Alexander Ku

I am a PhD student at Princeton, working with Tom Griffiths and Jon Cohen, and a Research Scientist at Google DeepMind. My research focuses on the computational principles underlying cognitive flexibility and long-term efficiency in humans, with the goal of translating these insights into building continually adaptive AI systems.

Research Interests: Continual Learning, Meta-Learning, Cognitive Control, Automaticity

Email / Google Scholar / GitHub / Twitter / CV

Selected Papers

Recent or representative papers:

Using the Tools of Cognitive Science to Understand Large Language Models at Different Levels of Analysis
Alexander Ku, Declan Campbell, Xuechunzi Bai, Jiayi Geng, Ryan Liu, Raja Marjieh, R. Thomas McCoy, Andrew Nam, Ilia Sucholutsky, Veniamin Veselovsky, Liyi Zhang, Jian-Qiao Zhu, Thomas L. Griffiths

Predictability Shapes Adaptation: An Evolutionary Perspective on Modes of Learning in Transformers
Alexander Y. Ku, Thomas L. Griffiths, Stephanie C.Y. Chan

On the Generalization of Language Models from In-Context Learning and Finetuning: A Controlled Study
Andrew K. Lampinen, Arslan Chaudhry, Stephanie C.Y. Chan, Cody Wild, Diane Wan, Alex Ku, Jörg Bornschein, Razvan Pascanu, Murray Shanahan, James L. McClelland