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author Binz, Marcel
Akata, Elif
Bethge, Matthias
Brändle, Franziska
Callaway, Fred
Coda-Forno, Julian
Dayan, Peter
Demircan, Can
Eckstein, Maria K.
Éltető, Noémi
Griffiths, Thomas L.
Haridi, Susanne
Jagadish, Akshay K.
Ji-An, Li
Kipnis, Alexander
Kumar, Sreejan
Ludwig, Tobias
Mathony, Marvin
Mattar, Marcelo
Modirshanechi, Alireza
Nath, Surabhi S.
Peterson, Joshua C.
Rmus, Milena
Russek, Evan M.
Saanum, Tankred
Schubert, Johannes A.
Buschoff, Luca M. Schulze
Singhi, Nishad
Sui, Xin
Thalmann, Mirko
Theis, Fabian
Truong, Vuong
Udandarao, Vishaal
Voudouris, Konstantinos
Wilson, Robert
Witte, Kristin
Wu, Shuchen
Wulff, Dirk
Xiong, Huadong
Schulz, Eric
author_facet Binz, Marcel
Akata, Elif
Bethge, Matthias
Brändle, Franziska
Callaway, Fred
Coda-Forno, Julian
Dayan, Peter
Demircan, Can
Eckstein, Maria K.
Éltető, Noémi
Griffiths, Thomas L.
Haridi, Susanne
Jagadish, Akshay K.
Ji-An, Li
Kipnis, Alexander
Kumar, Sreejan
Ludwig, Tobias
Mathony, Marvin
Mattar, Marcelo
Modirshanechi, Alireza
Nath, Surabhi S.
Peterson, Joshua C.
Rmus, Milena
Russek, Evan M.
Saanum, Tankred
Schubert, Johannes A.
Buschoff, Luca M. Schulze
Singhi, Nishad
Sui, Xin
Thalmann, Mirko
Theis, Fabian
Truong, Vuong
Udandarao, Vishaal
Voudouris, Konstantinos
Wilson, Robert
Witte, Kristin
Wu, Shuchen
Wulff, Dirk
Xiong, Huadong
Schulz, Eric
contents Establishing a unified theory of cognition has been a major goal of psychology. While there have been previous attempts to instantiate such theories by building computational models, we currently do not have one model that captures the human mind in its entirety. A first step in this direction is to create a model that can predict human behavior in a wide range of settings. Here we introduce Centaur, a computational model that can predict and simulate human behavior in any experiment expressible in natural language. We derived Centaur by finetuning a state-of-the-art language model on a novel, large-scale data set called Psych-101. Psych-101 reaches an unprecedented scale, covering trial-by-trial data from over 60,000 participants performing over 10,000,000 choices in 160 experiments. Centaur not only captures the behavior of held-out participants better than existing cognitive models, but also generalizes to new cover stories, structural task modifications, and entirely new domains. Furthermore, we find that the model's internal representations become more aligned with human neural activity after finetuning. Taken together, our results demonstrate that it is possible to discover computational models that capture human behavior across a wide range of domains. We believe that such models provide tremendous potential for guiding the development of cognitive theories and present a case study to demonstrate this.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_20268
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Centaur: a foundation model of human cognition
Binz, Marcel
Akata, Elif
Bethge, Matthias
Brändle, Franziska
Callaway, Fred
Coda-Forno, Julian
Dayan, Peter
Demircan, Can
Eckstein, Maria K.
Éltető, Noémi
Griffiths, Thomas L.
Haridi, Susanne
Jagadish, Akshay K.
Ji-An, Li
Kipnis, Alexander
Kumar, Sreejan
Ludwig, Tobias
Mathony, Marvin
Mattar, Marcelo
Modirshanechi, Alireza
Nath, Surabhi S.
Peterson, Joshua C.
Rmus, Milena
Russek, Evan M.
Saanum, Tankred
Schubert, Johannes A.
Buschoff, Luca M. Schulze
Singhi, Nishad
Sui, Xin
Thalmann, Mirko
Theis, Fabian
Truong, Vuong
Udandarao, Vishaal
Voudouris, Konstantinos
Wilson, Robert
Witte, Kristin
Wu, Shuchen
Wulff, Dirk
Xiong, Huadong
Schulz, Eric
Machine Learning
Establishing a unified theory of cognition has been a major goal of psychology. While there have been previous attempts to instantiate such theories by building computational models, we currently do not have one model that captures the human mind in its entirety. A first step in this direction is to create a model that can predict human behavior in a wide range of settings. Here we introduce Centaur, a computational model that can predict and simulate human behavior in any experiment expressible in natural language. We derived Centaur by finetuning a state-of-the-art language model on a novel, large-scale data set called Psych-101. Psych-101 reaches an unprecedented scale, covering trial-by-trial data from over 60,000 participants performing over 10,000,000 choices in 160 experiments. Centaur not only captures the behavior of held-out participants better than existing cognitive models, but also generalizes to new cover stories, structural task modifications, and entirely new domains. Furthermore, we find that the model's internal representations become more aligned with human neural activity after finetuning. Taken together, our results demonstrate that it is possible to discover computational models that capture human behavior across a wide range of domains. We believe that such models provide tremendous potential for guiding the development of cognitive theories and present a case study to demonstrate this.
title Centaur: a foundation model of human cognition
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.20268