Ada

"Not only is the ratio of AI’s resource rapacity to its productive utility indefensibly and irremediably skewed, AI-made material is itself a waste product: flimsy, shoddy, disposable, a single-use plastic of the mind."

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enshittification | noun | when a digital platform is made worse for users, in order to increase profits

Windows Notepad, the native simple text editor, now has formatting options and a Copilot button.

Look what they did to Notepad. Shut the fuck up. This is Notepad. You are not welcome here. Oh yeah "Let me use Copilot for Notepad". "I'm going to sign into my account for Notepad". What the fuck are you talking about. It's Notepad.

Our new paper in #PNAS (bit.ly/4fcWfma) presents a surprising finding—when words change meaning, older speakers rapidly adopt the new usage; inter-generational differences are often minor.

w/ Michelle Yang, ‪@sivareddyg.bsky.social‬ , @msonderegger.bsky.social‬ and @dallascard.bsky.social‬👇(1/12)

Thrilled to announce our new survey that explores the exciting possibilities and troubling risks of computational persuasion in the era of LLMs 🤖💬
📄Arxiv: arxiv.org/pdf/2505.07775
💻 GitHub: github.com/beyzabozdag/...

02 | Gauthier Gidel: Bridging Theory and Deep Learning, Vibes at Mila, and the Effects of AI on Art Behind the Research of AI · Episode

Started a new podcast with @tomvergara.bsky.social !

Behind the Research of AI:
We look behind the scenes, beyond the polished papers 🧐🧪

If this sounds fun, check out our first "official" episode with the awesome Gauthier Gidel
from @mila-quebec.bsky.social :

open.spotify.com/episode/7oTc...

Zohran Mamdani, a 33-year-old state assemblyman, declared victory in New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary after Andrew Cuomo conceded the race.

“Tonight we made history,” Mamdani said, addressing his supporters. wapo.st/44yMVoI

Mahmoud Khalil is finally home with his beautiful wife and newborn son.

Each one of the 104 days he spent detained was a grave injustice.

From the moment of his detention, @ccrjustice.org + @aclu.org engaged my office as we worked closely to help secure his release. They did remarkable work here.

A Shortcut-aware Video-QA Benchmark for Physical Understanding via Minimal Video Pairs Existing benchmarks for assessing the spatio-temporal understanding and reasoning abilities of video language models are susceptible to score inflation due to the presence of shortcut solutions based ...

The facts:

We release (MVPBench) with around 55K videos (grouped as *minimal video pairs*) from diverse physical understanding sources

Arxiv: arxiv.org/abs/2506.09987

Huggingface: huggingface.co/datasets/fac...

GitHub: github.com/facebookrese...

Leaderboard: huggingface.co/spaces/faceb...

Excited to share the results of my recent internship!

We ask 🤔
What subtle shortcuts are VideoLLMs taking on spatio-temporal questions?

And how can we instead curate shortcut-robust examples at a large-scale?

We release: MVPBench

Details 👇🔬

Congrats!

Today, I was denied access to seeing my constituent, Mr. Kilmar Abrego Garcia. If there is nothing to hide, cut the crap. Let his lawyer and I check on him.

Live updates: Trump administration revokes Harvard’s ability to enroll foreign students Get the latest news on President Donald Trump’s return to the White House and the Republican-led Congress.

Breaking news: The Trump administration revoked Harvard’s ability to enroll foreign students, saying it allowed anti-American agitators.

Existing foreign students must transfer or risk losing their legal status, DHS said.

when in albuquerque…

We won a Senior Area Chair Award at NAACL!! Many thanks again to my amazing coauthors Gaurav Kamath and @sivareddyg.bsky.social :-)

Check out Gaurav's video on their #NAACL paper and find @adadtur.bsky.social at the conference 👇

Great work from labmates on LLMs vs humans regarding linguistic preferences: You know when a sentence kind of feels off e.g. "I met at the park the man". So in what ways do LLMs follow these human intuitions?

Language Models Largely Exhibit Human-like Constituent Ordering Preferences Though English sentences are typically inflexible vis-à-vis word order, constituents often show far more variability in ordering. One prominent theory presents the notion that constituent ordering is ...

Ada is an undergrad and will soon be looking for PhDs. Gaurav is a PhD student looking for intellectually stimulating internships/visiting positions. They did most of the work without much of my help. Highly recommend them. Please reach out to them if you have any positions.

Incredibly proud of my students @adadtur.bsky.social and Gaurav Kamath for winning a SAC award at #NAACL2025 for their work on assessing how LLMs model constituent shifts.

Congratulations to Mila members @adadtur.bsky.social , Gaurav Kamath and @sivareddyg.bsky.social for their SAC award at NAACL! Check out Ada's talk in Session I: Oral/Poster 6. Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2502.05670

I filmed this yesterday on my way to Lousiana where my constituent Rümeysa Öztürk is being wrongfully held by ICE. I’m there now demanding her release. More to come.

A circular diagram with a blue whale icon at the center. The diagram shows 8 interconnected research areas around LLM reasoning represented as colored rectangular boxes arranged in a circular pattern. The areas include: §3 Analysis of Reasoning Chains (central cloud), §4 Scaling of Thoughts (discussing thought length and performance metrics), §5 Long Context Evaluation (focusing on information recall), §6 Faithfulness to Context (examining question answering accuracy), §7 Safety Evaluation (assessing harmful content generation and jailbreak resistance), §8 Language & Culture (exploring moral reasoning and language effects), §9 Relation to Human Processing (comparing cognitive processes), §10 Visual Reasoning (covering ASCII generation capabilities), and §11 Following Token Budget (investigating direct prompting techniques). Arrows connect the sections in a clockwise flow, suggesting an iterative research methodology.

Models like DeepSeek-R1 🐋 mark a fundamental shift in how LLMs approach complex problems. In our preprint on R1 Thoughtology, we study R1’s reasoning chains across a variety of tasks; investigating its capabilities, limitations, and behaviour.
🔗: mcgill-nlp.github.io/thoughtology/

Not sure if this has been shared here yet, but this is video of Rumeysa Ozturk's arrest posted by WCVB. It's terrifying.

Pm Private GIF ALT: Pm Private GIF

I would like to nominate Maxwell Smart for national security advisor.

Under Trump, AI Scientists Are Told to Remove ‘Ideological Bias’ From Powerful Models A directive from the National Institute of Standards and Technology eliminates mention of “AI safety” and “AI fairness.”

this is outrageously terrible but if there's one thing the Trump administration’s policy is doing so far it is expediting public outrage and turning the masses against everything AI

www.wired.com/story/ai-saf...

Instruction-following retrievers can efficiently and accurately search for harmful and sensitive information on the internet! 🌐💣

Retrievers need to be aligned too! 🚨🚨🚨

Work done with the wonderful Nick and @sivareddyg.bsky.social

🔗 mcgill-nlp.github.io/malicious-ir/
Thread: 🧵👇

Super excited that this is finally out! We evaluated leading LLM-based web agents from OpenAI, Anthropic, and more, on our new benchmark SafeArena and found that many are surprisingly compliant with malicious requests. Check out the leaderboard here: huggingface.co/spaces/McGil...

Web agents powered by LLMs can solve complex tasks, but our analysis shows that they can also be easily misused to automate harmful tasks.

See the thread below for more details on our new web agent safety benchmark: SafeArena and Agent Risk Assessment framework (ARIA).

The potential for malicious misuse of LLM agents is a serious threat.

That's why we created SafeArena, a safety benchmark for web agents. See the thread and our paper for details: arxiv.org/abs/2503.04957 👇