research

I’m broadly interested in computational theories of learning and decision making, and how computational models can be used to characterize beliefs and behavior in neurodevelopmental and psychiatric disorders.

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 ☺️

current lab members + collaborators

Cheshta Bhatia (PhD Student, Organismic & Evolutionary Biology, Harvard) co-advised with Sam Gershman
Daniel Mulford (Post-Bacc Researcher, Cognitive Science, UCSD)
Rami Abukhater (Undergraduate Researcher, Data Science, UCSD)

past members

Khang Quach (Undergraduate Researcher, TRELS Awardee, UCSD)

publications

Google Scholar | ^*denotes co-first authorship

in progress

Bhatia, C., Lai, L. (in prep). Reduced exploration in autism reflects resource-rational policy compression.
Lai, L., Hauser, TU., Huys, QJM. (in prep). Towards a computational account of egodystonia.
Bhatia, C., Gershman, SJ., Lai, L. (submitted). Policy regularization as a unifying theory of the striatal division of labor in learning.

published

Lai, L.^*, Huang, A.Z.X.^*, & Gershman, S.J. (2025). Action chunking as conditional policy compression. Cognition
Liu, S., Lai, L., Gershman, S.J., & Bari, B.A. (2025). Time and memory costs jointly determine a speed-accuracy trade-off and set-size effects.
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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