#AcademicRunPlaylist - 4/24/25

I had a lovey but tiring day in Michigan, and while running to a surprisingly cold beach for a bit I also listened to talks for my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

First was a compelling talk by Kianté Brantley using a reset methodology to improve reinforcement learning for LLMs at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JudHG3tiln4

Next was an excellent discussion with Gabriel Ulyssea and Mariaflavia Harari on how the informal economy functions for individuals, firms, and societies on the VoxDev podcast https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1qFKVpxUUU

Next was an interesting talk by Kai-Wei Chang on fine-grained vision-language alignment at the Simons Institute https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5vWk7uitnE

Next was a fantastic talk by Valentin Hofmann on probing covert racism in LLMs at the Carnegie Mellon University - School of Computer Science - Language Technologies Institute. One can imagine where this goes. Highly recommend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1EjADUq7uQ

Next was an engaging talk by Swabha Swayamdipta on the problems with current language model evaluation approaches at the Simons Institute https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcPRW2YOqkA

Next was a rousing talk by Annelise Orleck the history of labor's fight against poverty wages and unsafe working conditions and the modern, global efforts to preserve and extend those gains at the Cornell University ILR School https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cj4W6HPUnFo

Next was a thought-provoking talk by Grigorios Chrysos on using sequence-to-sequence models for common ML goals at the Simons Institute https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mod3sWAWX-U

Next was a great talk by Skyler Hallinan on using n-gram coverage for membership inference, focusing on LLM copyright/memorization applications at the USC Information Sciences Institute https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJwbNZqXnWg

Next was a nice conversation with Robert Hawkins on language, collaboration, and social reasoning on the Stanford Psychology podcast https://www.stanfordpsychologypodcast.com/episodes/episode/7ba26ce3/151-robert-hawkins-language-collaboration-and-social-reasoning

Last was "When Affirmative Action Was White" by Ira Katznelson. This book was written in 2006, and I'll just say that it's pretty depressing reading it in 2025. Katznelson methodically details the extremely recent history of government and industry-based affirmative action policies during the early to relatively late 20th century that were designed to help white people over others, revealing the ridiculousness of the claim that racism or systemic racism is "far in the past." The relatively hopeful notes about the gains more appropriate affirmative action has yielded for unfairly discriminated against groups was hard to read given the current environment, but only underscores the need to push for even greater reforms in the future. Highly recommend https://wwnorton.com/books/When-Affirmative-Action-Was-White/