Anna Leshinskaya

About

I am a research scientist with a decade of experience in cutting edge research in cognitive science. I work to unravel the mechanisms underlying human and machine cognition. I apply rigorous experimental design together with formal conceptual tools to characterize the inner workings and properties of these systems. My passions are defining research questions, leading programs of research, and mentoring junior scientists. My recent topic is probing cognition in large language AI models. As AI models become increasingly complex, we must understand them by carefully understanding *how* they behave, not just whether they succeed on tasks. With deep collaborations between researchers in AI and in cognitive science, we can propel the emerging science of understanding the cognitive properties of deep neural networks. Pressingly, I believe that aligning AI models to human objectives increasingly relies on our ability to understand machine cognition and for machine cognition to understand us. I am fascinated by the question of how we can enable AI to learn from us, about us.

Experience

Education