UCSC’s Summer Academy on Artificial Intelligence is a four-week, in-person program for talented and motivated high school students who are interested in exploring artificial intelligence (AI) in a university setting. Hosted at the UCSC Silicon Valley Campus, the program offers an immersive learning experience that combines foundational AI concepts with hands-on, research-inspired work. Students learn […]
Dual Attention Transformers (DATs) extend decoder-only Transformers with a dedicated relational-attention stream, making them a natural architecture for abstract identity rules such asABA and ABB. Surprisingly, we find that comparably sized GPT-2 models outperform DATs on these tasks. We investigate this gap with two complementary mechanistic analyses. First, causal mediation analysis shows that DATs exhibit […]
While the human brain learns continually, mastering new tasks without forgetting the old and adapting to unfamiliar ones from context alone, modern neural networks still lack both. To bridge the gap between biological adaptivity and modern AI, we have established foundational work on sparsity as a computational principle at three levels of neural computation, through […]
Unlocking the blueprint for regeneration: Insights from Hydra Regeneration, the ability to heal and regrow lost body parts, varies across species, tissues, and even cell types. To harness regenerative ability for medicine, we need to understand the genetic mechanisms that are similar across regenerating species. My lab uses Hydra, a small freshwater relative of jellyfish, to investigate […]