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Joshua Tenenbaum

Joshua Brett Tenenbaum is an American cognitive scientist specializing in computational models of human learning, reasoning, and perception.^[1] He is a professor of computational cognitive science in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he is also a principal investigator at the Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines (CBMM), an investigator at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), and Director of Science at the MIT Quest for Intelligence.^[2]^[3] Tenenbaum's research employs probabilistic and Bayesian statistical models to explain how humans efficiently acquire knowledge from limited data, bridging cognitive science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence.^[4] Tenenbaum earned a B.S. magna cum laude in physics from Yale University in 1993 and a Ph.D. in brain and cognitive sciences from MIT in 1999, under advisor Whitman Richards.^[5] Following his doctorate, he conducted postdoctoral research at the MIT AI Laboratory before joining Stanford University as an assistant professor in psychology and computer science from 1999 to 2002.^[6] He then returned to MIT, advancing from assistant professor (2002–2007) to associate professor (2007–2011), and has held the position of full professor since 2011.^[5] Tenenbaum's contributions include developing Bayesian frameworks for tasks such as concept learning, causal inference, language acquisition, and intuitive physics, validated through behavioral experiments with children and adults.^[1] His work has advanced AI systems that mimic human-like learning from sparse data and has been published in leading journals like Science and Psychological Review.^[1] Among his honors are the 2019 MacArthur Fellowship for his innovative integration of computational modeling and behavioral studies, election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2020, the 2011 Troland Research Award from the National Academy of Sciences, and the 2023 Schmidt Futures AI2050 Senior Fellowship.^[1]^[4]^[5]^[7]

Early Life and Education

Early Life

Joshua Tenenbaum was born on August 21, 1972, in California.^[8] He grew up in California in a family deeply engaged with science and technology, which fostered his early curiosity about the mind and intelligence.^[9] His father, Jay Martin "Marty" Tenenbaum, was a prominent figure in artificial intelligence, having led vision research at SRI International's AI Center in the 1970s and later pioneering electronic commerce technologies.^[10] His mother, Bonnie Tenenbaum, was an educational psychologist specializing in cognition, whose work emphasized how children learn and develop understanding.^[9] This household environment, blending AI innovation and cognitive studies, provided constant exposure to discussions on human and machine intelligence from a young age.^[9] Tenenbaum's interests in science and the workings of the mind emerged early, supported enthusiastically by his parents. For example, in fifth grade, he undertook a science fair project on optical illusions, guided by his father and using tools like Emacs, LaTeX, and Arpanet.^[8] The intellectual atmosphere at home—marked by his parents' professional pursuits—laid the groundwork for his lifelong focus on cognition. This foundation propelled him toward formal studies, leading to his enrollment at Yale University for undergraduate work.^[8]

Academic Training

Joshua Tenenbaum earned a Bachelor of Science degree in physics, magna cum laude, from Yale University in 1993.^[1] During his undergraduate studies, he engaged in coursework in physics while encountering courses on the mind and brain taught by psychologists and cognitive scientists, which began shifting his interests toward cognitive modeling.^[11] A pivotal early research experience came from a summer collaboration with cognitive psychologist Roger Shepard at Stanford University, where Tenenbaum explored mathematics and computational approaches to studying mental processes, fostering his focus on probabilistic models of cognition.^[11] Tenenbaum pursued graduate studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, receiving a Ph.D. in Brain and Cognitive Sciences in 1999.^[1] His dissertation, titled "A Bayesian Framework for Concept Learning," examined probabilistic methods for human concept acquisition under the advisement of Whitman Richards, a pioneer in computational neuroscience.^[12]^[13] This training in Bayesian inference and cognitive modeling built directly on his undergraduate explorations, solidifying his interdisciplinary approach to understanding intelligence through computational lenses.^[11]

Professional Career

Early Positions

Following his Ph.D. in Brain and Cognitive Sciences from MIT in 1999, where he developed foundational work in Bayesian learning, Joshua Tenenbaum served as a Postdoctoral Associate at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory for a brief period that year.^[5] He then transitioned to Stanford University as Assistant Professor of Psychology from 1999 to 2002.^[2] In 2000, he also held a courtesy appointment as Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science, reflecting the interdisciplinary nature of his expertise in cognitive science and computation.^[5] At Stanford, Tenenbaum's primary responsibilities included teaching undergraduate and graduate courses central to cognitive science and artificial intelligence. He taught Psychology 205: Foundations of Cognition in the fall semesters of 1999, 2000, and 2001, providing students with an introduction to core principles of human cognition.^[5] Additionally, he offered Psychology 224: Learning and Inference in Humans and Machines in the spring semesters of 2000 and 2001, exploring computational approaches to learning processes across biological and artificial systems.^[5] These courses underscored his role in bridging psychological theory with machine learning methodologies during his early academic career. Tenenbaum began establishing his research presence at Stanford through early supervision of students and collaborators, laying the groundwork for computational modeling in cognitive science. He advised undergraduate researchers such as Mark Pearson and Neville Sanjana from 2000 to 2001, a postdoctoral researcher Mark Steyvers from 2000 to 2002, and initiated supervision of Ph.D. student Thomas L. Griffiths, who completed his degree in 2004.^[5] These efforts marked the formation of his initial research group at the institution, focused on interdisciplinary projects at the intersection of psychology and computer science.

