I am a PhD student in Psychology at UC Berkeley, advised by Bill Thompson.
I am interested in the computational principles that underlie social cognition: what are the representations and computations that enable intelligent agents to solve the problems that arise when interacting with others? In particular, I am interested in understanding how people and AI systems develop abstractions such as social norms to coordinate joint action, and the core social learning and reasoning capabilities that underlie this.
I've also been thinking about how we can use AI tools to advance our understanding of human behavior, e.g. by studying mechanisms of reasoning at scale in more naturalistic settings.
Before my PhD, I spent a year in startup land, and before that, I earned a BS in Symbolic Systems and an MS in Computer Science from Stanford.
Publications
Yu, D., and Thompson, B.D. (2025). Adaptive use of vagueness to coordinate joint action. In Proceedings of the 47th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. [paper]
Yu, D., Thompson, B.D., and Dubey, R. (2025). Leveraging AI to advance psychological research for climate policy. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences. [paper]
Yu, D., and Thompson, B.D. (2024). People balance joint reward, fairness and complexity to develop social norms in a two-player game. In Proceedings of the 46th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. [paper]
Yu, D., Goodman, N.D., and Mu, J. (2023). Characterizing tradeoffs between teaching via language and demonstrations in multi-agent systems. In Proceedings of the 45th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. [paper] [code]
Yu, D., Waldon, B., and Degen, J. (2023). The cross-linguistic order of adjectives and nouns may be the result of iterated pragmatic pressures on referential communication. In Proceedings of the 45th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. [paper] [code]
Yu, D., Mu, J., and Goodman, N.D. (2022). Emergent Covert Signaling in Adversarial Reference Games. In 5th Workshop on Emergent Communication at ICLR 2022. [paper]
Mankewitz, J., Boyce, V., Waldon, B., Loukatou, G., Yu, D., Mu, J., Goodman, N.D., and Frank, M.C. (2021). Multi-party Referential Communication in Complex Strategic Games. In Meaning in Context Workshop at NeurIPS 2021. [paper]