Associate Professor @hseas. Information theorist, but only asymptotically. Brasileiro/American.

Cambridge, MA
๐Ÿ“ฃ Excited to announce our oral presentation at #ICLR! LLMs capture rich semantic structure, as evidenced by their strong performance across a wide range of language and reasoning tasks. But Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs), a popular interpretability tool, mostly learn local, noisy, token-level features when applied to LLMs (e.g., hundreds of features for the word โ€œtheโ€). So why arenโ€™t SAEs finding that rich semantic structure? ๐Ÿ‘‰ Because they ignore the sequential nature of language. We introduce Temporal SAEs to bridge this gap. arxiv.org/abs/2511.05541 ๐Ÿงต [1/N]
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Flavio Calmon retweeted
Can GenAI agents๐Ÿค– manage a supply chain? Lessons from the classical beer game๐Ÿบ (1/n) @davidsimchilevi @FlavioCalmon @AndreCalmon
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โ€ผ๏ธ๐Ÿ•šNew paper alert with @ushabhalla_: Leveraging the Sequential Nature of Language for Interpretability (openreview.net/pdf?id=hgPf1kโ€ฆ)! 1/n
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Flavio Calmon retweeted
How can we improve LLMs without any additional training? ๐Ÿค” The standard playbook is using Best-of-N: generate N responses โžก๏ธ use a reward model to score them โžก๏ธ pick the best ๐Ÿ† More responses = better results... right? Well, not exactly. You might be reward hacking! Instead, you should hedge! ๐ŸŽฏ
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Flavio Calmon retweeted
Can we use coding-theory, heavy-tailed distributions, and optimal-transport to create ๐˜‡๐—ฒ๐—ฟ๐—ผ-๐—ฑ๐—ถ๐˜€๐˜๐—ผ๐—ฟ๐˜๐—ถ๐—ผ๐—ป, ๐—ฒ๐—ฎ๐˜€๐˜† ๐˜๐—ผ ๐˜‚๐˜€๐—ฒ, ๐˜„๐—ฎ๐˜๐—ฒ๐—ฟ๐—บ๐—ฎ๐—ฟ๐—ธ๐˜€ ๐—ณ๐—ผ๐—ฟ ๐—Ÿ๐—Ÿ๐— ๐˜€? We show they can โ€” and the result is pretty exciting! ๐ŸŽ‰ ๐Ÿงต (1/n)
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Flavio Calmon retweeted
Happy to share we received best paper at NENLP workshop at Yale ๐Ÿฅณ๐Ÿฅณ! tldr: Current alignment methods give excessive discretion to annotators in defining what good behavior means. This means we don't know what we are aligning to โ€ผ๏ธ We formalize discretion in alignment and propose mechanisms for data curators & model developers to monitor for it. Paper link below โฌ‡๏ธ
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Flavio Calmon retweeted
[1/x] ๐Ÿš€ We're excited to share our latest work on improving inference-time efficiency for LLMs through KV cache quantization---a key step toward making long-context reasoning more scalable and memory-efficient.
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AI is built to โ€œbe helpfulโ€ or โ€œavoid harmโ€, but which principles should it prioritize and when? We call this alignment discretion. As Asimov's stories show: balancing principles for AI behavior is tricky. In fact, we find that AI has its own set of priorities (comic @xkcd)๐Ÿ‘‡
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Flavio Calmon retweeted
The standard practice in differential privacy of targeting ฮต at small ฮด is extremely lossy for interpreting the level of privacy protection. In practice (e.g., for DP-SGD), we can do much better! We show how in the #NeurIPS2024 paper: arxiv.org/abs/2407.02191 Short summary๐Ÿ‘‡
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Flavio Calmon retweeted
Imagine an all-powerful AI with any ideology you don't agree with! Super proud of this work, where we show that every LLM reflects a different ideological worldview, which should worry everyone.
Imagine an all-powerful woke AI
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Finally, I am pleased to announce ๐ŸชขInterpreting CLIP with Sparse Linear Concept Embeddings (SpLiCE)๐Ÿชข Joint work with Usha Bhalla, as well as @Suuraj, @FlavioCalmon, and @hima_lakkaraju, which was just accepted to NeurIPS 2024! Check out the paper here: arxiv.org/abs/2402.10376
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Part 2 of my 2024 publication tweets! Please welcome Multi-group Proportional Representation, a novel metric for measuring representation in image generation and retrieval. This work was recently accepted at @NeurIPSConf 2024. (1/n)
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First up, how do various aspects of trustworthy machine learning interact? Can we expect a production ML system to satisfy all regulatory requirements of fairness, privacy, and interpretability simultaneously when past research generally focuses on one component at a time? (1/n)
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Mario Diaz Torres, a brilliant researcher and mathematician, passed away suddenly on August 31st. @MDMarioDiaz was a rising star in the LatAm math community and was doing exceptional work in information theory, differential privacy, and related areas. bit.ly/4d9XGPB
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Mario was incredibly passionate about math, information theory, and statistics. He was homeschooling his son so he could โ€œteach him math in a principled and advanced manner.โ€ Now his family really needs our support. Please consider donating here: gofund.me/07df91a5
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Mario was a friend, close collaborator, and the first post-doc I hired at Harvard. This is a devastating loss to our community. Please consider reading one of Mario's papers this week. You can also learn more about his research here: bit.ly/3XCNxW2
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This week, I spoke on the panel โ€œAI, Rights, and Democracyโ€ at the Brazilian Supreme Court. Thank you @STF_oficial for the invitation. It was an incredible experience! See my talk (in pt-br) here: piped.video/mNkZ_Aw2tFs&t=4002s
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Flavio Calmon retweeted
Back home from FAccT - I thankful for the work our community is doing & the values it stands for. Serving it has been a labor of love for me & I am beyond grateful to have done so this year along my truly wonderful program co-chairs & human beings @mikarv @RDBinns @FlavioCalmon
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