technocracy

arXiv:2601.22288v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM-based and agent-based synthetic personas are increasingly used in design and product decision-making, yet prior work shows that prompt-based personas often produce persuasive but unverifiable responses that obscure their evidentiary basis. We present PersonaCite, an agentic system that reframes AI personas as evidence-bounded research instruments through retrieval-augmented interaction. Unlike prior approaches that rely on prompt-based roleplaying, PersonaCite retrieves actual voice-of-customer artifacts during each conversation turn, constrains responses to retrieved evidence, explicitly abstains when […]

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Semantic associations such as the link between "bird" and "flew" are foundational for language modeling as they enable models to go beyond memorization and instead generalize and generate coherent text. Understanding how these associations are learned and represented in language models is essential for connecting deep learning with linguistic theory and developing a mechanistic foundation for large language models. In this work, we analyze how these associations emerge from natural language data in attention-based language models through the […]

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Pretrained large language models are often referred to as foundation models for a good reason: they perform well on various tasks, and we can use them as a foundation for finetuning on a target task. As an alternative to updating all layers, which is very expensive, parameter-efficient methods such as prefix tuning and adapters have been developed. Let’s talk about one of the most popular parameter-efficient finetuning techniques: Low-rank adaptation (LoRA). What is LoRA? How does it work? […]

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arXiv:2602.02558v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep learning has been extensively researched in the analysis of pathology whole-slide images (WSIs). However, most existing methods are limited to providing prediction interpretability by locating the model’s salient areas in a post-hoc manner, failing to offer more reliable and accountable explanations. In this work, we propose Phenotype-Aware Multiple Instance Learning (PA-MIL), a novel ante-hoc interpretable framework that identifies cancer-related phenotypes from WSIs and utilizes them for cancer subtyping. To facilitate PA-MIL in […]

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arXiv:2601.18145v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Computation of confidence sets is central to data science and machine learning, serving as the workhorse of A/B testing and underpinning the operation and analysis of reinforcement learning algorithms. Among all valid confidence sets for the multinomial parameter, minimum-volume confidence sets (MVCs) are optimal in that they minimize average volume, but they are defined as level sets of an exact p-value that is discontinuous and difficult to compute. Rather than attempting to characterize […]

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arXiv:2507.08965v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG) is a widely used technique for conditional generation and improving sample quality in continuous diffusion models, and its extensions to discrete diffusion has recently started to be investigated. In order to improve the algorithms in a principled way, this paper starts by analyzing the exact effect of CFG in the context of a low-dimensional masked diffusion model, with a special emphasis on the guidance schedule. Our analysis shows that high […]

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Word embeddings, attention, and positional encodings and the specific problem each one was built to solve. Blogging my understanding as I go through the lecture series of “CS 639: Introduction to Foundation Models” at University of Wisconsin-Madison. Photo by Gaelle Marcel on Unsplash How Do Machines Even Understand Words? Before we get into the fancy stuff, it’s worth pausing on this simple question. Text is just characters to a machine, so how do we get it to understand meaning? A […]

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arXiv:2602.21213v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We develop a topological lens on relational schema design by encoding functional dependencies (FDs) as simplices of an abstract simplicial complex. This dependency complex exposes multi-attribute interactions and enables homological invariants (Betti numbers) to diagnose cyclic dependency structure. We define Simplicial Normal Form (SNF) as homological acyclicity of the dependency complex in positive dimensions, i.e., vanishing reduced homology for all $n ge 1$. SNF is intentionally weaker than contractibility and does not identify […]

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