Machine unlearning without access to real data distribution is challenging. The existing method based on data-free distillation achieved unlearning by filtering out synthetic samples containing forgetting information but struggled to distill the retaining-related knowledge efficiently. In this work, we analyze that such a problem is due to over-filtering, which reduces the synthesized retaining-related information. We propose a novel method, Inhibited Synthetic PostFilter (ISPF), to tackle this challenge from two perspectives: First, the Inhibited Synthetic, by reducing the synthesized forgetting information; Second, the PostFilter, by fully utilizing the retaining-related information in synthesized samples. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed ISPF effectively tackles the challenge and outperforms existing methods.

As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to advance, understanding public perceptions -- including biases, risks, and benefits -- is critical for guiding research priorities, shaping public discourse, and informing policy. This study explores public mental models of AI using micro scenarios to assess reactions to 71 statements about AI's potential future impacts. Drawing on cross-cultural samples from Germany (N=52) and China (N=60), we identify significant differences in expectations, evaluations, and risk-utility tradeoffs. German participants tended toward more cautious assessments, whereas Chinese participants expressed greater optimism regarding AI's societal benefits. Chinese participants exhibited relatively balanced risk-benefit tradeoffs ($\beta=-0.463$ for risk and $\beta=+0.484$ for benefit, $r^2=.630$). In contrast, German participants showed a stronger emphasis on AI benefits and less on risks ($\beta=-0.337$ for risk and $\beta=+0.715$ for benefit, $r^2=.839$). Visual cognitive maps illustrate these contrasts, offering new perspectives on how cultural contexts shape AI acceptance. Our findings underline key factors influencing public perception and provide actionable insights for fostering equitable and culturally sensitive integration of AI technologies.

Text is a vehicle to convey information that reflects the writer's linguistic style and communicative patterns. By studying these attributes, we can discover latent insights about the author and their underlying message. This article uses such an approach to better understand patent applications and their inventors. While prior research focuses on patent metadata, we employ machine learning and natural language processing to extract hidden information from the words in patent applications. Through these methods, we find that inventor gender can often be identified from textual attributes - even without knowing the inventor's name. This ability to discern gender through text suggests that anonymized patent examination - often proposed as a solution to mitigate disparities in patent grant rates - may not fully address gendered outcomes in securing a patent. Our study also investigates whether objective features of a patent application can predict if it will be granted. Using a classifier algorithm, we correctly predicted whether a patent was granted over 60% of the time. Further analysis emphasized that writing style - like vocabulary and sentence complexity - disproportionately influenced grant predictions relative to other attributes such as inventor gender and subject matter keywords. Lastly, we examine whether women disproportionately invent in technological areas with higher rejection rates. Using a clustering algorithm, applications were allocated into groups with related subject matter. We found that 85% of female-dominated clusters have abnormally high rejection rates, compared to only 45% for male-dominated groupings. These findings highlight complex interactions between textual choices, gender, and success in securing a patent. They also raise questions about whether current proposals will be sufficient to achieve gender equity and efficiency in the patent system.

Social choice theory is the study of preference aggregation across a population, used both in mechanism design for human agents and in the democratic alignment of language models. In this study, we propose the representative social choice framework for the modeling of democratic representation in collective decisions, where the number of issues and individuals are too large for mechanisms to consider all preferences directly. These scenarios are widespread in real-world decision-making processes, such as jury trials, indirect elections, legislation processes, corporate governance, and, more recently, language model alignment. In representative social choice, the population is represented by a finite sample of individual-issue pairs based on which social choice decisions are made. We show that many of the deepest questions in representative social choice can be naturally formulated as statistical learning problems, and prove the generalization properties of social choice mechanisms using the theory of machine learning. We further formulate axioms for representative social choice, and prove Arrow-like impossibility theorems with new combinatorial tools of analysis. Our framework introduces the representative approach to social choice, opening up research directions at the intersection of social choice, learning theory, and AI alignment.

We study a censored variant of the data-driven newsvendor problem, where the decision-maker must select an ordering quantity that minimizes expected overage and underage costs based only on offline censored sales data, rather than historical demand realizations. Our goal is to understand how the degree of historical demand censoring affects the performance of any learning algorithm for this problem. To isolate this impact, we adopt a distributionally robust optimization framework, evaluating policies according to their worst-case regret over an ambiguity set of distributions. This set is defined by the largest historical order quantity (the observable boundary of the dataset), and contains all distributions matching the true demand distribution up to this boundary, while allowing them to be arbitrary afterwards. We demonstrate a spectrum of achievability under demand censoring by deriving a natural necessary and sufficient condition under which vanishing regret is an achievable goal. In regimes in which it is not, we exactly characterize the information loss due to censoring: an insurmountable lower bound on the performance of any policy, even when the decision-maker has access to infinitely many demand samples. We then leverage these sharp characterizations to propose a natural robust algorithm that adapts to the historical level of demand censoring. We derive finite-sample guarantees for this algorithm across all possible censoring regimes and show its near-optimality with matching lower bounds (up to polylogarithmic factors). We moreover demonstrate its robust performance via extensive numerical experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets.

