Byron Wallace
@byron.bsky.social
Assoc. Prof in CS @ Northeastern, NLP/ML & health & etc. He/him.
Check out @hibaahsan.bsky.social's paper on spotting (problematic) racial biases in LLMs for healthcare applications 👇
LLMs have been shown to provide different predictions in clinical tasks when patient race is altered. Can SAEs spot this undue reliance on race? 🧵
Work w/ @byron.bsky.social
Link: arxiv.org/abs/2511.00177
Work w/ @byron.bsky.social
Link: arxiv.org/abs/2511.00177
November 5, 2025 at 3:52 PM
Check out @hibaahsan.bsky.social's paper on spotting (problematic) racial biases in LLMs for healthcare applications 👇
Reposted by Byron Wallace
3/ 🏥 A separate team at Northeastern located where certain signals live inside Olmo and made targeted edits that reduced biased clinical predictions. This kind of audit is only possible because Olmo exposes all its components.
→ buff.ly/HkChr4Q
→ buff.ly/HkChr4Q
October 24, 2025 at 6:36 PM
3/ 🏥 A separate team at Northeastern located where certain signals live inside Olmo and made targeted edits that reduced biased clinical predictions. This kind of audit is only possible because Olmo exposes all its components.
→ buff.ly/HkChr4Q
→ buff.ly/HkChr4Q
Chantal (and Vinith) find that you can jailbreak LLMs with syntax! Some examples: cshaib.github.io/syntax_domai...
Syntax that spuriously correlates with safe domains can jailbreak LLMs - e.g. below with GPT4o mini
Our paper (co w/ Vinith Suriyakumar) on syntax-domain spurious correlations will appear at #NeurIPS2025 as a ✨spotlight!
+ @marzyehghassemi.bsky.social, @byron.bsky.social, Levent Sagun
Our paper (co w/ Vinith Suriyakumar) on syntax-domain spurious correlations will appear at #NeurIPS2025 as a ✨spotlight!
+ @marzyehghassemi.bsky.social, @byron.bsky.social, Levent Sagun
October 24, 2025 at 4:26 PM
Chantal (and Vinith) find that you can jailbreak LLMs with syntax! Some examples: cshaib.github.io/syntax_domai...
Now to appear at #EMNLP2025 (Findings). We've added more models and experiments: arxiv.org/abs/2502.13319
LLMs are known to perpetuate social biases in clinical tasks. Can we locate and intervene upon LLM activations that encode patient demographics like gender and race? 🧵
Work w/ @arnabsensharma.bsky.social, @silvioamir.bsky.social, @davidbau.bsky.social, @byron.bsky.social
arxiv.org/abs/2502.13319
Work w/ @arnabsensharma.bsky.social, @silvioamir.bsky.social, @davidbau.bsky.social, @byron.bsky.social
arxiv.org/abs/2502.13319
October 22, 2025 at 12:24 PM
Now to appear at #EMNLP2025 (Findings). We've added more models and experiments: arxiv.org/abs/2502.13319
Can we distill *circuits* from teacher models into smaller students? 👇
🔊 New work w/ @silvioamir.bsky.social & @byron.bsky.social! We show you can distill a model’s mechanism, not just its answers -- teaching a small LM to run it's circuit same as a larger teacher model. We call it Circuit Distillation. (1/4)
September 30, 2025 at 11:34 PM
Can we distill *circuits* from teacher models into smaller students? 👇
Reposted by Byron Wallace
Who is going to be at #COLM2025?
I want to draw your attention to a COLM paper by my student @sfeucht.bsky.social that has totally changed the way I think and teach about LLM representations. The work is worth knowing.
And you can meet Sheridan at COLM, Oct 7!
bsky.app/profile/sfe...
I want to draw your attention to a COLM paper by my student @sfeucht.bsky.social that has totally changed the way I think and teach about LLM representations. The work is worth knowing.
And you can meet Sheridan at COLM, Oct 7!
bsky.app/profile/sfe...
September 27, 2025 at 8:54 PM
Who is going to be at #COLM2025?
I want to draw your attention to a COLM paper by my student @sfeucht.bsky.social that has totally changed the way I think and teach about LLM representations. The work is worth knowing.
And you can meet Sheridan at COLM, Oct 7!
bsky.app/profile/sfe...
I want to draw your attention to a COLM paper by my student @sfeucht.bsky.social that has totally changed the way I think and teach about LLM representations. The work is worth knowing.
And you can meet Sheridan at COLM, Oct 7!
bsky.app/profile/sfe...
Can we quantify what makes some text read like AI "slop"? We tried 👇
"AI slop" seems to be everywhere, but what exactly makes text feel like "slop"?
