Contract theory studies the setting where a principal seeks to design a contract for rewarding an agent on the basis of the uncertain outcomes caused by the agent's private actions [

We consider a novel dynamic pricing and learning setting where in addition to setting prices of products in sequential rounds, the seller also ex-ante commits to'advertising schemes'. That is, in the beginning of each round the seller can decide what kind of signal they will provide to the buyer about the product's quality upon realization. Using the popular Bayesian persuasion framework to model the effect of these signals on the buyers' valuation and purchase responses, we formulate the problem of finding an optimal design of the advertising scheme along with a pricing scheme that maximizes the seller's expected revenue. Without any apriori knowledge of the buyers' demand function, our goal is to design an online algorithm that can use past purchase responses to adaptively learn the optimal pricing and advertising strategy. We study the regret of the algorithm when compared to the optimal clairvoyant price and advertising scheme.

To thrive in those environments, the agent needs to influence other agents so their actions become more helpful and less harmful. Research in computational economics distills two ways to influence others directly: by providing tangible goods ( mechanism design) and by providing information ( information design). This work investigates information design problems for a group of RL agents. The main challenges are two-fold. One is the information provided will immediately affect the transition of the agent trajectories, which introduces additional non-stationarity. The other is the information can be ignored, so the sender must provide information that the receiver is willing to respect.

To thrive in those environments, the agent needs to influence other agents so their actions become more helpful and less harmful. Research in computational economics distills two ways to influence others directly: by providing tangible goods ( mechanism design) and by providing information ( information design). This work investigates information design problems for a group of RL agents. The main challenges are two-fold. One is the information provided will immediately affect the transition of the agent trajectories, which introduces additional non-stationarity. The other is the information can be ignored, so the sender must provide information that the receiver is willing to respect.

Could Ukraine hold a presidential election right now? Will Europe use frozen Russian assets to fund war? How can Ukraine rebuild China ties? 'Ukraine is running out of men, money and time' Video released by the Ukrainian military showed soldiers shooting down small Russian drones with their rifles near the small Donetsk village of Kostiantynivka. Russian forces have made steady yet costly gains in the region, claiming on Monday to have captured nearby Dibrova.

Neural architecture search (NAS) finds high performing networks for a given task. Y et the results of NAS are fairly prosaic; they did not e.g.

We build a mechanism design framework where a platform designs GenAI models to screen users who obtain instrumental value from the generated conversation and privately differ in their preference for latency. We show that the revenue-optimal mechanism is simple: deploy a single aligned (user-optimal) model and use token cap as the only instrument to screen the user. The design decouples model training from pricing, is readily implemented with token metering, and mitigates misalignment pressures.

Abstract--This paper introduces SENSE (Shared Embedding for N-lingual Speech and tExt), an open-source solution inspired by the SAMU-XLSR framework and conceptually similar to Meta AI's SONAR models. These approaches rely on a teacher-student framework to align a self-supervised speech encoder with the language-agnostic continuous representations of a text encoder at the utterance level. We describe how the original SAMU-XLSR method has been updated by selecting a stronger teacher text model and a better initial speech encoder . The source code for training and using SENSE models has been integrated into the SpeechBrain toolkit, and the first SENSE model we trained has been publicly released. We report experimental results on multilingual and multimodal semantic tasks, where our SENSE model achieves highly competitive performance. Finally, this study offers new insights into how semantics are captured in such semantically aligned speech encoders. Speech foundation models based on self-supervised learning (SSL) have brought significant advances in speech processing. These models, such as wav2vec 2.0 [1], HuBERT [2], and WavLM [3], generate learned speech representations that can be applied to a wide range of downstream speech processing tasks. By training on large amounts of unlabelled speech data, SSL models have demonstrated the ability to capture crucial speech features, such as phonemes and other acoustic units [4]. This capability has led to significant progress in multiple downstream tasks, including speech recognition [1], speech translation [5], speech separation, speaker verification, speaker diarization [3], and emotion detection [6]. Different approaches have been proposed to pretrain model by aligning speech and text, like mSLAM [7], a Massively multilingual joint pre-training for speech and text.

As Large Language Models (LLMs) become increasingly integrated into everyday life and information ecosystems, concerns about their implicit biases continue to persist. While prior work has primarily examined socio-demographic and left--right political dimensions, little attention has been paid to how LLMs align with broader geopolitical value systems, particularly the democracy--authoritarianism spectrum. In this paper, we propose a novel methodology to assess such alignment, combining (1) the F-scale, a psychometric tool for measuring authoritarian tendencies, (2) FavScore, a newly introduced metric for evaluating model favorability toward world leaders, and (3) role-model probing to assess which figures are cited as general role-models by LLMs. We find that LLMs generally favor democratic values and leaders, but exhibit increased favorability toward authoritarian figures when prompted in Mandarin. Further, models are found to often cite authoritarian figures as role models, even outside explicit political contexts. These results shed light on ways LLMs may reflect and potentially reinforce global political ideologies, highlighting the importance of evaluating bias beyond conventional socio-political axes. Our code is available at: https://github.com/irenestrauss/Democratic-Authoritarian-Bias-LLMs.

The problem of two-sided matching markets is well-studied in computer science and economics, owing to its diverse applications across numerous domains. Since market participants are usually uncertain about their preferences in various online matching platforms, an emerging line of research is dedicated to the online setting where one-side participants (players) learn their unknown preferences through multiple rounds of interactions with the other side (arms). Sankararaman et al. provide an $Ω\left( \frac{N\log(T)}{Δ^2} + \frac{K\log(T)}Δ \right)$ regret lower bound for this problem under serial dictatorship assumption, where $N$ is the number of players, $K (\geq N)$ is the number of arms, $Δ$ is the minimum reward gap across players and arms, and $T$ is the time horizon. Serial dictatorship assumes arms have the same preferences, which is common in reality when one side participants have a unified evaluation standard. Recently, the work of Kong and Li proposes the ET-GS algorithm and achieves an $O\left( \frac{K\log(T)}{Δ^2} \right)$ regret upper bound, which is the best upper bound attained so far. Nonetheless, a gap between the lower and upper bounds, ranging from $N$ to $K$, persists. It remains unclear whether the lower bound or the upper bound needs to be improved. In this paper, we propose a multi-level successive selection algorithm that obtains an $O\left( \frac{N\log(T)}{Δ^2} + \frac{K\log(T)}Δ \right)$ regret bound when the market satisfies serial dictatorship. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to propose an algorithm that matches the lower bound in the problem of matching markets with bandits.