Hey!
I'm a junior (third-year) at Princeton University studying computer science and math, and I'm grateful to be advised by Tom Griffiths in the Computational Cognitive Science Lab. I was born in the Bay Area 🌉 but have lived in Kingston, Ontario, Canada 🇨🇦 for my entire life.
I'm an incoming Research Intern at the Center for AI Safety this Summer (2026).
Broadly speaking, I focus on how we can make AI, especially LLMs, more reliable, safe, and fair, to facilitate better human-AI interaction. Currently, I'm interested in how we can use cognitive science and psychology to reveal insightful patterns in human behavior — both the prosocial and the problematic — that offer lessons for building AI that adapts to us well without reproducing our worst tendencies.
Outside of research, I like to play Wordle, Globle, Travle, GeoGuessr/Geotastic, and the NYT Mini. My life goal is to defeat the Ender Dragon in Minecraft Survival Mode.
Selected Publications
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Are Large Language Models Sensitive to the Motives Behind Communication?
Addison J. Wu*, Ryan Liu*, Kerem Oktar*, Theodore R. Sumers, Thomas L. Griffiths
NeurIPS 2025 [Project Page] [arXiv]
Oral at PragLM @ COLM 2025 -
Mind Your Step (by Step): Chain-of-Thought can Reduce Performance on Tasks where Thinking Makes Humans Worse
Ryan Liu*, Jiayi Geng*, Addison J. Wu, Ilia Sucholutsky, Tania Lombrozo, Thomas L. Griffiths
ICML 2025 [Project Page] [arXiv]
Press coverage: The Information [text] -
Large Language Models Develop Novel Social Biases Through Adaptive Exploration
Addison J. Wu*, Ryan Liu*, Xuechunzi Bai, Thomas L. Griffiths
MTI-LLM @ NeurIPS 2025 [arXiv]
To be presented at SPSP 2026 Invited Symposia
Where am I?
- San Francisco, CA 🇺🇸 - CAIS Internship (Jun-Aug 2026)
- San Diego, CA 🇺🇸 - NeurIPS (Dec 2025)
- Montreal, Canada 🇨🇦 - COLM (Oct 2025)
- Vancouver, Canada 🇨🇦 - ICML (Jul 2025)