Assistant professor at TTIC. Previously: faculty fellow at NYU CDS, PhD student at Berkeley, undergrad at Brown University. Natural language processing. He/him.

Chicago, IL
Joined November 2013
New paper! LLM memory keeps improving, but this makes them *worse* as user sims. If we want to build models that can, e.g., simulate realistic students to train chatbots to be better teachers, then these models need to be able to forget like humans do 📄: arxiv.org/abs/2605.25680
16
68
7
463
48,924
Nicholas Tomlin retweeted
Introducing the Language, Expressivity, Interpretability, and Formalism (LEIF) Lab at TTIC — it's a cool crew! leif-lab-ttic.github.io/
7
27
4
281
22,065
To make AI better at imitating humans, limit its memory. Recent CDS Faculty Fellow @NickATomlin, CDS PhD student @michahu8, and CDS Assoc Prof @tallinzen show that capping a model's memory at 4 slots makes it a far better stand-in for a real person. nyudatascience.medium.com/fo…
2
2
16
6,511
One of the better AI use policies I've seen:
As agents perform increasingly complex tasks for researchers, it's important to develop norms for communicating with other humans. Here's my lab's policy on AI in writing and communication, focusing on helping us think deeply and communicate precisely. cs.columbia.edu/~johnhew/lab…
14
3,104
Nicholas Tomlin retweeted
I just found out our paper won an outstanding paper award at #RLC2026. This is my last PhD work with my incredible advisors @EmmaBrunskill @chrispiech Huge thanks to the @RL_Conference for giving this work a recognition 🥳🥳 rl-conference.cc/RLC2026Awar… 📝 arxiv.org/abs/2608.14851
24
13
3
211
21,436
Nicholas Tomlin retweeted
Presenting a chess puzzle recommendation paper @RL_Conference #RLC2026 This project took an excruciating 3 years—long enough for both Anirudhan and @rose_e_wang to join OpenAI in the interim, and for @NickATomlin to become a professor at TTIC.
1
4
46
2,706
Nicholas Tomlin retweeted
we started a company!! so, we’re tackling continual learning: what’s the learning algorithm to take arbitrary data — documents, conversations, the models’ own experience — and make better models? how do we scale compute in the same way we’ve already seen with pre-training and inference time, but scaling on the same data we see as humans, day after day with no labels, no rewards? A lot of the ingredients are out there already (rl, distillation, long-context, sparse / param-efficient architectures, etc.). our team is at the frontier of these topics, and we’re singularly focused on this. we want to understand this problem better than anyone else in the world. nobody’s solved this problem yet, but even today it’s extremely greenfield opportunity to co-develop research & useful products. in our space, how people interact with the models defines what the data distribution is - and working on this problem end-to-end, from core science to end user, gives us incredible freedom to define the problem and imagine new kinds of experiences. i expect we’ll use models that continually learn much differently than we’re using them today. it’ll feel different when the models _just know_, and build on our thinking and direction in ways we can’t even imagine. we don’t even know the queries we’re not asking, the things we would do but aren’t able to today. i’m so excited to share what we’re doing with the world in the coming months!! and the team is extremely cracked :) tackling this grand challenge and working alongside @jxmnop @EyubogluSabri @dan_biderman @MayeeChen @__howardchen @shizhehe and many others has made every day so fun. come work with us!
71
53
8
676
117,847
When I started my PhD back in 2019, there was a lot of excitement around taking ideas from linguistics and cognitive science and using them to build better NLP models
would be so excited to see cognitive scientists and llm researchers working together on user modeling research
3
9
105
17,494
This shouldn't be too surprising: if we want to build models that can collaborate with humans, rather than replace them, then we should leverage our knowledge about how humans use and understand language
1
10
833
"Every time you fire a linguist, the performance of your system goes up, but your ability to simulate realistic human behavior goes down"
1
3
21
2,138
Finally, we show preliminary evidence that user simulators with more human-like memory are more useful. In particular, we find that our most human-like model is more capable of predicting which LLM outputs humans will best understand and remember:
1
2
11
720
This work was done with Qihan Wang, @michahu8, Brian Dillon, and @tallinzen! We’re excited about the continued potential for leveraging ideas from cogsci/linguistics and using them to improve user sims, which can be used to train models that collaborate better with real humans
1
9
631
Nicholas Tomlin retweeted
would be so excited to see cognitive scientists and llm researchers working together on user modeling research
4
4
2
78
23,541
Current AI agents take many actions without considering their cost-effectiveness. Courant PhD @Wenxuan_Ding_, CDS Faculty Fellow @NickATomlin, and CDS Assoc Prof @gregd_nlp show LLMs make better tradeoffs when uncertainty is estimated separately. nyudatascience.medium.com/te…
1
5
6
1,495
Nicholas Tomlin retweeted
Hiring a student researcher for RL agents, co-hosted by @chinganc_rl and me at Google Research and DeepMind. Our work in the last 2 years: arxiv.org/abs/2406.16218 arxiv.org/abs/2506.10341 arxiv.org/abs/2603.14769 Any interest? DMs are open or email us!
Looking for Google research student researcher (PhD student) to work on LLM and agent related learning. Preferred background: RL/game theory, agentic system, LLM training. Candidate will work closely with me and @allenainie Email me if you are interested. 😀
4
22
225
27,120