Tom McCoy and Tom Griffiths publish paper in Nature Communications

Tuesday, May 20, 2025
Distillation figure

Faculty member Tom McCoy and external collaborator Tom Griffiths (from the Princeton Department of Psychology) have published a paper in Nature Communications. The paper is titled “Modeling rapid language learning by distilling Bayesian priors into artificial neural networks.” It introduces a method for combining the complementary strengths of two popular methods for modeling language learning: Bayesian models (which learn well from small amounts of data) and neural networks (which are effective at capturing the complexity of naturalistic data).