research

I am currently a TSVP Visiting Scholar at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology in Japan. I’m broadly interested in computational theories of learning and decision making, belief formation and change, and disordered behavior in psychiatric disease. More recently, I’ve become interested in the collaboration between artificial and natural intelligence and how we can leverage AI while preserving human ingenuity and intellectual agency.

I completed my Ph.D. at Harvard with Sam Gershman, where I studied decision making under cognitive resource constraints. My dissertation, Policy compression: Acting with limited cognitive resources, can be found here. A précis (summary) of my dissertation is here.

I completed my B.A. at Rice University, where I worked with Jeff Yau at Baylor College of Medicine on causal inference in multisensory perception. I’ve also worked with Mehrdad Jazayeri at MIT, with Josh Dudman at Janelia Research Campus, and with Tobias Hauser and Quentin Huys at the Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry. The best part about science is truly all the wonderful people I have met along the way:-)

publications

Google Scholar | ^*denotes co-first authorship

in preparation

Lai, L., Hauser, TU., Huys, QJM. (in prep). Towards a computational account of egodystonia.
Lai, L., Bhatia, C., Hardcastle, K., Mizes, K., Ölveczky, BP., Gershman, SJ. (in prep). Policy regularization enables robustness and flexibility in motor sequence learning.

preprints

Liu, S., Lai, L., Gershman, S.J., & Bari, B.A. (submitted). Time and memory costs jointly determine a speed-accuracy trade-off and set-size effects.
Lai, L.^*, Huang, A.Z.X.^*, & Gershman, S.J. (submitted). Action chunking as conditional policy compression.

published

Lai, L., & Gershman, S.J. (2024). Human decision making balances reward maximization and policy compression. PLOS Computational Biology
Lai, L. & Gershman, S.J. (2021). Policy compression: an information bottleneck in action selection. Psychology of Learning and Motivation.
Gershman, S.J. & Lai, L. (2021). The reward-complexity trade-off in schizophrenia. Computational Psychiatry.
Bhui, R., Lai, L., Gershman, S.J. (2021). Resource-rational decision making. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences.
Mikhael, J.G., Lai, L., & Gershman, S.J. (2021). Rational inattention and tonic dopamine. PLOS Computational Biology.
Lai, L., Magnotti, J.F., & Yau, J.M. (2017). Multisensory context warps time perception. 2017 Conference on Cognitive Computational Neuroscience.

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