Tootfinder

Backdoor Attribution: Elucidating and Controlling Backdoor in Language Models
Miao Yu, Zhenhong Zhou, Moayad Aloqaily, Kun Wang, Biwei Huang, Stephen Wang, Yueming Jin, Qingsong Wen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.21761

Backdoor Attribution: Elucidating and Controlling Backdoor in Language Models
Fine-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to backdoor attacks through data poisoning, yet the internal mechanisms governing these attacks remain a black box. Previous research on interpretability for LLM safety tends to focus on alignment, jailbreak, and hallucination, but overlooks backdoor mechanisms, making it difficult to understand and fully eliminate the backdoor threat. In this paper, aiming to bridge this gap, we explore the interpretable mechanisms of LLM backdoors through…

À Madagascar, plus de 430 organisations impliquées dans les questions environnementales ont signé une lettre ouverte adressée au Président de la Refondation de la République.
Elles évoquent :
- les risques (mais aussi les opportunités) provoquées par la situation actuelle,
- les menaces et violences que subissent défenseurs de l’environnement et journalistes.
Pourquoi chat échaudé a-t-il de bonnes raisons de craindre l’eau froide ?
[blog]

It turns out my tinnitus on the left side can be triggered perfectly on the right side by pulling my head to the left.
The orthopedist, while agreeing that this is, in fact, the case, told me that it's not so according to my medical insurance and so I'm on my own.
Still wondering why people end up "doing their own research"?

Read the Room or Lead the Room: Understanding Socio-Cognitive Dynamics in Human-AI Teaming
Jaeyoon Choi, Mohammad Amin Samadi, Spencer JaQuay, Seehee Park, Nia Nixon
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.09944

Read the Room or Lead the Room: Understanding Socio-Cognitive Dynamics in Human-AI Teaming
Research on Collaborative Problem Solving (CPS) has traditionally examined how humans rely on one another cognitively and socially to accomplish tasks together. With the rapid advancement of AI and large language models, however, a new question emerge: what happens to team dynamics when one of the "teammates" is not human? In this study, we investigate how the integration of an AI teammate -- a fully autonomous GPT-4 agent with social, cognitive, and affective capabilities -- shapes the socio-c…

AI Adoption Across Mission-Driven Organizations
Dalia Ali, Muneeb Ahmed, Hailan Wang, Arfa Khan, Naira Paola Arnez Jordan, Sunnie S. Y. Kim, Meet Dilip Muchhala, Anne Kathrin Merkle, Orestis Papakyriakopoulos
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.03868

AI Adoption Across Mission-Driven Organizations
Despite AI's promise for addressing global challenges, empirical understanding of AI adoption in mission-driven organizations (MDOs) remains limited. While research emphasizes individual applications or ethical principles, little is known about how resource-constrained, values-driven organizations navigate AI integration across operations. We conducted thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews with 15 practitioners from environmental, humanitarian, and development organizations across the…

Why the noise model matters: A performance gap in learned regularization
Sebastian Banert, Christoph Brauer, Dirk Lorenz, Lionel Tondji
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12521 https://…

Why the noise model matters: A performance gap in learned regularization
This article addresses the challenge of learning effective regularizers for linear inverse problems. We analyze and compare several types of learned variational regularization against the theoretical benchmark of the optimal affine reconstruction, i.e. the best possible affine linear map for minimizing the mean squared error. It is known that this optimal reconstruction can be achieved using Tikhonov regularization, but this requires precise knowledge of the noise covariance to properly weight …

Taking notes from the successes and failures of the Russian revolution, a group of anarchists (including Nestor Makhno, a Ukrainian anarchist militant who was critical in defeating the Tzar's army and who later also fought the Red Army) wrote a document titled the "Organizational Platform of the Libertarian Communists." This document came to be known as "The Platform." It remains one of the most important first-hand revolutionary documents, outlining a clear revolutionary plan.
I've taken this, the Viable System Model from cybernetics, and my own organizing experience, to describe an organization to confront the current set of crises.
This continues to build on the stuff I have been writing, but it's a lot less high level theory and a lot more specific.
https://anarchoccultism.org/building-zion/a-solarpunk-fractal-microservices
As always, editing notes (typos, grammar, spelling, etc) are always welcome, as are any questions. My ADHD brain tends to go a lot faster than anything else, so I have a tendency to drop words and have a lot of trouble catching them later. Between my ADHD and mild dyslexia, it can be pretty hard for me to catch when autocorrect gives me the wrong word.
A lot of folks have already been super helpful in offering their editing support, and I'm really grateful. Writing this has felt collaborative, and it should. On the one hand this comes from my own experience and research, but on the other I'm also voicing things that have come from conversations here. This has all been a bit of my voice and a bit of the federated world, and I'm really appreciating that.

