Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Byron Wallace @byron.bsky.social · 9d

Can we distill *circuits* from teacher models into smaller students? 👇

Somin W @sominw.bsky.social · 9d

🔊 New work w/ @silvioamir.bsky.social & @byron.bsky.social! We show you can distill a model’s mechanism, not just its answers -- teaching a small LM to run it's circuit same as a larger teacher model. We call it Circuit Distillation. (1/4)

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Reposted by Byron Wallace

David Bau @davidbau.bsky.social · 12d

Who is going to be at #COLM2025?

I want to draw your attention to a COLM paper by my student @sfeucht.bsky.social that has totally changed the way I think and teach about LLM representations. The work is worth knowing.

And you can meet Sheridan at COLM, Oct 7!
bsky.app/profile/sfe...

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Byron Wallace @byron.bsky.social · 16d

Can we quantify what makes some text read like AI "slop"? We tried 👇

Chantal @chantalsh.bsky.social · 16d

"AI slop" seems to be everywhere, but what exactly makes text feel like "slop"?

In our new work (w/ @tuhinchakr.bsky.social, Diego Garcia-Olano, @byron.bsky.social ) we provide a systematic attempt at measuring AI "slop" in text!

arxiv.org/abs/2509.19163

🧵 (1/7)

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Reposted by Byron Wallace

Naomi Saphra @nsaphra.bsky.social · 22d

Our new paper asks: what is the goal of “natural language verbalization” interpretability approaches? If a verbalizer is supposed to tell us something about what’s in the target LM and NOT just what’s in the verbalizer LM, how do we actually evaluate that?

Millicent Li @millicentli.bsky.social · 22d

In short: Verbalizer evals are broken! To know what info a model REMOVES from input, reconstruction is better than verbalization. And verbalization tells very little about what a model ADDS to input! w/A. Ceballos, G. Rogers, @nsaphra.bsky.social @byron.bsky.social

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Do Natural Language Descriptions of Model Activations Convey Privileged Information?

Recent interpretability methods have proposed to translate LLM internal representations into natural language descriptions using a second verbalizer LLM. This is intended to illuminate how the target ...

arxiv.org

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Reposted by Byron Wallace

Millicent Li @millicentli.bsky.social · 22d

Wouldn’t it be great to have questions about LM internals answered in plain English? That’s the promise of verbalization interpretability. Unfortunately, our new paper shows that evaluating these methods is nuanced—and verbalizers might not tell us what we hope they do. 🧵👇1/8

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Reposted by Byron Wallace

Hye Sun Yun @hyesunyun.bsky.social · Aug 25

Thrilled to share our research showing how LLM models can be influenced by bias from "spun" medical literature is now featured in Northeastern's Khoury news! This shows critical insights as AI enters healthcare.
The full paper can be found at arxiv.org/abs/2502.07963

As AI expands into medicine, Northeastern study finds AI models influenced by medical bias - Khoury College of Computer Sciences

Humans can be easily influenced by language that is one-sided, especially in complex fields like medicine. But a new Khoury-led study shows that large language models, too, can be tricked […]

khoury.northeastern.edu

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Reposted by Byron Wallace

David Bau @davidbau.bsky.social · Aug 18

This Friday NEMI 2025 is at Northeastern in Boston, 8 talks, 24 roundtables, 90 posters; 200+ attendees. Thanks to
goodfire.ai/ for sponsoring! nemiconf.github.io/summer25/

If you can't make it in person, the livestream will be here:
www.youtube.com/live/4BJBis...

New England Mechanistic Interpretability Workshop

About:The New England Mechanistic Interpretability (NEMI) workshop aims to bring together academic and industry researchers from the New England and surround...

www.youtube.com

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Reposted by Byron Wallace

Monica M Reddy @monicamreddy.bsky.social · Aug 11

📢 How factual are LLMs in healthcare?
We’re excited to release FactEHR — a new benchmark to evaluate factuality in clinical notes. As generative AI enters the clinic, we need rigorous, source-grounded tools to measure what these models get right — and what they don’t. 🏥 🤖

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Reposted by Byron Wallace

Yuval Pinter @uvp.bsky.social · Jul 19

Chatted with @byron.bsky.social at icml about my recent work, so look out for his upcoming "Tokenization is More Than More Than Compression".

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Reposted by Byron Wallace

Lily Chen @lilywchen.bsky.social · Jul 1

Are we fact-checking medical claims the right way? 🩺🤔

Probably not. In our study, even experts struggled to verify Reddit health claims using end-to-end systems.

We show why—and argue fact-checking should be a dialogue, with patients in the loop

arxiv.org/abs/2506.20876

🧵1/

An overview of our AI-in-the-loop expert study pipeline: given a claim from a subreddit, we extract the PIO elements and retrieve the evidence automatically. The evidence, its context, and the evidence are then presented to a medical expert to provide a judgment and a rationale for the factuality of the claim.

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Reposted by Byron Wallace

Sheridan Feucht @ COLM @sfeucht.bsky.social · Apr 7

[📄] Are LLMs mindless token-shifters, or do they build meaningful representations of language? We study how LLMs copy text in-context, and physically separate out two types of induction heads: token heads, which copy literal tokens, and concept heads, which copy word meanings.

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Reposted by Byron Wallace

Chantal @chantalsh.bsky.social · Mar 10

I'm searching for some comp/ling experts to provide a precise definition of “slop” as it refers to text (see: corp.oup.com/word-of-the-...)

