Year 3 of spending many days making gingerbread — this year, featuring the gantries of Long Island City

Excited to share a new working paper! What happened when Change.org integrated an AI writing tool into their platform? We provide causal evidence that petition text changed significantly while outcomes did not improve. 1/ arxiv.org/abs/2511.13949

I had a lot of fun making this map of Manhattan’s grid (only the numbered streets and avenues). Learned that 4th avenue doesn’t exist, but then learned that it actually does exist but only for a few blocks.

New #NeurIPS2025 paper: how should we evaluate machine learning models without a large, labeled dataset? We introduce Semi-Supervised Model Evaluation (SSME), which uses labeled and unlabeled data to estimate performance! We find SSME is far more accurate than standard methods.

Being Divya's labmate (and fellow ferry commuter) has been a real pleasure, and I've learned a ton from both her research itself and her approach to research (and also from the other random things she knows about).

"those already relatively advantaged are, empirically, more able to pay time costs and navigate administrative burdens imposed by the mechanisms." This point by @nkgarg.bsky.social has greatly shaped my thinking about the role of computer science in public service settings.

How do we reconcile excitement about sparse autoencoders with negative results showing that they underperform simple baselines? Our new position paper makes a distinction: SAEs are very useful for tools for discovering *unknown* concepts, less good for acting on *known* concepts.

One paragraph pitch for why sparse autoencoders are cool (they learn *interpretable* text embeddings)

We're presenting two papers Wednesday at #ICML2025, both at 11am. Come chat about "Sparse Autoencoders for Hypothesis Generation" (west-421), and "Correlated Errors in LLMs" (east-1102)! Short thread ⬇️

Are LLMs correlated when they make mistakes? In our new ICML paper, we answer this question using responses of >350 LLMs. We find substantial correlation. On one dataset, LLMs agree on the wrong answer ~2x more than they would at random. 🧵(1/7) arxiv.org/abs/2506.07962

New work 🎉: conformal classifiers return sets of classes for each example, with a probabilistic guarantee the true class is included. But these sets can be too large to be useful. In our #CVPR2025 paper, we propose a method to make them more compact without sacrificing coverage.

We'll present HypotheSAEs at ICML this summer! 🎉 Draft: arxiv.org/abs/2502.04382 We're continuing to cook up new updates for our Python package: github.com/rmovva/Hypot... (Recently, "Matryoshka SAEs", which help extract coarse and granular concepts without as much hyperparameter fiddling.)

I’m really excited to share the first paper of my PhD, “Learning Disease Progression Models That Capture Health Disparities” (accepted at #CHIL2025)! ✨ 1/ 📄: arxiv.org/abs/2412.16406

The US government recently flagged my scientific grant in its "woke DEI database". Many people have asked me what I will do. My answer today in Nature. We will not be cowed. We will keep using AI to build a fairer, healthier world. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Our lab had a #dogathon 🐕 yesterday where we analyzed NYC Open Data on dog licenses. We learned a lot of dog facts, which I’ll share in this thread 🧵 1) Geospatial trends: Cavalier King Charles Spaniels are common in Manhattan; the opposite is true for Yorkshire Terriers.

Migration data lets us study responses to environmental disasters, social change patterns, policy impacts, etc. But public data is too coarse, obscuring these important phenomena! We build MIGRATE: a dataset of yearly flows between 47 billion pairs of US Census Block Groups. 1/5

💡New preprint & Python package: We use sparse autoencoders to generate hypotheses from large text datasets. Our method, HypotheSAEs, produces interpretable text features that predict a target variable, e.g. features in news headlines that predict engagement. 🧵1/

(1/n) New paper/code! Sparse Autoencoders for Hypothesis Generation HypotheSAEs generates interpretable features of text data that predict a target variable: What features predict clicks from headlines / party from congressional speech / rating from Yelp review? arxiv.org/abs/2502.04382

Please repost to get the word out! @nkgarg.bsky.social and I are excited to present a personalized feed for academics! It shows posts about papers from accounts you’re following bsky.app/profile/pape...

In new work, we show a "No Free Lunch Theorem" for human-AI Collaboration (w/ @nkgarg.bsky.social and Jon Kleinberg). (And if you're at #AAAI, I'm presenting at 11:15am today in the Humans and AI session. Poster 12:30-2:30.) arxiv.org/abs/2411.15230

I'm at #NeurIPS, presenting work w/ @nkgarg.bsky.social where we study algorithmic monoculture using a matching markets model: If many firms or colleges all use the same algorithm to evaluate applicants, what happens? Poster is in a few hours, come chat! Wed 11am-2pm | West Ballroom A-D #5505