The author's dilemma, circa 2021

at his rally in Michigan, Trump plays a propaganda video of prisoners having their heads shaved at the Gulag in El Salvador to big cheers from the crowd and "U-S-A!" chants

I’ve left this platform but democracy’s decline hasn’t. Follow me on Bluesky @barbarafwalter.com for real-time analysis and what's happening and how we fight back. Bluesky is more thoughtful and better for honest debate. Join me there.

Introducing ChartMuseum🖼️, testing visual reasoning with diverse real-world charts! ✍🏻Entirely human-written questions by 13 CS researchers 👀Emphasis on visual reasoning – hard to be verbalized via text CoTs 📉Humans reach 93% but 63% from Gemini-2.5-Pro & 38% from Qwen2.5-72B

Are you an RL PhD at Harvard who has had your funding wrecked by the government and working on topics related to multi-agent? Reach out, I am happy to try to find a way to support you

If you're an international PhD student at Harvard studying computer vision and your visa is cancelled, reach out to me or others in Europe. Don't despair. I'm sure we can find you a great place to carry on your research.

When I was a kid it seemed like America was run by stiffs. But that turned out to be infinitely preferable to having the country run by thugs.

theatlantic.com/technology/arc…

If you wanted to completely break the information ecosystem in a world with frictionless generation of false video and image content, all you would need to do is downweight external links, like the feed algorithm on X does.

A key hypothesis in the history of linguistics is that different constructions share underlying structure. We take advantage of recent advances in mechanistic interpretability to test this hypothesis in Language Models. New work with Kyle Mahowald and Christopher Potts! 🧵👇

John Strand We are repeating the mistakes of Germany in the 1930s when that country pushed out its scientific leadership. x.com/ChrisO_wiki/st…

ACADEMICS: it is time to get our heads out of our *sses. This is not the moment for personal ambition, why your latest sophisticated widget beats rivals intricate theorem. The scientific franchise is under attack. It is time to defend it to the public. x.com/davidbau/statu…

Thrilled to announce that I will be joining UT Austin Computer Science at UT Austin as an assistant professor in fall 2026! I will continue working on language models, data challenges, learning paradigms, & AI for innovation. Looking forward to teaming up with new students & colleagues! 🤠🤘

Revoking visas to Chinese PhD students is economically shortsighted and inhumane. Most Chinese PhD students stay in the U.S. after graduation (first image, stats from 2022). They're staying and building technology in the U.S., not taking it to China. Immigrant students create

Revoking visas to Chinese students in the US is both cruel and stupid. Immigrants and investment in science made this country great. They are throwing it all away for no reason

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/

1/3 The US didn’t end up leading the world in computing by luck. It happened because it made long-term, public investments in basic research, especially through NSF. That’s what created the technology that today’s companies are built on.

Super thrilled that Kanishka Misra 🌊 is going to join UT Linguistics Dept as our newest computational linguistics faculty member -- looking forward to doing great research together! 🧑‍🎓Students: Kanishka is a GREAT mentor -- apply to be his PhD student in the upcoming cycle!!

Solving complex problems with CoT requires combining different skills. We can do this by: 🧩Modify the CoT data format to be “composable” with other skills 🔥Train models on each skill 📌Combine those models Lead to better 0-shot reasoning on tasks involving skill composition!

Have you thought about making your reasoning model stronger through *skill composition*? It's not as hard as you'd imagine! Check out our work!!!