MIT Professorship

Joshua Tenenbaum joined the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2002 as an Assistant Professor of Computational Cognitive Science in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, following a brief tenure at Stanford University where he had explored opportunities in cognitive artificial intelligence.^[2]^[5] His career at MIT progressed rapidly, with promotion to Associate Professor in 2007, coinciding with the granting of tenure by the MIT Corporation.^[14]^[5] During this period, he was appointed to the Paul E. Newton Career Development Professorship in Cognitive Science and Computation in 2004, a position he continues to hold.^[5]^[15] He advanced to full Professor of Computational Cognitive Science in 2011, a position he continues to hold.^[5]^[6] At MIT, Tenenbaum serves as the principal investigator and leader of the Computational Cognitive Science group, fostering interdisciplinary research at the intersection of cognitive science and computation.^[16]^[17] He is also a principal investigator in MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), where he has contributed to advancing computational approaches to intelligence since 2003.^[5]^[1] Tenenbaum plays a prominent role in MIT's Quest for Intelligence initiative, launched in 2018 to explore the mechanisms of human and artificial intelligence through multidisciplinary efforts; as of 2025, he serves as the Director of Science for the program.^[3]^[18] In addition to his research leadership, Tenenbaum has made significant contributions to education at MIT, developing and teaching core courses such as 9.66/6.804 Computational Cognitive Science, which introduces probabilistic reasoning and machine learning frameworks for modeling human cognition, and 9.012 Cognitive Science, offered regularly since 2002.^[5]

Research Contributions

Core Theories

Joshua Tenenbaum's core theoretical framework posits cognition as a form of probabilistic inference within structured generative models, where the mind generates hypotheses about the world and updates beliefs based on observed data using Bayesian principles.^[19] This approach views human learning and reasoning as inverting generative processes that describe how data arise from underlying causes, allowing for efficient generalization from limited evidence.^[20] Structured generative models incorporate hierarchical and relational representations to capture the compositional nature of knowledge, enabling the mind to simulate potential outcomes and infer latent structures.^[16] In his seminal 2006 work, Tenenbaum, along with Thomas L. Griffiths and Charles Kemp, developed theory-based Bayesian models of inductive learning and reasoning, which integrate domain-specific intuitive theories with statistical inference to explain how humans generalize from sparse data.^[21] These models treat inductive processes as Bayesian updates over structured knowledge representations, where priors derived from theories constrain possible hypotheses, facilitating robust inferences about categories, properties, and causal relations.^[22] By embedding theories within probabilistic frameworks, the approach reconciles rule-based and probabilistic accounts of cognition, emphasizing how structured priors guide learning beyond mere similarity or frequency-based statistics.^[23] Tenenbaum further advanced this framework in concepts outlined in "How to Grow a Mind: Statistics, Structure, and Abstraction," co-authored with Charles Kemp, Thomas L. Griffiths, and Noah D. Goodman, which integrates statistical inference, structural representations, and abstraction as complementary mechanisms for cognitive development.^[24] Statistics provide the tools for handling uncertainty and updating beliefs from data, while structure imposes hierarchical and relational organization on knowledge to enable compositionality and transfer across domains.^[25] Abstraction allows for the extraction of high-level principles that guide efficient reasoning, forming a unified theory where these elements interact within Bayesian generative models to support rapid, flexible learning akin to human intelligence.^[26] A central tenet of Tenenbaum's theories is that humans employ approximate inference algorithms to perform these computations efficiently, as exact Bayesian inference in complex structured models is often computationally intractable.^[26] These approximations, such as sampling-based methods or variational techniques, enable the mind to balance accuracy and speed, mirroring how cognitive processes handle real-world ambiguity and scale to rich, multifaceted data.^[27] This idea underscores the practicality of probabilistic cognition, allowing for adaptive learning without exhaustive computation.^[28]

