From Model Training to Model Raising

Current AI training methods align models with human values only after their core capabilities have been established, resulting in models that are easily misaligned and lack deep-rooted value systems. We propose a paradigm shift from "model training" to "model raising", in which alignment is woven into a model's development from the start. We identify several key components for this paradigm, all centered around redesigning the training corpus: reframing training data from a first-person perspective, recontextualizing information as lived experience, simulating social interactions, and scaffolding the ordering of training data. We expect that this redesign of the training corpus will lead to an early commitment to values from the first training token onward, such that knowledge, skills, and values are intrinsically much harder to separate. In an ecosystem in which large language model capabilities start overtaking human capabilities in many tasks, this seems to us like a critical need.

SEAM: Semantically Equivalent Across Modalities Benchmark for Vision-Language Models

Evaluating whether vision-language models (VLMs) reason consistently across representations is challenging because modality comparisons are typically confounded by task differences and asymmetric information. We introduce SEAM, a benchmark that pairs semantically equivalent inputs across four domains that have existing standardized textual and visual notations. By employing distinct notation systems across modalities, in contrast to OCR-based image-text pairing, SEAM provides a rigorous comparative assessment of the textual-symbolic and visual-spatial reasoning capabilities of VLMs. Across 21 contemporary models, we observe systematic modality imbalance: vision frequently lags language in overall performance, despite the problems containing semantically equivalent information, and cross-modal agreement is relatively low. Our error analysis reveals two main drivers: textual perception failures from tokenization in domain notation and visual perception failures that induce hallucinations. We also show that our results are largely robust to visual transformations. SEAM establishes a controlled, semantically equivalent setting for measuring and improving modality-agnostic reasoning.

Maia-2: A Unified Model for Human-AI Alignment in Chess

There are an increasing number of domains in which artificial intelligence (AI) systems both surpass human ability and accurately model human behavior. This introduces the possibility of algorithmically-informed teaching in these domains through more relatable AI partners and deeper insights into human decision-making. Critical to achieving this goal, however, is coherently modeling human behavior at various skill levels. Chess is an ideal model system for conducting research into this kind of human-AI alignment, with its rich history as a pivotal testbed for AI research, mature superhuman AI systems like AlphaZero, and precise measurements of skill via chess rating systems. Previous work in modeling human decision-making in chess uses completely independent models to capture human style at different skill levels, meaning they lack coherence in their ability to adapt to the full spectrum of human improvement and are ultimately limited in their effectiveness as AI partners and teaching tools. In this work, we propose a unified modeling approach for human-AI alignment in chess that coherently captures human style across different skill levels and directly captures how people improve. Recognizing the complex, non-linear nature of human learning, we introduce a skill-aware attention mechanism to dynamically integrate players' strengths with encoded chess positions, enabling our model to be sensitive to evolving player skill. Our experimental results demonstrate that this unified framework significantly enhances the alignment between AI and human players across a diverse range of expertise levels, paving the way for deeper insights into human decision-making and AI-guided teaching tools.

Designing Skill-Compatible AI: Methodologies and Frameworks in Chess

Powerful artificial intelligence systems are often used in settings where they must interact with agents that are computationally much weaker, for example when they work alongside humans or operate in complex environments where some tasks are handled by algorithms, heuristics, or other entities of varying computational power. For AI agents to successfully interact in these settings, however, achieving superhuman performance alone is not sufficient; they also need to account for suboptimal actions or idiosyncratic style from their less-skilled counterparts. We propose a formal evaluation framework for assessing the compatibility of near-optimal AI with interaction partners who may have much lower levels of skill; we use popular collaborative chess variants as model systems to study and develop AI agents that can successfully interact with lower-skill entities. Traditional chess engines designed to output near-optimal moves prove to be inadequate partners when paired with engines of various lower skill levels in this domain, as they are not designed to consider the presence of other agents. We contribute three methodologies to explicitly create skill-compatible AI agents in complex decision-making settings, and two chess game frameworks designed to foster collaboration between powerful AI agents and less-skilled partners. On these frameworks, our agents outperform state-of-the-art chess AI (based on AlphaZero) despite being weaker in conventional chess, demonstrating that skill-compatibility is a tangible trait that is qualitatively and measurably distinct from raw performance. Our evaluations further explore and clarify the mechanisms by which our agents achieve skill-compatibility.

ICL Markup: Structuring In-Context Learning using Soft-Token Tags

Large pretrained language models (LLMs) can be rapidly adapted to a wide variety of tasks via a text-to-text approach, where the instruction and input are fed to the model in natural language. Combined with in-context learning (ICL), this paradigm is impressively flexible and powerful. However, it also burdens users with an overwhelming number of choices, many of them arbitrary. Inspired by markup languages like HTML, we contribute a method of using soft-token tags to compose prompt templates. This approach reduces arbitrary decisions and streamlines the application of ICL. Our method is a form of meta-learning for ICL; it learns these tags in advance during a parameter-efficient fine-tuning ``warm-up'' process. The tags can subsequently be used in templates for ICL on new, unseen tasks without any additional fine-tuning. Our experiments with this approach yield promising initial results, improving LLM performance on important enterprise applications such as few-shot and open-world intent detection, as well as text classification in news and legal domains.

