Related papers: Optimal Echo Chambers
Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting has demonstrated the capacity of large language models to perform complex reasoning through intermediate steps. While effective, current CoT methods face challenges: Zero-shot-CoT can lead to reasoning…
Whether animal or speech communication, environmental sounds, or music -- all sounds carry some information. Sound sources are embedded in acoustic environments that contain any number of additional sources that emit sounds that reach the…
Multi-agent models often describe populations segregated either in the physical space, i.e. subdivided in metapopulations, or in the ecology of opinions, i.e. partitioned in echo chambers. Here we show how the interplay between homophily…
The ability to learn from others (social learning) is often deemed a cause of human species success. But if social learning is indeed more efficient (whether less costly or more accurate) than individual learning, it raises the question of…
Vocabulary learning by children can be characterized by many biases. When encountering a new word, children as well as adults, are biased towards assuming that it means something totally different from the words that they already know. To…
The maturation of Large Audio Language Models (LALMs) has raised growing expectations for them to comprehend complex audio much like humans. Current efforts primarily replicate text-based reasoning by contextualizing audio content through a…
Policy learning can be used to extract individualized treatment regimes from observational data in healthcare, civics, e-commerce, and beyond. One big hurdle to policy learning is a commonplace lack of overlap in the data for different…
Machine learning algorithms are increasingly used to assist human decision-making. When the goal of machine assistance is to improve the accuracy of human decisions, it might seem appealing to design ML algorithms that complement human…
Active learning is usually applied to acquire labels of informative data points in supervised learning, to maximize accuracy in a sample-efficient way. However, maximizing the accuracy is not the end goal when the results are used for…
This paper studies audio-visual noise suppression for egocentric videos -- where the speaker is not captured in the video. Instead, potential noise sources are visible on screen with the camera emulating the off-screen speaker's view of the…
Recent studies suggest that social media usage -- while linked to an increased diversity of information and perspectives for users -- has exacerbated user polarization on many issues. A popular theory for this phenomenon centers on the…
Heuristics and cognitive biases are an integral part of human decision-making. Automatically detecting a particular cognitive bias could enable intelligent tools to provide better decision-support. Detecting the presence of a cognitive bias…
Pierons and Chocholles seminal psychophysical work predicts that human response time to information relative to visual contrast and sound frequency decreases when contrast intensity or sound frequency increases. The goal of this study is to…
This work addresses private communication with distributed systems in mind. We consider how to best use secret key resources and communication to transmit signals across a system so that an eavesdropper is least capable to act on the…
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in group decision-making, but their influence risks fostering conformity and reducing epistemic vigilance. Drawing on the Argumentative Theory of Reasoning, we argue that confirmation bias,…
Imperfect secrecy in communication systems is investigated. Instead of using equivocation as a measure of secrecy, the distortion that an eavesdropper incurs in producing an estimate of the source sequence is examined. The communication…
Bayesian models quantify uncertainty and facilitate optimal decision-making in downstream applications. For most models, however, practitioners are forced to use approximate inference techniques that lead to sub-optimal decisions due to…
Teaching is one of the most important factors affecting any education system. Many research efforts have been conducted to facilitate the presentation modes used by instructors in classrooms as well as provide means for students to review…
Voice-controlled house-hold devices, like Amazon Echo or Google Home, face the problem of performing speech recognition of device-directed speech in the presence of interfering background speech, i.e., background noise and interfering…
We study the outcomes of information aggregation in online social networks. Our main result is that networks with certain realistic structural properties avoid information cascades and enable a population to effectively aggregate…