we are the clapton, always anti-fascist, fuck the terf FA, LET THEM PLAY
#claptoncfc #ccfc #ftfa #fedifc

An Accurate Standard Error Estimation for Quadratic Exponential Logistic Regressions by Applying Generalized Estimating Equations to Pseudo-Likelihoods
Ong Wei Yong, Lee Shao-Man, Hsueh Chia-Ming, Chang Sheng-Mao
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00431

An Accurate Standard Error Estimation for Quadratic Exponential Logistic Regressions by Applying Generalized Estimating Equations to Pseudo-Likelihoods
For a set of binary response variables, conditional mean models characterize the expected value of a response variable given the others and are popularly applied in longitudinal and network data analyses. The quadratic exponential binary distribution is a natural choice in this context. However, maximum likelihood estimation of this distribution is computationally demanding due to its intractable normalizing constant, while the pseudo-likelihood, though computationally convenient, tends to seve…

The fracturing of the Dutch far-right, after Wilder's reminded everyone that bigots are bad at compromise, is definitely a relief. Dutch folks I've talked to definitely see D66 as progressive, <strike>so there's no question this is a hard turn to the left (even if it's not a total flip to the far-left)</strike> a lot of folks don't agree. I'm going to let the comments speak rather than editorialize myself..
While this is a useful example of how a democracy can be far more resilient to fascism than the US, that is, perhaps, not the most interesting thing about Dutch politics. The most interesting thing is something Dutch folks take for granted and never think of as such: there are two "governments."
The election was for the Tweede Kamer. This is a house of representatives. The Dutch use proportional representation, so people can (more or less) vote for the parties they actually want. Parties <strike>rarely</strike> never actually get a ruling majority, so they have to form coalition governments. This forces compromise, which is something Wilders was extremely bad at. He was actually responsible for collapsing the coalition his party put together, which triggered this election... and a massive loss of seats for his party.
Dutch folks do still vote strategically, since a larger party has an easier time building the governing coalition and the PM tends to come from the largest party. This will likely be D66, which is really good for the EU. D66 has a pretty radical plan to solve the housing crisis, and it will be really interesting to see if they can pull it off. But that's not the government I want to talk about right now.
In the Netherlands, failure to control water can destroy entire towns. A good chunk of the country is below sea level. Both floods and land reclamation have been critical parts of Dutch history. So in the 1200's or so, the Dutch realized that some things are too important to mix with normal politics.
You see, if there's an incompetent government that isn't able to actually *do* anything (see Dick Schoof and the PVV/VVD/NSC/BBB coalition) you don't want your dikes to collapse and poulders to flood. So the Dutch created a parallel "government" that exists only to manage water: waterschap or heemraadschap (roughly "Water Board" in English). These are regional bureaucracies that exist only to manage water. They exist completely outside the thing we usually talk about as a "government" but they have some of the same properties as a government. They can, for example, levy taxes. The central government contributes funds to them, but lacks authority over them. Water boards are democratically elected and can operate more-or-less independent of the central government.
Controlling water is a common problem, so water boards were created to fulfill the role of commons management. Meanwhile, so many other things in politics run into the very same "Tragedy of the Commons" problems. The right wing solution to commons management is to let corporations ruin everything. The left-state solution is to move everything into the government so it can be undermined and destroyed by the right. The Dutch solution to this specific problem has been to move commons management out of the domain of the central government into something else.
And when I say "government" here, I'm speaking more to the liberal definition of the term than to an anarchist definition. A democratically controlled authority that facilitates resource management lacks the capacity for coercive violence that anarchists define as "government." (Though I assume they might leverage police or something if folks refuse to pay their taxes, but I can't imagine anyone choosing not to.)
As the US federal government destroys the social fabric of the US, as Trump guts programs critical to people's survival, it might be worth thinking about this model. These authorities weren't created by any central authority, they evolved from the people. Nothing stops Americans from building similar institutions that are both democratic and outside of the authority of a government that could choose to defund and abolish them... nothing but the realization that yes, you actually can.
#USPol #NLPol