Excited about a new paper! Multicalibration turns out to be strictly harder than marginal calibration. We prove tight Omega(T^{2/3}) lower bounds for online multicalibration, separating it from online marginal calibration for which better rates were recently discovered.

Yes. We already have a set of ingrained red flags for human written papers that signal a lack of care: not citing the relevant literature, not formatting or typesetting math correctly, etc. These don't mean the paper is wrong but they strongly correlate with lack of care. But...

Getting absurd over at the ACM…

2025 was an eventful/disruptive year for computer science research, for two reasons: 1) a shock to federal funding, and 2) the arrival of AI models capable enough to assist mathematical research. 1) is unambiguously bad and 2) is probably mostly good. I'll write about AI first.

📢 Our last TCS+ talk of the season will be Wed, Dec 3 (10am PT, 1pm ET, 19:00 CET): Natalie Collina (@ncollina.bsky.social), from UPenn, will tell us about "Swap regret and correlated equilibria beyond normal-form games"! RSVP to receive the link (one day before the talk): forms.gle/utLgSxLpqvpx...

I am recruiting PhD students at NYU Courant to conduct research in learning theory, algorithmic statistics, and trustworthy machine learning, starting Fall 2026. Please share widely! Deadline to apply is December 12, 2025.

Did your fairness/privacy/CS&Law/etc paper just get rejected from ITCS? Oh FORC! Submit tomorrow and join us at Harvard this summer.

Foundations of Responsible Computing (FORC) is a super exciting new conference focused on the intersection of mathematical research and society. It's also a fantastic and vibrant community. Check out the CfP, with two deadlines. Also follow the new BSky account @forcconf.bsky.social !

The first of two @forcconf.bsky.social 2026 deadlines is tomorrow, Nov 11! I hope everyone is putting finishing polishes on their submissions. For everyone else who doesn't want to miss out on the fun at Harvard this summer, there is another deadline in Feb. responsiblecomputing.org/forc-2026-ca...

If you work at the intersection of CS and economics (or think your work is of interest to those who do!) consider submitting to the ESIF Economics and AI+ML meeting this summer at Cornell: www.econometricsociety.org/regional-act...

A few weeks ago everyone was super hype about Nano Banana. Meanwhile, I ask it to do super basic things and it fails. What am I doing wrong?? (why would I want a collage of these amazing researchers? Stay tuned CC @let-all.com 👀) More fails in the transcript: gemini.google.com/share/5cc80f...

Announcing the 7th Learning Theory Alliance mentoring workshop on November 20. Fully free & virtual! Theme: Harnessing AI for Research, Learning, and Communicating Ft @aaroth.bsky.social @andrejristeski.bsky.social @profericwong.bsky.social @ktalwar.bsky.social &more

I've been enjoying learning about linear regression. This is a really cool machine learning technique with some really elegant theory --- someone should have taught me about this earlier!

How should you use forecasts f:X->R^d to make decisions? It depends what properties they have. If they are fully calibrated (E[y | f(x) = p] = p), then you should be maximally aggressive and act as if they are correct --- i.e. play argmax_a E_{o ~ f(x)}[u(a,o)]. On the other hand

If you are around Berkeley today stop by Evans 1011 for a talk: events.berkeley.edu/stat/event/3...

Congrats to @epsilonrational.bsky.social @ncollina.bsky.social @aaroth.bsky.social on being featured in quanta! (Also do check out the paper, also involving Sampath Kannan and me that the piece is based on here: arxiv.org/abs/2409.03956)

And now might be a good time to mention, I’m on the faculty job market this year! I do work in human-AI collusion, collaboration and competition, with an eye towards building foundations for trustworthy AI. Check out more info on my website here! Nataliecollina.com

(And Natalie is on the job market..)

If you are at Johns Hopkins tomorrow stop by --- also on Zoom: hub.jhu.edu/events/2025/...

An interesting debate between Emily Bender and Sebastien Bubeck: www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtIQ... ---Emily's thesis is roughly summarized as: "LLMs extrude plausible sounding text, and the illusion of understanding comes entirely from how the listener's human mind interprets language. "

Announcing (w @adamsmith.xyz @thejonullman.bsky.social) the 2025 edition of the Foundations of Responsible Computing Job Market Profiles! Check out 40 job market candidates in mathematical research in computation and society writ large! Link: drive.google.com/file/d/1zvsr...

Join us on October 23 for our next Gerald M. Masson Distinguished Lecture, featuring @upenn.edu’s @aaroth.bsky.social! Learn more here: www.cs.jhu.edu/event/gerald...

The FORC 2026 call for papers is out! responsiblecomputing.org/forc-2026-ca... Two reviewing cycles with two deadlines: Nov 11 and Feb 17. If you haven't been, FORC is a great venue for theoretical work in "responsible AI" --- fairness, privacy, social choice, CS&Law, explainability, etc.

One more thought: AI tools are a very useful research accelerator for an expert, and I plan to use them whenever I can. But at the moment it is very easy to be led down false paths if you let them get ahead of yourself and lure you too far from your expertise.

To contribute to common knowledge :-) I too have been integrating AI tools closely into my research. This paper arxiv.org/abs/2507.09683 with @mkearnsphilly.bsky.social and Emily was my first experiment with this, and it was just accepted to SODA. I'll describe the process in thread.

Appearing in SODA 2026! Last year we had a 3-page SODA paper, this one is 107 pages. Next time I’m thinking we swing way back the other way and just submit a twitter/bluesky thread

The opportunities and risks of the entry of LLMs into mathematical research in one screenshot. I think it is clear that LLMs will make trained researchers more effective. But they will also lead to a flood of bad/wrong papers, and I'm not sure we have the tools to deal with this.

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)