I put together a google form that should take no longer than 10 minutes to complete: forms.gle/oWxsCScW3dJU...
If you can help, I'd appreciate your input! 🙏

Oxford Word of the Year 2024 - Oxford University Press

The Oxford Word of the Year 2024 is 'brain rot'. Discover more about the winner, our shortlist, and 20 years of words that reflect the world.

corp.oup.com

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Reposted by Byron Wallace

Jessy Li @jessyjli.bsky.social · Feb 25

🌟Job ad🌟 We (@gregdnlp.bsky.social, @mattlease.bsky.social and I) are hiring a postdoc fellow within the CosmicAI Institute, to do galactic work with LLMs and generative AI! If you would like to push the frontiers of foundation models to help solve myths of the universe, please apply!

NSF-Simons AI Institute for Cosmic Origins (CosmicAI) @nsfsimonscosmicai.bsky.social · Feb 25

Seeking candidates (within three years of the award of their PhD) for a postdoctoral position with the Explorable Universe research group to perform research on developing next-generation generative AI copilots & agents to aid astronomy research. Info here www.cosmicai.org/jobs/postdoc...

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Reposted by Byron Wallace

Hiba Ahsan @hibaahsan.bsky.social · Feb 22

LLMs are known to perpetuate social biases in clinical tasks. Can we locate and intervene upon LLM activations that encode patient demographics like gender and race? 🧵

Work w/ @arnabsensharma.bsky.social, @silvioamir.bsky.social, @davidbau.bsky.social, @byron.bsky.social

arxiv.org/abs/2502.13319

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Reposted by Byron Wallace

Hye Sun Yun @hyesunyun.bsky.social · Feb 15

🚨 Do LLMs fall for spin in medical literature? 🤔

In our new preprint, we find that LLMs are susceptible to biased reporting of clinical treatment benefits in abstracts—more so than human experts. 📄🔍 [1/7]

Full Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2502.07963

🧵👇

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Reposted by Byron Wallace

Somin W @sominw.bsky.social · Feb 11

📢 Can we trace a small distilled model back to its teacher? 🤔New work (w/ @chantalsh.bsky.social, @silvioamir.bsky.social & @byron.bsky.social) finds some footprints left by LLMs in distillation! [1/6]

🔗 Full paper: arxiv.org/abs/2502.06659

Who Taught You That? Tracing Teachers in Model Distillation

Model distillation -- using outputs from a large teacher model to teach a small student model -- is a practical means of creating efficient models for a particular task. We ask: Can we identify a stud...

arxiv.org

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Reposted by Byron Wallace

David Bau @davidbau.bsky.social · Jan 31

DeepSeek R1 shows how important it is to be studying the internals of reasoning models. Try our code: Here @canrager.bsky.social shows a method for auditing AI bias by probing the internal monologue.

dsthoughts.baulab.info

I'd be interested in your thoughts.

dsthoughts.baulab

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Reposted by Byron Wallace

ijmarshall.bsky.social @ijmarshall.bsky.social · Jan 27

📣 🌍 We're hiring for 2 Machine Learning researchers to join SOLACE-AI @kingscollegelondon.bsky.social , funded by @wellcometrust.bsky.social . This is your chance to develop cutting-edge AI to directly impact global health responses to climate emergencies. jobs.ac.uk/job/DLM377

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Reposted by Byron Wallace

Luca Soldaini 🎀 @soldaini.net · Nov 26

OLMo 2 is out 🥳 7B and 13B trained on 5T tokens, and meticulousy instruction tuned using Tulu 3 recipe.

Simply the best fully open models yet.

Really proud of the work & the amazing team at
@ai2.bsky.social

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Byron Wallace @byron.bsky.social · Nov 9

And Sheridan Feucht investigates the "implicit vocabulary" of LLMs via token erasure: arxiv.org/abs/2406.20086 (w/David Atkinson and @davidbau.bsky.social)

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Byron Wallace @byron.bsky.social · Nov 9

Somin Wadhwa has some intriguing findings on distillation with "chain of thought" sequences (e.g., this works better when "reasoning" follows labels, and individual tokens seem to be sufficient): arxiv.org/abs/2406.14511 (w/@Silvio Amir)

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Byron Wallace @byron.bsky.social · Nov 9

Chantal Shaib reports on syntactic "templates" that LLM's like to repeat: arxiv.org/abs/2407.00211 (w/@yanai.bsky.social and @jessyjli.bsky.social)

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Byron Wallace @byron.bsky.social · Nov 9

I'll be @ #EMNLP2024 if anyone wants to find snobby coffee / despair about election / or I guess talk research. Some work to be presented👇

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Reposted by Byron Wallace

Jered McInerney @dmcinerney.bsky.social · Feb 28

Our work on reducing diagnostic errors with interpretable risk prediction is now on arXiv!

We retrieve evidence from a patient’s record, visualize how it informs a prediction, and test it in a realistic setting. 👇 (1/6)

arxiv.org/abs/2402.10109
w/ @byron.bsky.social and @jwvdm.bsky.social

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Reposted by Byron Wallace

Jessy Li @jessyjli.bsky.social · Nov 14

To appear #EMNLP2023! Can LMs simplify medical texts in non-English languages? We introduce⚕️MultiCochrane: the *first* multilingual, aligned dataset for this. arxiv.org/abs/2305.12532. Led by Sebastian Joseph, also w/ @byron.bsky.social Wei Xu

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