Key Models and Applications

Tenenbaum's Bayesian framework for concept learning, introduced in his 1999 dissertation, models human generalization from sparse positive examples by treating concept acquisition as probabilistic inference over a structured hypothesis space. The framework defines a space of candidate hypotheses representing possible concept extensions, such as mathematical rules (e.g., powers of 2), spatial regions (e.g., axis-parallel rectangles parameterized by location and size), or hierarchical categories derived from similarity judgments. Priors over hypotheses encode background knowledge or simplicity biases, such as exponential or Erlang distributions favoring compact or natural concepts, while likelihoods follow the "size principle," assigning higher probability to observations under smaller hypotheses as the number of examples n increases: p(X|h) = (1/|h|)^n if the examples are consistent with hypothesis h (where |h| is the hypothesis size), and 0 otherwise. The posterior p(h|X) \propto p(X|h) p(h) is then used to compute generalization probabilities by marginalizing over hypotheses: p(y \in C | X) = \sum_h p(y \in C | h) p(h|X), enabling a shift from broad, similarity-based predictions with few examples to precise, rule-based ones with more data, as validated in experiments on numerical, spatial, and lexical concepts.^[29] Building on this foundation, Tenenbaum developed probabilistic models for causal inference and word learning that leverage hierarchical Bayesian structures to integrate theory-based priors with data-driven updates. In causal induction, the approach posits a space of possible causal graphs or structures, with priors favoring sparse, domain-appropriate relations (e.g., linear or cyclic dependencies in intuitive physics), and inference via Bayesian structure learning to explain observed covariations, as in the theory-based causal induction model that predicts human judgments on interventions and counterfactuals by sampling from posterior distributions over causal models. For word learning, the model treats meanings as nested taxonomic hypotheses (e.g., subordinate to superordinate levels like "collie" to "animal"), using size-principled likelihoods p(X|h) \propto 1/(\text{height}(h) + \epsilon)^n and priors biased toward distinctive basic-level categories, allowing learners to infer referents from mutual exclusivity and graded generalization, with strong fits to adult (r = .99) and child data (r = .91) across experiments involving novel labels for objects.^[30] These models extend the Bayesian framework to handle probabilistic causal structures, enabling efficient learning in ambiguous environments like language acquisition. Tenenbaum's applications to intuitive physics involve probabilistic simulation engines that model object motion and interactions by sampling trajectories from generative physical processes, approximating Newtonian mechanics with uncertainty in initial states and forces to predict outcomes like stability or collision paths. In one such model, an intuitive physics engine uses Monte Carlo sampling (6 trials per prediction) over scene representations with geometric noise (\sigma = 0.2) and external forces (\phi = 0.01), achieving high correlation (\rho = 0.92) with human judgments on block-stacking stability and dynamic events like bumping, thus capturing everyday physical reasoning biases and illusions.^[31] For intuitive psychology, particularly theory of mind, Tenenbaum contributed to rational Bayesian models that infer others' mental states (beliefs, goals) from observed actions via probabilistic inference over goal-directed plans, as in the false-belief task where the model computes posteriors over belief representations to predict performance transitions in children, integrating evidential support for mistaken beliefs through hierarchical sampling of rational action principles. To facilitate these simulations, Tenenbaum co-developed the Church probabilistic programming language, a Lisp-based universal system for specifying stochastic generative models of cognitive processes, enabling modular composition of priors, likelihoods, and inference routines. Church supports exact and approximate inference via Monte Carlo methods like rejection sampling and Markov chain Monte Carlo, with features such as stochastic memoization for non-parametric models (e.g., infinite Gaussian mixtures or hierarchical Dirichlet processes) and query functions for conditioning on observations, allowing researchers to prototype and test Bayesian models of learning, causal reasoning, and planning—such as inferring diagnostic causes from symptoms or clustering data into cognitive categories—directly as executable code.^[32]

