Manuel Cherep

New paper in @PNASNews: we find that AI agents are sensitive to nudges, often more than humans.

Defaults, suggestions, and highlighted information can alter model behavior substantially—for both better and worse.

We believe this has important implications for agent design and delegation.

Work w/ @nikhilsinghmus @PattieMaes

pnas.org/doi/full/10.10…

As a reviewer, all I see are AI slop papers. As an author, all I get are AI slop reviews.

Can’t wait to read the AI summaries of the rebuttal period from the ACs!

Bonus points if you also got all reviewers with “broad familiarity with this field but little or no direct research experience on this topic.”

#ICLR2027

The Workshop on Agent Behavior is tomorrow starting at 8:30 AM in Continental Ballroom 4! If you’re @COLM_conf come check it out. We have some amazing speakers giving very different perspectives on how to study agents.

I'm at COLM this week! If you're interested in chatting about AI agent vs human behavior, feel free to reach out :) I will also be on campus at Stanford (Oct 6-7) and Berkeley (Oct 8)

Last week, I was invited to present our @icmlconf 2026 paper “Visual Persuasion: What Influences Decisions of Vision-Language Models?” at the ECCV VisPer Workshop.

We created a visual prompt optimization method (CVPO), in which we iteratively edit images (e.g., w/ @NanoBanana 🍌) to maximize the feedback given by VLM judges. While this method can be used for lots of applications, we use it to discover factors that persuade agents (and, as a proxy, people) while making decisions. More details and examples below!

Work w/ Pranav M R*, @PattieMaes, and @nikhilsinghmus