Aligning an AI with human preferences might be hard. But there is more than one AI out there, and users can choose which to use. Can we get the benefits of a fully aligned AI without solving the alignment problem? In a new paper we study a setting in which the answer is yes.

A great initiative for the FORC community --- if you know a graduating student working on theoretical/mathematical aspects of responsible computing, send them this way.

📢Adam Smith, @gautamkamath.com, and I are putting together a list of job market candidates in Foundations of Responsible Computing! Last year's list was a great success so we're keeping it going! If you want to be included, or nominate someone, see link in the replies!

New ChatGPT data just dropped

If you oppose this it's because you want line go down, but I want line go up. COMIC ◆ www.smbc-comics.com/comic/protocol PATREON ◆ www.patreon.com/c/ZachWeiner... STORE ◆ smbc-store.myshopify.com

I was the AEA's President Elect as the first Trump term began. We worried about government statistics then, and appointed a committee that included members (such as Google's Chief Economist) who might be in a position to help make reliable statistics available if the government went dark. #econsky

Tried this out; generally very impressed with the quality of the feedback!

Suppose we have a regression problem that many people want to solve, but information is distributed across agents --- different agents see different subsets of features. And the agents are embedded in a network (DAG). When one makes predictions, they are observed by its children.

Come say hi at our #ICML poster today during Poster Session 1 (W-600)! Joint work with @ericeaton.bsky.social @marcelhussing.bsky.social @optimistsinc.bsky.social @aaroth.bsky.social @mkearnsphilly.bsky.social! arxiv.org/abs/2502.11828

Delighted (and honestly a little bit stunned) that our paper “Swap Regret and Correlated Equilibria Beyond Normal-Form Games” was just awarded both the “Best Paper” and “Best Student Paper” at EC! arxiv.org/abs/2502.20229

Agentic LLM tooling like Windsurf is amazing. But you can already tell from the interface (you can pick from two dozen models from half a dozen different model providers, seamlessly) that AI is going to be a commodity. Not at all clear that LLM developers will get the surplus.

The United States has had a tremendous advantage in science and technology because it has been the consensus gathering point: the best students worldwide want to study and work in the US because that is where the best students are studying and working. 1/

Check out the terrific set of EC 2025 accepted papers! ec25.sigecom.org/program/acce...

Wow! arxiv.org/abs/2504.09096

Suppose you and I both have different features about the same instance. Maybe I have CT scans and you have physician notes. We'd like to collaborate to make predictions that are more accurate than possible from either feature set alone, while only having to train on our own data.

TheoryML Bluesky: Where can I find a reference for the sequential fat shattering dimension of norm bounded linear functions in d dimensions?

Its interesting to see OpenAI slowly tighten the guardrails around the Studio Ghibli meme.

My first attempt at writing a Philosophy paper with Alex. Forthcoming in Philosophy of Science! We study the reference class problem which is about the indeterminacy of "individual probabilities" from data. What is the chance that Alice will die in the next 12 months? philsci-archive.pitt.edu/23589/

Is the distinction between "aleatoric" and "epistemic" uncertainty practically meaningful (or even well defined) in any real sense? Aleotoric uncertainty refers to irreducible unpredictability (e.g. unrealized randomness in nature) whereas epistemic refers to model uncertainty.

What do a computer scientist, an economist & two legal scholars have in common? They all worry about algorithmic collusion. Join us for an interdisciplinary online event on March 21 at 1PM Central Time. 1/2

Wow, the whole EC 2025 PC got their first round reviews in a day early! Except for one of them. You know who you are. The whole PC knows who you are. Get those reviews in ASAP and minimize embarrassment!

(This paper looks really cool --- finding the right definition of swap regret from a strategic and computational standpoint once you move beyond games in which you randomize over "pure" strategies)

What should swap-regret mean beyond normal-form games? We have a new paper (@ncollina.bsky.social, Mehryar Mohri, Yishay Mansour, Jon Schneider, Balu Sivan) tackling this question and providing a definitive answer! (thread) arxiv.org/abs/2502.20229

Alex Tolbert is running a stellar conference next week at Emory that I am bummed to be missing out on. The speaker lineup is especially remarkable- spanning theoretical computer science to machine learning to law to philosophy. You should go and enjoy it for me. 39893947.hs-sites.com/aiethicsconf...

Can you solve group-conditional online conformal prediction with a no-regret learning algorithm? Not with vanilla regret, but -yes- with swap regret. And algorithms from the follow-the-regularized leader family (notably online gradient descent) work really well for other reasons.