Impact on AI and Cognitive Science

Tenenbaum's research has significantly bridged human cognition and machine learning by emphasizing one-shot learning and reverse engineering intelligence, enabling AI systems to mimic the efficiency of human generalization from limited data. His work demonstrates how probabilistic models can invert compositional causal processes to achieve rapid learning of visual concepts, contrasting with data-intensive deep learning approaches that require thousands of examples. This paradigm shift has influenced AI development toward more robust, human-like inference, as evidenced by his advocacy for integrating cognitive principles to overcome limitations in current machine learning architectures.^[33]^[34] Through advancements in probabilistic programming, Tenenbaum has contributed foundational tools for constructing human-like AI systems, notably via the development of languages like Church that facilitate Bayesian inference over generative models of cognition. These frameworks allow machines to perform approximate inference on complex probabilistic programs, supporting tasks such as intuitive physics simulation and causal reasoning, which align AI more closely with human thought processes. His efforts have popularized probabilistic programming as a unifying approach for modeling common sense in both humans and machines, fostering interpretable and flexible AI architectures.^[35]^[36] Tenenbaum's studies on child learning have profoundly shaped AI by drawing parallels between infant cognition and machine robustness, arguing that exploring how children acquire concepts from sparse interactions can inform more adaptive AI systems. For instance, his lab's behavioral experiments with young learners reveal mechanisms of rapid concept formation that inspire AI models capable of few-shot adaptation in dynamic environments. This interdisciplinary lens has spurred initiatives to replicate developmental trajectories in AI, enhancing generalization beyond supervised datasets.^[37]^[38] His collaborations with leading AI labs, including DeepMind and MIT's CSAIL through projects like the Curious Minded Machine, have amplified his influence, integrating cognitive models into practical AI applications such as physics-aware simulations. As of November 2025, Tenenbaum's publications have garnered over 137,000 citations on Google Scholar, underscoring their widespread adoption in machine learning research.^[11]^[39]^[20] Recent extensions of his work include developments in world models for bilevel planning and domain-specific probabilistic programming languages like memo for Bayesian mechanics, advancing scalable AI systems that incorporate structured priors for complex decision-making and physical simulations.^[40]^[41] As a scientific director of MIT's Quest for Intelligence, Tenenbaum has driven efforts to cultivate collective human-AI intelligence, promoting initiatives that combine computational modeling with empirical studies to scale AI toward human-level understanding. This role has facilitated cross-disciplinary advancements, emphasizing ethical and foundational progress in AI aligned with cognitive science principles.^[3]^[42]

Awards and Honors

Prestigious Fellowships

In 2019, Joshua Tenenbaum was selected as a MacArthur Fellow by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, receiving an unrestricted grant of $625,000 disbursed over five years without any reporting requirements.^[1] The fellowship recognized his pioneering work in cognitive science, particularly for developing innovative probabilistic modeling approaches that integrate computational models with behavioral experiments to illuminate human learning, reasoning, and perception.^[43] Selection for the MacArthur Fellowship occurs through an anonymous nomination process, with candidates identified and vetted by a diverse advisory committee of experts who prioritize exceptional creativity and potential for future impact across fields. In 2023, Tenenbaum was named one of seven AI2050 Senior Fellows by Schmidt Sciences, an initiative of Schmidt Futures aimed at harnessing artificial intelligence for long-term societal benefits.^[36] This fellowship provides up to $1 million in funding over three years to support ambitious, interdisciplinary projects addressing AI's risks and opportunities.^[44] Tenenbaum's project focuses on scaling probabilistic models of cognition by drawing insights from human language learning to create more robust and human-like AI systems, with the goal of reverse-engineering intelligence to advance machine learning for societal good.^[45] Senior Fellows are chosen through a competitive, multi-stage review by expert panels emphasizing high-risk, high-reward research that tackles "hard problems" in AI, such as ensuring equitable and beneficial outcomes by 2050.^[7] These awards underscore Tenenbaum's influence in Bayesian cognitive science and its applications to AI development.^[1]

Scientific Awards

In 2008, Joshua Tenenbaum received the Distinguished Scientific Award for an Early Career Contribution to Psychology from the American Psychological Association, recognizing his innovative work in computational models of human cognition and learning.^[15] Tenenbaum was awarded the Troland Research Award from the National Academy of Sciences in 2011 for developing a groundbreaking Bayesian framework that advances understanding of cognitive processes, including perception, reasoning, and learning.^[46] In 2016, he earned the Howard Crosby Warren Medal from the Society of Experimental Psychologists, honoring his pioneering contributions to experimental psychology through computational approaches to inductive inference and intuitive physics.^[47] Tenenbaum was named R&D Magazine's Innovator of the Year in 2018 for his integrative research bridging cognitive science and artificial intelligence, particularly in building machine systems that mimic human-like reasoning and intelligence.^[48] In 2020, Tenenbaum was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, acknowledging his influential role in shaping computational cognitive science.^[49]