In our new work (w/ @tuhinchakr.bsky.social, Diego Garcia-Olano, @byron.bsky.social ) we provide a systematic attempt at measuring AI "slop" in text!
arxiv.org/abs/2509.19163
🧵 (1/7)
In our new work (w/ @tuhinchakr.bsky.social, Diego Garcia-Olano, @byron.bsky.social ) we provide a systematic attempt at measuring AI "slop" in text!
arxiv.org/abs/2509.19163
🧵 (1/7)
September 24, 2025 at 1:28 PM
Can we quantify what makes some text read like AI "slop"? We tried 👇
Reposted by Byron Wallace
Our new paper asks: what is the goal of “natural language verbalization” interpretability approaches? If a verbalizer is supposed to tell us something about what’s in the target LM and NOT just what’s in the verbalizer LM, how do we actually evaluate that?
In short: Verbalizer evals are broken! To know what info a model REMOVES from input, reconstruction is better than verbalization. And verbalization tells very little about what a model ADDS to input! w/A. Ceballos, G. Rogers, @nsaphra.bsky.social @byron.bsky.social
8/8
8/8
Do Natural Language Descriptions of Model Activations Convey Privileged Information?
Recent interpretability methods have proposed to translate LLM internal representations into natural language descriptions using a second verbalizer LLM. This is intended to illuminate how the target ...
arxiv.org
September 17, 2025 at 9:45 PM
Our new paper asks: what is the goal of “natural language verbalization” interpretability approaches? If a verbalizer is supposed to tell us something about what’s in the target LM and NOT just what’s in the verbalizer LM, how do we actually evaluate that?
Reposted by Byron Wallace
Wouldn’t it be great to have questions about LM internals answered in plain English? That’s the promise of verbalization interpretability. Unfortunately, our new paper shows that evaluating these methods is nuanced—and verbalizers might not tell us what we hope they do. 🧵👇1/8
September 17, 2025 at 7:19 PM
Wouldn’t it be great to have questions about LM internals answered in plain English? That’s the promise of verbalization interpretability. Unfortunately, our new paper shows that evaluating these methods is nuanced—and verbalizers might not tell us what we hope they do. 🧵👇1/8
Reposted by Byron Wallace
Thrilled to share our research showing how LLM models can be influenced by bias from "spun" medical literature is now featured in Northeastern's Khoury news! This shows critical insights as AI enters healthcare.
The full paper can be found at arxiv.org/abs/2502.07963
The full paper can be found at arxiv.org/abs/2502.07963
As AI expands into medicine, Northeastern study finds AI models influenced by medical bias - Khoury College of Computer Sciences
Humans can be easily influenced by language that is one-sided, especially in complex fields like medicine. But a new Khoury-led study shows that large language models, too, can be tricked […]
khoury.northeastern.edu
August 25, 2025 at 3:36 PM
Thrilled to share our research showing how LLM models can be influenced by bias from "spun" medical literature is now featured in Northeastern's Khoury news! This shows critical insights as AI enters healthcare.
The full paper can be found at arxiv.org/abs/2502.07963
The full paper can be found at arxiv.org/abs/2502.07963
Reposted by Byron Wallace
This Friday NEMI 2025 is at Northeastern in Boston, 8 talks, 24 roundtables, 90 posters; 200+ attendees. Thanks to
goodfire.ai/ for sponsoring! nemiconf.github.io/summer25/
If you can't make it in person, the livestream will be here:
www.youtube.com/live/4BJBis...
goodfire.ai/ for sponsoring! nemiconf.github.io/summer25/
If you can't make it in person, the livestream will be here:
www.youtube.com/live/4BJBis...
New England Mechanistic Interpretability Workshop
About:The New England Mechanistic Interpretability (NEMI) workshop aims to bring together academic and industry researchers from the New England and surround...
www.youtube.com
August 18, 2025 at 6:06 PM
This Friday NEMI 2025 is at Northeastern in Boston, 8 talks, 24 roundtables, 90 posters; 200+ attendees. Thanks to
goodfire.ai/ for sponsoring! nemiconf.github.io/summer25/
If you can't make it in person, the livestream will be here:
www.youtube.com/live/4BJBis...
goodfire.ai/ for sponsoring! nemiconf.github.io/summer25/
If you can't make it in person, the livestream will be here:
www.youtube.com/live/4BJBis...
Reposted by Byron Wallace
📢 How factual are LLMs in healthcare?
We’re excited to release FactEHR — a new benchmark to evaluate factuality in clinical notes. As generative AI enters the clinic, we need rigorous, source-grounded tools to measure what these models get right — and what they don’t. 🏥 🤖
We’re excited to release FactEHR — a new benchmark to evaluate factuality in clinical notes. As generative AI enters the clinic, we need rigorous, source-grounded tools to measure what these models get right — and what they don’t. 🏥 🤖
August 11, 2025 at 5:25 PM
📢 How factual are LLMs in healthcare?
