Pharmaceutical companies have been educating healthcare providers (HCPs) about new medicines and treatments for decades, shaping patterns of care and influencing treatment decisions. Traditionally, these educational conversations happened in person. But as hospitals and clinics have limited in-person visits in recent years, companies have increasingly turned to digital communication [1]. Today, pharmaceutical companies connect with HCPs using many online tools: e-mail, digital advertisements, virtual meetings, and even professional social media platforms [2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]. And now, short message service (SMS) text messaging has emerged as a powerful digital tool.

We introduce the first formal large-scale assessment of the utility of traditional chemical functional groups as used in chemical explanations. Our assessment employs a fundamental principle from computational learning theory: a good explanation of data should also compress the data. We introduce an unsupervised learning algorithm based on the Minimum Message Length (MML) principle that searches for substructures that compress around three million biologically relevant molecules. We demonstrate that the discovered substructures contain most human-curated functional groups as well as novel larger patterns with more specific functions. We also run our algorithm on 24 specific bioactivity prediction datasets to discover dataset-specific functional groups. Fingerprints constructed from dataset-specific functional groups are shown to significantly outperform other fingerprint representations, including the MACCS and Morgan fingerprint, when training ridge regression models on bioactivity regression tasks.

Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents are increasingly deployed in multi-agent scenarios where coordination is crucial but not always assured. Research shows that the way strategic scenarios are framed linguistically can affect cooperation. This paper explores whether allowing agents to communicate amplifies these language-driven effects. Leveraging FAIRGAME, we simulate one-shot and repeated games across different languages and models, both with and without communication. Our experiments, conducted with two advanced LLMs-GPT-4o and Llama 4 Maverick-reveal that communication significantly influences agent behavior, though its impact varies by language, personality, and game structure. These findings underscore the dual role of communication in fostering coordination and reinforcing biases.

Humans leverage shared conversational context to become increasingly successful and efficient at communicating over time. One manifestation of this is the formation of ad hoc linguistic conventions, which allow people to coordinate on short, less costly utterances that are understood using shared conversational context. We present a method to train large multimodal models to form conventions, enabling efficient communication. Our approach uses simulated reference games between models, and requires no additional human-produced data. In repeated reference games involving photographs and tangram images, our method enables models to communicate efficiently with people: reducing the message length by up to 41% while increasing success by 15% over the course of the interaction. Human listeners respond faster when interacting with our model that forms conventions. We also show that training based on success or cost alone is insufficient - both are necessary to elicit convention formation.

This paper provides a focused study of the distribution of message lengths in an emergent communication task. A Lewis-type signaling game is constructed in which referents are generated from a power-law distribution. RNN "speaker" and "listener" models are constructed to communicate via a discrete channel (with variable vocabulary size and max length) and trained to maximize success at the signaling game using a vanilla policy gradient algorithm. It is observed that more frequent referents are associated with *longer* messages from the speaker agent. This is in contrast to natural language (exemplified by corpus data from English and Arabic and two simple computational models).

Substantial research on deep learning-based emergent communication uses the referential game framework, specifically the Lewis signaling game, however we argue that successful communication in this game typically only need one or two symbols for target image classification because of a sampling pitfall in the training data. To address this issue, we provide a theoretical analysis and introduce a combinatorial algorithm SolveMinSym (SMS) to solve the symbolic complexity for classification, which is the minimum number of symbols in the message for successful communication. We use the SMS algorithm to create datasets with different symbolic complexity to empirically show that data with higher symbolic complexity increases the number of effective symbols in the emergent language.

We present the first undetectable watermarking scheme for generative image models. Undetectability ensures that no efficient adversary can distinguish between watermarked and un-watermarked images, even after making many adaptive queries. In particular, an undetectable watermark does not degrade image quality under any efficiently computable metric. Our scheme works by selecting the initial latents of a diffusion model using a pseudorandom error-correcting code (Christ and Gunn, 2024), a strategy which guarantees undetectability and robustness. We experimentally demonstrate that our watermarks are quality-preserving and robust using Stable Diffusion 2.1. Our experiments verify that, in contrast to every prior scheme we tested, our watermark does not degrade image quality. Our experiments also demonstrate robustness: existing watermark removal attacks fail to remove our watermark from images without significantly degrading the quality of the images. Finally, we find that we can robustly encode 512 bits in our watermark, and up to 2500 bits when the images are not subjected to watermark removal attacks. Our code is available at https://github.com/XuandongZhao/PRC-Watermark.

Recent developments in online communication and their usage in everyday life have caused an explosion in the amount of a new genre of text data, short text. Thus, the need to classify this type of text based on its content has a significant implication in many areas. Online debates are no exception, once these provide access to information about opinions, positions and preferences of its users. This paper aims to use data obtained from online social conversations in Portuguese schools (short text) to observe behavioural trends and to see if students remain engaged in the discussion when stimulated. This project used the state of the art (SoA) Machine Learning (ML) algorithms and methods, through BERT based models to classify if utterances are in or out of the debate subject. Using SBERT embeddings as a feature, with supervised learning, the proposed model achieved results above 0.95 average accuracy for classifying online messages. Such improvements can help social scientists better understand human communication, behaviour, discussion and persuasion.