Selected Publications

Seminal Papers

Joshua Tenenbaum's seminal papers span machine learning, cognitive modeling, and AI, establishing key frameworks for understanding human-like inference and computation. These works emphasize probabilistic approaches to learning, structure in cognition, and scalable AI systems, influencing both theoretical and applied research. One of his earliest and most cited contributions is the 2000 paper A global geometric framework for nonlinear dimensionality reduction, published in Science, with over 18,000 citations as of 2025. Co-authored with Joshua B. Tenenbaum, Vin de Silva, and John C. Langford, it introduces the Isomap algorithm, which unfolds nonlinear manifolds in high-dimensional data by preserving geodesic distances, enabling effective visualization and analysis of complex datasets like facial images and handwritten digits.^[20] In cognitive science, the 2006 paper Theory-based Bayesian models of inductive learning and reasoning, appearing in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, has exceeded 1,200 citations. Written with Thomas L. Griffiths and Charles Kemp, it develops a Bayesian framework where inductive generalizations draw on structured theories as priors, combined with statistical evidence, to explain phenomena like property induction and category-based reasoning in human cognition.^[20] The 2011 review How to grow a mind: Statistics, structure, and abstraction, published in Science, has garnered more than 2,400 citations. Co-authored with Charles Kemp, Thomas L. Griffiths, and Noah D. Goodman, it synthesizes evidence that children's rapid learning arises from integrating probabilistic inference over causal structures with abstract compositional representations, proposing this triad as essential for building intuitive AI.^[20] A highly influential 2017 target article, Building machines that learn and think like people, in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, has over 4,100 citations. With Brenden M. Lake, Tomer D. Ullman, Samuel J. Gershman, and Fiery A. Cushman, it argues for core cognitive systems—like intuitive physics, psychology, and causal learning—modeled via probabilistic programs, to surpass deep learning's limitations in one-shot generalization and systematic reasoning.^[20] Reflecting Tenenbaum's recent work on language models, the 2023 paper Planning with Large Language Models for Code Generation, presented at ICLR, has nearly 200 citations. Co-authored with Shun Zhang, Zhenfang Chen, Yikang Shen, Mingyu Ding, and Chuang Gan, it shows how LLMs generate hierarchical plans to guide code synthesis, boosting accuracy on tasks requiring multi-step reasoning, such as algorithmic problem-solving.^[50]^[20]

Books and Reviews

Tenenbaum has co-authored several influential books that synthesize Bayesian approaches to modeling human cognition, emphasizing probabilistic inference as a core mechanism for learning and reasoning. In Bayesian Models of Cognition: Reverse Engineering the Mind (MIT Press, 2024), co-authored with Thomas L. Griffiths and Nick Chater, he outlines a unified framework for reverse-engineering cognitive processes through generative models and approximate inference techniques, drawing on examples from perception, language, and decision-making to illustrate how probabilistic methods capture the efficiency and flexibility of human intelligence.^[51] This textbook builds on earlier work to provide both theoretical foundations and practical tools for applying Bayesian cognition in computational models.^[51] Another key contribution is Probabilistic Models of Cognition (2nd edition, 2016), co-authored with Noah D. Goodman and a team of contributors including Daphna Buchsbaum and Joshua Hartshorne, which uses probabilistic programming languages like WebPPL to explore cognitive phenomena such as intuitive physics, causal reasoning, and social inference.^[35] The book demonstrates how structured probabilistic models can simulate human-like abstraction and generalization, serving as an accessible resource for integrating statistical inference with cognitive theory.^[35] Tenenbaum's chapters in edited volumes further extend these ideas, often serving as synthetic reviews of Bayesian methods in specific domains. In The Probabilistic Mind: Prospects for Bayesian Cognitive Science (Oxford University Press, 2008), edited by Nick Chater and Mike Oaksford, his chapter "Compositionality in rational analysis: Grammar-based induction for concept learning," co-authored with Noah D. Goodman, Thomas L. Griffiths, and Jacob Feldman, examines how recursive grammatical structures facilitate inductive learning of complex concepts from sparse data.^[52] This work highlights the role of compositional priors in enabling scalable Bayesian inference for hierarchical knowledge representation.^[52] In the Cambridge Handbook of Computational Psychology (Cambridge University Press, 2008), edited by Ron Sun, Tenenbaum's chapter "Bayesian models of cognition," co-authored with Griffiths and Charles Kemp, reviews foundational principles of Bayesian modeling, including hierarchical priors and Markov chain Monte Carlo inference, as applied to problems in categorization and causal discovery.^[53] Similarly, in the Oxford Handbook of Causal Reasoning (Oxford University Press, 2017), edited by Michael R. Waldmann, his chapter "Intuitive theories," co-authored with Tobias Gerstenberg, synthesizes evidence for how innate theory-like structures guide probabilistic causal inference across development and adulthood.^[5] These contributions underscore Tenenbaum's emphasis on integrating structure and flexibility in probabilistic frameworks to explain core aspects of human cognition.^[5]

References

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