Sparsify-then-Classify: From Internal Neurons of Large Language Models To Efficient Text Classifiers

Among the many tasks that Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized is text classification. However, existing approaches for applying pretrained LLMs to text classification predominantly rely on using single token outputs from only the last layer of hidden states. As a result, they suffer from limitations in efficiency, task-specificity, and interpretability. In our work, we contribute an approach that uses all internal representations by employing multiple pooling strategies on all activation and hidden states. Our novel lightweight strategy, Sparsify-then-Classify (STC) first sparsifies task-specific features layer-by-layer, then aggregates across layers for text classification. STC can be applied as a seamless plug-and-play module on top of existing LLMs. Our experiments on a comprehensive set of models and datasets demonstrate that STC not only consistently improves the classification performance of pretrained and fine-tuned models, but is also more efficient for both training and inference, and is more intrinsically interpretable.

Generating Faithful Synthetic Data with Large Language Models: A Case Study in Computational Social Science

Large Language Models (LLMs) have democratized synthetic data generation, which in turn has the potential to simplify and broaden a wide gamut of NLP tasks. Here, we tackle a pervasive problem in synthetic data generation: its generative distribution often differs from the distribution of real-world data researchers care about (in other words, it is unfaithful). In a case study on sarcasm detection, we study three strategies to increase the faithfulness of synthetic data: grounding, filtering, and taxonomy-based generation. We evaluate these strategies using the performance of classifiers trained with generated synthetic data on real-world data. While all three strategies improve the performance of classifiers, we find that grounding works best for the task at hand. As synthetic data generation plays an ever-increasing role in NLP research, we expect this work to be a stepping stone in improving its utility. We conclude this paper with some recommendations on how to generate high(er)-fidelity synthetic data for specific tasks.

Detecting Individual Decision-Making Style: Exploring Behavioral Stylometry in Chess

The advent of machine learning models that surpass human decision-making ability in complex domains has initiated a movement towards building AI systems that interact with humans. Many building blocks are essential for this activity, with a central one being the algorithmic characterization of human behavior. While much of the existing work focuses on aggregate human behavior, an important long-range goal is to develop behavioral models that specialize to individual people and can differentiate among them. To formalize this process, we study the problem of behavioral stylometry, in which the task is to identify a decision-maker from their decisions alone. We present a transformer-based approach to behavioral stylometry in the context of chess, where one attempts to identify the player who played a set of games. Our method operates in a few-shot classification framework, and can correctly identify a player from among thousands of candidate players with 98% accuracy given only 100 labeled games. Even when trained on amateur play, our method generalises to out-of-distribution samples of Grandmaster players, despite the dramatic differences between amateur and world-class players. Finally, we consider more broadly what our resulting embeddings reveal about human style in chess, as well as the potential ethical implications of powerful methods for identifying individuals from behavioral data.

Mimetic Models: Ethical Implications of AI that Acts Like You

An emerging theme in artificial intelligence research is the creation of models to simulate the decisions and behavior of specific people, in domains including game-playing, text generation, and artistic expression. These models go beyond earlier approaches in the way they are tailored to individuals, and the way they are designed for interaction rather than simply the reproduction of fixed, pre-computed behaviors. We refer to these as mimetic models, and in this paper we develop a framework for characterizing the ethical and social issues raised by their growing availability. Our framework includes a number of distinct scenarios for the use of such models, and considers the impacts on a range of different participants, including the target being modeled, the operator who deploys the model, and the entities that interact with it.

Community embeddings reveal large-scale cultural organization of online platforms

Optimism about the Internet's potential to bring the world together has been tempered by concerns about its role in inflaming the 'culture wars'. Via mass selection into like-minded groups, online society may be becoming more fragmented and polarized, particularly with respect to partisan differences. However, our ability to measure the cultural makeup of online communities, and in turn understand the cultural structure of online platforms, is limited by the pseudonymous, unstructured, and large-scale nature of digital discussion. Here we develop a neural embedding methodology to quantify the positioning of online communities along cultural dimensions by leveraging large-scale patterns of aggregate behaviour. Applying our methodology to 4.8B Reddit comments made in 10K communities over 14 years, we find that the macro-scale community structure is organized along cultural lines, and that relationships between online cultural concepts are more complex than simply reflecting their offline analogues. Examining political content, we show Reddit underwent a significant polarization event around the 2016 U.S. presidential election, and remained highly polarized for years afterward. Contrary to conventional wisdom, however, instances of individual users becoming more polarized over time are rare; the majority of platform-level polarization is driven by the arrival of new and newly political users. Our methodology is broadly applicable to the study of online culture, and our findings have implications for the design of online platforms, understanding the cultural contexts of online content, and quantifying cultural shifts in online behaviour.