Marcel Binz

📣 Work with me on AI and behavioral science. I am hiring an Assistant Professor (3 years) at WU Vienna, in collaboration with my team at the MPI for Human Development. Start Jan 2027 or by arrangement. Deadline Nov 11. Please share. jobs.wu.ac.at/Assistant-Pr...

Incredibly excited to announce that I’m starting my own research group at Justus-Liebig-Universität in Gießen as part of the excellence cluster “The Adaptive Mind”! 🥳 I'm looking to fill the first PhD position. If you’re interested, apply here: tinyurl.com/38p3h22p Please spread the word! 🙏

🚨 Two open postdoc positions in the ERC-funded project BrainAlign at the Max Planck Institute in Saarbruecken, Germany: position #1 on NeuroAI: postdocprogram.mpg.de/node/58480 position #2 on human-centered LLM evaluations: postdocprogram.mpg.de/node/58481 Application deadline: Oct 13, 2026

Excited to share that I'll be starting as a junior professor and Emmy Noether awardee at the University of Göttingen this October! 🥳 🚀 I'll be hiring #phd students and #postdoc across #machinelearning, #neuroscience and #cogsci: modirlab.github.io/open-positio... Please spread the word! 🙏

New work with @marcelbinz.bsky.social & @ericschulz.bsky.social! We introduce a permutation-based ML approach that decomposes behavioral variability into distinct components, bridging prediction & explanation in a single framework, paving the way for better behavioral theories osf.io/preprints/ps...

1/ 🚨 New opinion piece: "Can we automatize scientific discovery in the cognitive sciences?" We lay out a vision for a fully automated, in-silico science of the mind, where modern AI systems run every stage of the scientific discovery cycle in cognitive science 🧵 #AutomatedDiscovery #AI4Science

Excited to announce that I'll be starting my own lab in Tübingen this October! Hiring at all levels: Postdoc, PhD & RA. Want to work on computational cognitive science at scale? Apply: core-cognition.github.io Reposts and shares much appreciated 🙏

🚨 Hiring in Munich 🇩🇪: 2 open-topic PhD positions in human & machine learning (TVöD E13 80%). Start ~June 2026 (flexible). Deadline: March 2, 2026. Apply/info: hcai-munich.com/PhD_Job_Ad.pdf Reposts appreciated 🙏

join us!

check out our GAC on benchmarks at CCN happening later today!

What happens when you train AI on psychological experiments? It behaves a lot like a human mind. Here's my story on Centaur, and the debate about what AI has to offer to cognitive science. Gift link nyti.ms/3ZYqXcg 🧪

New short-form preprint in which we use Centaur to identify gaps in interpretable cognitive models and revise them accordingly using Qwen3 -- fully automated and without a human-in-the-loop. arxiv.org/abs/2505.17661

Registration for IICCSSS 2025 in Darmstadt is open! 🥳 Sign up now for a week of exciting talks, hands-on projects and inspiring discussions! www.iiccsss.org/registration/ As always, IICCSSS is free, and open to all students who are excited about computational cognitive science 💡🧠

#AIinScience: Ethical & Practical Challenges 🎤Interview with Dr. Marcel Binz, #HelmholtzMunich, on how Large Language Models are transforming scientific methods & the need of reshaping the scientific mindset: 👉 t1p.de/p82vj @marcelbinz.bsky.social @ericschulz.bsky.social ‬@zeynepakata.bsky.social

We are looking for two PhD students at our institute in Munich. Both postions are open-topic, so anything between cognitive science and machine learning is possible. More information: hcai-munich.com/PhDHCAI.pdf Feel free to share broadly!

Ever wondered why only some memories 🧠 come easily? Our latest work (osf.io/preprints/ps...) led by S. Haridi, with @ericschulz.bsky.social, shows that targeted memory retrieval speeds up with precise semantic and temporal retrieval cues. Hence, crafting cues can give you instant access to memories⚡

In previous work we found that VLMs fall short of human visual cognition. To make them better, we fine-tuned them on visual cognition tasks. We find that while this improves performance on the fine-tuning task, it does not lead to models that generalize to other related tasks:

About a month late posting this, but here's a new project with @ericschulz.bsky.social, @akjagadish.bsky.social, @marvinmathony.bsky.social and Tobias Ludwig We are using LLMs to propose cognitive models in learning and decision making data. Presenting this work at RLDM! arxiv.org/abs/2502.00879

The German Cognitive Science Society is organizing a PhD symposium in Tuebingen in April. If you are a PhD student in the vicinity, you should definetely register (by February 28th) -- it will be fun! cogsciprag.github.io/context-in-c...

In our latest article, published in @pnas.org and led by @marcelbinz.bsky.social and Stephan Alaniz, we got together four diverse groups of scientists to reflect on how LLMs should affect science. From treating them like co-authors to using other tools instead, many interesting arguments emerged.

We are currently building the largest, cross-domain data set of human behavior as part of an open collaborative project. Contributions of any form are welcome, but especially experiments with meta-data from developmental, cross-cultural, or clinical studies. More details: github.com/marcelbinz/P...

Have we built machines that learn and think like people? In our new paper, we find that vision large language models still fall short when it comes to cognitive abilities in the domains of causal reasoning, intuitive physics, and theory of mind. www.nature.com/articles/s42...

and mark in your calendars the following dates & speakers: David Danks, Jan. 7 Dimitri Coelho Mollo, Jan 14 Raphael Milliere, Jan 21 Ben Bergen, Feb 4 David Garcia, Feb 18 Jay McClelland, Mar 4 Chris Summerfield, Mar 18 Marcel Binz, April 1st Tom Griffiths, April 29 Thomas Icard, May 13

Preprint alert! We explore 3 exploration tasks, testing if they measure a stable construct & its link to real-world exploration. We find improved robustness of latent factors compared to single-task estimates. With Mirko Thalmann & @ericschulz.bsky.social 🔗https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/tzuey

If you are at NeurIPS, and interested in human alignment, representations, or cognitive modeling, don't miss out Can's Poster tomorrow!