Sarah A. Wu
I am a Ph.D. student in Psychology at Stanford University, advised by Tobi Gerstenberg and supported by a Stanford Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellowship and an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. Previously, I studied math, computer science, and cognitive science at MIT, where I worked with Max Kleiman-Weiner and Ted Gibson.
CV GITHUB sarahawu@stanford.edu
Preprints
Sarah A. Wu, Shruti Sridhar, and Tobias Gerstenberg (submitted). Helping and hindering as counterfactual difference-making.
Archival Publications
Neha Balamurugan, Sarah A. Wu, Adam Chun, Gabe Gaw, Cristobal Eyzaguirre, and Tobias Gerstenberg (2026). Spot The Ball: A Benchmark for Visual Social Inference. Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR).
Carlota Parés-Morlans, Michelle Yi, Claire Chen, Sarah A. Wu, Rika Antonova, Tobias Gerstenberg, and Jeannette Bohg (2025). Causal-PIK: Causality-based physical reasoning with a physics-informed kernel. International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML).
Emily Jin, Zhuoyi Huang, Jan-Philipp Fränken, Weiyu Liu, Hannah Cha, Erik Brockbank, Sarah A. Wu, Ruohan Zhang, Jiajun Wu, and Tobias Gerstenberg (2024). MARPLE: A Benchmark for Long-Horizon Inference. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS).
Sarah A. Wu and Tobias Gerstenberg (2023). If not me, then who? Responsibility and replacement. Cognition, 242, 105646.
Rose E. Wang*, Sarah A. Wu*, James A. Evans, Joshua B. Tenenbaum, David C. Parkes, and Max Kleiman-Weiner (2021). Too many cooks: Bayesian inference for coordinating multi-agent collaboration. In S. Muggleton and N. Charter (Ed.), Human-like Machine Intelligence, 152-170.Oxford University Press.
Sarah A. Wu*, Rose E. Wang*, James A. Evans, Joshua B. Tenenbaum, David C. Parkes, and Max Kleiman-Weiner (2021). Too many cooks: Bayesian inference for coordinating multi-agent collaboration. Topics in Cognitive Science, 13(2), 414-432.
Sarah A. Wu and Edward Gibson (2021). Word order predicts cross-linguistic differences in the production of redundant color and number modifiers. Cognitive Science, 45(1), e12934.
Other Publications
Sarah A. Wu, Siying Zhang, and Tobias Gerstenberg (2026). How to make a reasonable person. Proceedings of the 48th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.
Chuqi Hu, Tobias Gerstenberg, and Sarah A. Wu (2026). Responsibility for influencing others. Proceedings of the 48th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.
Victor Btesh, Sarah A. Wu, and Tobias Gerstenberg (2026). Action understanding with presentational goals. Proceedings of the 48th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.
Verona Teo, Sarah A. Wu, Erik Brockbank, and Tobias Gerstenberg (2025). Leave a trace: Recursive reasoning about deceptive behavior. Proceedings of the 47th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.
Sarah A. Wu*, Erik Brockbank*, Hannah Cha, Jan-Philipp Fränken, Emily Jin, Zhuoyi Huang, Weiyu Liu, Ruohan Zhang, Jiajun Wu, and Tobias Gerstenberg (2024). Whodunnit? Inferring what happened from multimodal evidence. Proceedings of the 46th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.
Sarah A. Wu, Xiang Ren, Sydney Levine (2024). Resource-rational moral judgment. Proceedings of the 46th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.
Sarah A. Wu, Shruti Sridhar, and Tobias Gerstenberg (2023). A computational model of responsibility judgments from counterfactual simulations and intention inferences. Proceedings of the 45th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.
Sarah A. Wu, Shruti Sridhar, and Tobias Gerstenberg (2022). That was close! A counterfactual simulation model of causal judgments about decisions. Proceedings of the 44th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.
Miscellaneous

Outside of research, I enjoy running, reading, drinking boba, and making ceramics. I am committed to promoting diversity and inclusion in science, and formerly led a high school science outreach program called Stanford FAST.

Third place winner of the CogSci Mind Challenge, 2023
chalk art chalk art chalk art 1 chalk art 2 chalk art 3 chalk art 4 chalk art 5 chalk art 6 chalk art 7 chalk art 8 chalk art 9 chalk art 10
Select chalk art for MIT Chalk of the Day, 2016–2020
MIT Technique layout
Design and layout for MIT Technique 2020, vol. 136