While Large Language Models (LLMs) perform exceptionally well in generating accurate outputs, their "black box" nature poses significant challenges to transparency and trust. To address this, the paper proposes the TranspNet pipeline, which integrates symbolic AI with LLMs. By leveraging domain expert knowledge, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and formal reasoning frameworks like Answer Set Programming (ASP), TranspNet enhances LLM outputs with structured reasoning and verification.This approach strives to help AI systems deliver results that are as accurate, explainable, and trustworthy as possible, aligning with regulatory expectations for transparency and accountability. TranspNet provides a solution for developing AI systems that are reliable and interpretable, making it suitable for real-world applications where trust is critical.

Large Language Models (LLM) are usually fine-tuned to participate in dyadic or two-party dialogues, which can not adapt well to multi-party dialogues (MPD), which hinders their applications in such scenarios including multi-personal meetings, discussions and daily communication. Previous LLM-based researches mainly focus on the multi-agent framework, while their base LLMs are still pairwisely fine-tuned. In this work, we design a multi-party fine-tuning framework (MuPaS) for LLMs on the multi-party dialogue datasets, and prove such a straightforward framework can let the LLM align with the multi-party conversation style efficiently and effectively. We also design two training strategies which can convert MuPaS into the MPD simulator. Substantial experiments show that MuPaS can achieve state-of-the-art multi-party response, higher accuracy of the-next-speaker prediction, higher human and automatic evaluated utterance qualities, and can even generate reasonably with out-of-distribution scene, topic and role descriptions. The MuPaS framework bridges the LLM training with more complicated multi-party applications, such as conversation generation, virtual rehearsal or meta-universe.

This research applies Harold Demsetz's concept of the nirvana approach to the realm of AI governance and debunks three common fallacies in various AI policy proposals--"the grass is always greener on the other side," "free lunch," and "the people could be different." Through this, I expose fundamental flaws in the current AI regulatory proposal. First, some commentators intuitively believe that people are more reliable than machines and that government works better in risk control than companies' self-regulation, but they do not fully compare the differences between the status quo and the proposed replacements. Second, when proposing some regulatory tools, some policymakers and researchers do not realize and even gloss over the fact that harms and costs are also inherent in their proposals. Third, some policy proposals are initiated based on a false comparison between the AI-driven world, where AI does lead to some risks, and an entirely idealized world, where no risk exists at all. However, the appropriate approach is to compare the world where AI causes risks to the real world where risks are everywhere, but people can live well with these risks. The prevalence of these fallacies in AI governance underscores a broader issue: the tendency to idealize potential solutions without fully considering their real-world implications. This idealization can lead to regulatory proposals that are not only impractical but potentially harmful to innovation and societal progress.

Progress in AI is driven largely by the scale and quality of training data. Despite this, there is a deficit of empirical analysis examining the attributes of well-established datasets beyond text. In this work we conduct the largest and first-of-its-kind longitudinal audit across modalities--popular text, speech, and video datasets--from their detailed sourcing trends and use restrictions to their geographical and linguistic representation. Our manual analysis covers nearly 4000 public datasets between 1990-2024, spanning 608 languages, 798 sources, 659 organizations, and 67 countries. We find that multimodal machine learning applications have overwhelmingly turned to web-crawled, synthetic, and social media platforms, such as YouTube, for their training sets, eclipsing all other sources since 2019. Secondly, tracing the chain of dataset derivations we find that while less than 33% of datasets are restrictively licensed, over 80% of the source content in widely-used text, speech, and video datasets, carry non-commercial restrictions. Finally, counter to the rising number of languages and geographies represented in public AI training datasets, our audit demonstrates measures of relative geographical and multilingual representation have failed to significantly improve their coverage since 2013. We believe the breadth of our audit enables us to empirically examine trends in data sourcing, restrictions, and Western-centricity at an ecosystem-level, and that visibility into these questions are essential to progress in responsible AI. As a contribution to ongoing improvements in dataset transparency and responsible use, we release our entire multimodal audit, allowing practitioners to trace data provenance across text, speech, and video.

Jonathan Zittrain breaks ChatGPT: If you ask it a question for which my name is the answer, the chatbot goes from loquacious companion to something as cryptic as Microsoft Windows' blue screen of death. Anytime ChatGPT would normally utter my name in the course of conversation, it halts with a glaring "I'm unable to produce a response," sometimes mid-sentence or even mid-word. When I asked who the founders of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society are (I'm one of them), it brought up two colleagues but left me out. When pressed, it started up again, and then: zap. The behavior seemed to be coarsely tacked on to the last step of ChatGPT's output rather than innate to the model.