Congrats to @ncollina.bsky.social on winning an IBM Research fellowship! research.ibm.com/university/a...

Conflicted about whether to agree here

Eagles fans on the PC: every time you climb a poll, bid on a paper. If it is greased, bid on two. If it collapses, bid on 5.

I guess everyone is done with bidding

P-C-B-I-D-S bidding!!! Let's go reviewers, you got this!

A guess: The uncertainty in science funding in the US will -already- have a huge affect on PhD admissions for engineering schools this cycle, even before funding reductions hit (if they do). I expect historically low class sizes in CS PhD programs. Not good for US AI leadership.

EC 2025 (S)PC --- lets get ready for the Super Bowl! Every time there is a first down, bid on a paper. Field goal? Bid on two. Touchdown? Bid on 5 papers (10 if its the Eagles!) At the halftime show enter your topic preferences and conflicts. Lets go birds!

What are prediction sets good for? It turns out just as calibration is the "right" way of quantifying uncertainty for risk-neutral (expectation maximizing) decision makers, prediction sets are the right way of quantifying uncertainty for certain kinds of risk-averse decision makers.

If you're on the PC/SPC of @acmsigecom.bsky.social #AcmEC25 and struggle with keeping track of your bids, GPT-4o provided a small script that if run in the Chrome console, counts for you how many papers you rated at each bid level so far (divided into three posts due to length reasons):

A neat looking new paper by Behzad, Casacuberta, Diana, and Tolbert looking at practical solutions to model multiplicity problems. arxiv.org/abs/2501.16549

For no particular reason, what do you think were the most interesting areas of research at the econ/cs boundary in 2024?

EC 2025 will be held at Stanford from July 7-12. Itai Ashlagi and I are the chairs. The abstract deadline is February 3, and the paper deadline is February 10. The scope is inclusive of many topics across CS, economics, and operations research. Submit your best work!

Today I got some good news—I’ve been awarded the 2024-2025 IBM PhD Fellowship! A really wonderful way to close out 2024, a year in which I poured a lot of time, energy and excitement into my research.

EC 2025 will be held at Stanford from July 7-12. Itai Ashlagi and I are the chairs. The abstract deadline is February 3, and the paper deadline is February 10. The scope is inclusive of many topics across CS, economics, and operations research. Submit your best work!

New paper with @epsilonrational.bsky.social and Jon Schneider! Say you’re playing a repeated game against an opponent who will best-respond to your algorithm, but you only have a prior over their utility. What algorithm should you deploy to maximize your expected utility? arxiv.org/abs/2412.182...

With @adamsmith.xyz and @thejonullman.bsky.social, we have compiled a set of profiles of 29 people in the "foundations of responsible computing" community ("mathematical research in computation and society writ large") who are on the faculty job market. Link: drive.google.com/file/d/1Hyvg... 1/3

"If you don't know the answer to a question, please don't share false information 🥺" 70-odd years of computing and we're now pleading with systems beyond our understanding in hopes that they don't embarrass us 🙏

Our 4-year-old was crying on the floor insisting that the fact that I wouldn't let him have a candy cane before dinner was unfair. I corrected him that it was clearly fair, and that what he probably meant was that it was unjust. Unfortunately this didn't seem to resolve the situation.

A statistic I've seen repeated in the discussion of health insurance is that UHC used an "AI with a 90% error rate" to deny claims. Recently I saw it repeated twice here: dailynous.com/2024/12/15/c... in which a moral philosopher struggles to figure out if murdering health insurance CEOs is moral.

Michael Kearns is here! @mkearnsphilly.bsky.social

If you are at #NeurIPS, we will be presenting this work (#6610) from 4:30-7:30PM today and would love to chat! @marcelhussing.bsky.social @optimistsinc.bsky.social @aaroth.bsky.social

Elon Musk, billionaire owner of Tesla, once belonged to a group of businessmen who played ruthless capitalists. In the game, called "Monopoly," players aggressively pursue a plan of real estate domination, buying land and building homes and even hotels, while trying to avoid being sent to jail.

All videos of #ACMEC24 workshops are now online on the @acmsigecom.bsky.social YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/playlist?lis... Thank you @yannaigonch.bsky.social

Reading through some lecture notes (from 2010) to remind myself about properties of Kernels.

The 2024 Junior Theorists Workshop is Thursday (at Northwestern) and Friday (at TTIC), Dec 5-6. There is a stellar lineup of outstanding junior computer science theorists who are making the future happen. Come!! theory.cs.northwestern.edu/junior-theor...