We’re excited to release FactEHR — a new benchmark to evaluate factuality in clinical notes. As generative AI enters the clinic, we need rigorous, source-grounded tools to measure what these models get right — and what they don’t. 🏥 🤖
We’re excited to release FactEHR — a new benchmark to evaluate factuality in clinical notes. As generative AI enters the clinic, we need rigorous, source-grounded tools to measure what these models get right — and what they don’t. 🏥 🤖
Reposted by Byron Wallace
Chatted with @byron.bsky.social at icml about my recent work, so look out for his upcoming "Tokenization is More Than More Than Compression".
July 19, 2025 at 9:11 PM
Chatted with @byron.bsky.social at icml about my recent work, so look out for his upcoming "Tokenization is More Than More Than Compression".
Reposted by Byron Wallace
Are we fact-checking medical claims the right way? 🩺🤔
Probably not. In our study, even experts struggled to verify Reddit health claims using end-to-end systems.
We show why—and argue fact-checking should be a dialogue, with patients in the loop
arxiv.org/abs/2506.20876
🧵1/
Probably not. In our study, even experts struggled to verify Reddit health claims using end-to-end systems.
We show why—and argue fact-checking should be a dialogue, with patients in the loop
arxiv.org/abs/2506.20876
🧵1/
July 1, 2025 at 5:10 PM
Are we fact-checking medical claims the right way? 🩺🤔
Probably not. In our study, even experts struggled to verify Reddit health claims using end-to-end systems.
We show why—and argue fact-checking should be a dialogue, with patients in the loop
arxiv.org/abs/2506.20876
🧵1/
Probably not. In our study, even experts struggled to verify Reddit health claims using end-to-end systems.
We show why—and argue fact-checking should be a dialogue, with patients in the loop
arxiv.org/abs/2506.20876
🧵1/
Reposted by Byron Wallace
[📄] Are LLMs mindless token-shifters, or do they build meaningful representations of language? We study how LLMs copy text in-context, and physically separate out two types of induction heads: token heads, which copy literal tokens, and concept heads, which copy word meanings.
April 7, 2025 at 1:54 PM
[📄] Are LLMs mindless token-shifters, or do they build meaningful representations of language? We study how LLMs copy text in-context, and physically separate out two types of induction heads: token heads, which copy literal tokens, and concept heads, which copy word meanings.
Reposted by Byron Wallace
I'm searching for some comp/ling experts to provide a precise definition of “slop” as it refers to text (see: corp.oup.com/word-of-the-...)
I put together a google form that should take no longer than 10 minutes to complete: forms.gle/oWxsCScW3dJU...
If you can help, I'd appreciate your input! 🙏
I put together a google form that should take no longer than 10 minutes to complete: forms.gle/oWxsCScW3dJU...
If you can help, I'd appreciate your input! 🙏
Oxford Word of the Year 2024 - Oxford University Press
The Oxford Word of the Year 2024 is 'brain rot'. Discover more about the winner, our shortlist, and 20 years of words that reflect the world.
corp.oup.com
March 10, 2025 at 8:00 PM
I'm searching for some comp/ling experts to provide a precise definition of “slop” as it refers to text (see: corp.oup.com/word-of-the-...)
I put together a google form that should take no longer than 10 minutes to complete: forms.gle/oWxsCScW3dJU...
If you can help, I'd appreciate your input! 🙏
I put together a google form that should take no longer than 10 minutes to complete: forms.gle/oWxsCScW3dJU...
If you can help, I'd appreciate your input! 🙏
Reposted by Byron Wallace
🌟Job ad🌟 We (@gregdnlp.bsky.social, @mattlease.bsky.social and I) are hiring a postdoc fellow within the CosmicAI Institute, to do galactic work with LLMs and generative AI! If you would like to push the frontiers of foundation models to help solve myths of the universe, please apply!
Seeking candidates (within three years of the award of their PhD) for a postdoctoral position with the Explorable Universe research group to perform research on developing next-generation generative AI copilots & agents to aid astronomy research. Info here www.cosmicai.org/jobs/postdoc...
February 25, 2025 at 10:09 PM
🌟Job ad🌟 We (@gregdnlp.bsky.social, @mattlease.bsky.social and I) are hiring a postdoc fellow within the CosmicAI Institute, to do galactic work with LLMs and generative AI! If you would like to push the frontiers of foundation models to help solve myths of the universe, please apply!
Reposted by Byron Wallace
LLMs are known to perpetuate social biases in clinical tasks. Can we locate and intervene upon LLM activations that encode patient demographics like gender and race? 🧵
Work w/ @arnabsensharma.bsky.social, @silvioamir.bsky.social, @davidbau.bsky.social, @byron.bsky.social
arxiv.org/abs/2502.13319
Work w/ @arnabsensharma.bsky.social, @silvioamir.bsky.social, @davidbau.bsky.social, @byron.bsky.social
arxiv.org/abs/2502.13319
February 22, 2025 at 4:18 AM
LLMs are known to perpetuate social biases in clinical tasks. