[AI Seminar Series] Seminar by Prof. Ian Ballard, Friday January 23rd, 12-1pm, MRB Seminar Room

[Vassilis Tsotras]

The next AI Seminar will be on Friday January 23rd, 12-1pm, in the MRB
Seminar Room (1st floor).

*** Pizza and refreshments will be provided ****

To keep track of the number of attendees, please *register* at:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/ai-seminar-series-tickets-1980792449538.

The talk will be given by *Prof. Ian Ballard*, Department of Psychology, UCR

TITLE: Large Language Models reproduce human framing effects in inter
temporal choice

ABSTRACT:
Humans are highly susceptible to framing manipulations in intertemporal
decision making—choices that involve tradeoffs between immediate and
delayed rewards. Classic biases such as the magnitude effect, in which
larger reward amounts increase patience, have been attributed to
self-control, reward system activation, and other cognitive mechanisms.
Here, we show that large language models (LLMs) exhibit similar
sensitivities to decision framing, including the magnitude, sign, and
hidden-zero effects. Unlike humans, LLMs discount delayed rewards
exponentially rather than hyperbolically and do not exhibit a decimal
effect, suggesting that their behavior is not merely inherited from
descriptions of decision-making phenomena in their training data.

Analysis of LLM embedding spaces, which encode semantic knowledge, revealed
that large monetary amounts are represented more closely to words related
to delay and the future. This suggests that framing biases in LLMs arise
from semantic proximity of choice options to temporal concepts. Together,
these findings introduce a conceptual framework in which linguistic
structure shapes decision-making, raising the possibility that human
framing effects partly emerge from the organization of choices in semantic
space.


Bio:
Ian Ballard is an Assistant Professor at the University of California,
Riverside. He is affiliated with the Cognitive and Cognitive Neuroscience
area of the Psychology Department and the UCR Neuroscience Graduate
Program. He uses an integrative approach in which insights from statistical
learning, neuroscience, and cognitive psychology inspire novel experimental
probes of the relationship between goals and learning. His research has
been funded by the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of
Health.

------------------------------------
Sponsored by the RAISE at UCR Institute, the AI Seminar Series presents
speakers working on cutting edge Foundational AI or applying AI in their
research. The goal of these seminars is to inform the UCR community about
current trends in AI research and promote collaborations between faculty in
this emerging field. These seminars are open to interested faculty and
graduate/undergraduate students. Please forward this email to other
colleagues or students in your lab that may be interested. After the seminar a
discussion will follow for questions, open problems, ideas for possible
collaborations etc.

Sincerely,
Vassilis Tsotras
Professor, CSE Department
co-Director, RAISE at UCR Institute

Amit Roy-Chowdhury
Professor, ECE Department
co-Director, RAISE at UCR Institute
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.ucr.edu/pipermail/raise-seminar/attachments/20260120/ed7faddb/attachment.htm>