Tootfinder

‘Start Over From Scratch’: Nobel Laureate Economists Denounce GOP Budget Bill | Portside
https://portside.org/2025-06-03/start-over-scratch-nobel-laureate-economists-denounce-gop-budget-bill

Some economists are beginning to question the accuracy of recent U.S. inflation data
after the federal government said staffing shortages hampered its ability to conduct a massive monthly survey.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics, the office that publishes the inflation rate,
told outside economists this week that a hiring freeze at the agency was forcing the survey to cut back on the number of businesses where it checks prices.
In last month’s inflation report, which exa…

Skill-Driven Certification Pathways: Measuring Industry Training Impact on Graduate Employability
Anatoli Kovalev, Narelle Stefanac, Marian-Andrei Rizoiu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.04588

Skill-Driven Certification Pathways: Measuring Industry Training Impact on Graduate Employability
Australia faces a critical technology skills shortage, requiring approximately $52,000$ new technology professionals annually by 2030, while confronting a widening gap between employer requirements and graduate capabilities. With only $1\%$ of technology graduates considered immediately work-ready, traditional educational pathways alone prove insufficient to meet industry demands. This research examines how industry certifications, such as Microsoft's AI-900 (Azure AI Fundamentals), can bridge …

Another of my forays into AI ethics is just out! This time the focus is on the ethics (or lack thereof) of Reinforcement Learning Feedback (RLF) techniques aimed at increasing the 'alignment' of LLMs.
The paper is fruit of the joint work of a great team of collaborators, among whom @… and @…

Helpful, harmless, honest? Sociotechnical limits of AI alignment and safety through Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback - Ethics and Information Technology
This paper critically evaluates the attempts to align Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems, especially Large Language Models (LLMs), with human values and intentions through Reinforcement Learning from Feedback methods, involving either human feedback (RLHF) or AI feedback (RLAIF). Specifically, we show the shortcomings of the broadly pursued alignment goals of honesty, harmlessness, and helpfulness. Through a multidisciplinary sociotechnical critique, we examine both the theoretical underpinni…

Overlap Gap and Computational Thresholds in the Square Wave Perceptron
Marco Benedetti, Andrej Bogdanov, Enrico M. Malatesta, Marc M\'ezard, Gianmarco Perrupato, Alon Rosen, Nikolaj I. Schwartzbach, Riccardo Zecchina
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.05197

Overlap Gap and Computational Thresholds in the Square Wave Perceptron
Square Wave Perceptrons (SWPs) form a class of neural network models with oscillating activation function that exhibit intriguing ``hardness'' properties in the high-dimensional limit at a fixed signal-to-noise ratio $α= O(1)$. In this work, we examine two key aspects of these models. The first is related to the so-called overlap-gap property, that is a disconnectivity feature of the geometry of the solution space of combinatorial optimization problems proven to cause the failure of a large fa…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.03503 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_sta…

Analyzing limits for in-context learning
We examine limits of in-context learning (ICL) in transformer models trained from scratch, focusing on function approximation tasks as a controlled setting to uncover fundamental behaviors. While we show empirically that transformer models can generalize, approximating unseen classes of polynomial (non linear) functions, they cannot generalize beyond certain values. We provide both empirical and mathematical arguments explaining that these limitations stem from architectural components, namely …

Residual Income Valuation and Stock Returns: Evidence from a Value-to-Price Investment Strategy
Ahmad Haboub, Aris Kartsaklas, Vasilis Sarafidis
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.00206

Residual Income Valuation and Stock Returns: Evidence from a Value-to-Price Investment Strategy
We hypothesize that portfolio sorts based on the V/P ratio generate excess returns and consist of companies that are undervalued for prolonged periods. Results, for the US market show that high V/P portfolios outperform low V/P portfolios across horizons extending from one to three years. The V/P ratio is positively correlated to future stock returns after controlling for firm characteristics, which are well known risk proxies. Findings also indicate that profitability and investment add explan…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.03502 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_eco…

Adaptive Shock Compensation in the Multi-layer Network of Global Food Production and Trade
Global food production and trade networks are highly dynamic, especially in response to shortages when countries adjust their supply strategies. In this study, we examine adjustments across 123 agri-food products from 192 countries resulting in 23616 individual scenarios of food shortage, and calibrate a multi-layer network model to understand the propagation of the shocks. We analyze shock mitigation actions, such as increasing imports, boosting production, or substituting food items. Our find…