs.AI2026

Visual serial processing deficits explain divergences in human and VLM reasoning

Nicholas Budny, Kia Ghods, Declan Campbell +6

Why do Vision Language Models (VLMs), despite success on standard benchmarks, often fail to match human performance on surprisingly simple visual reasoning tasks? While the underly…

cs.CV2025

Visual symbolic mechanisms: Emergent symbol processing in vision language models

Rim Assouel, Declan Campbell, Yoshua Bengio +1

To accurately process a visual scene, observers must bind features together to represent individual objects. This capacity is necessary, for instance, to distinguish an image conta…

cs.CV2025

Caption This, Reason That: VLMs Caught in the Middle

Zihan Weng, Lucas Gomez, Taylor Whittington Webb +1

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have shown remarkable progress in visual understanding in recent years. Yet, they still lag behind human capabilities in specific visual tasks such as…

cs.AI2025

Whither symbols in the era of advanced neural networks?

Thomas L. Griffiths, Brenden M. Lake, R. Thomas McCoy +2

Some of the strongest evidence that human minds should be thought about in terms of symbolic systems has been the way they combine ideas, produce novelty, and learn quickly. We arg…

cs.CL2025

Emergent Symbolic Mechanisms Support Abstract Reasoning in Large Language Models

Yukang Yang, Declan Campbell, Kaixuan Huang +3

Many recent studies have found evidence for emergent reasoning capabilities in large language models (LLMs), but debate persists concerning the robustness of these capabilities, an…

cs.LG2025

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

Marco Nurisso, Jesseba Fernando, Raj Deshpande +9

Intelligent systems must deploy internal representations that are simultaneously structured -- to support broad generalization -- and selective -- to preserve input identity. We ex…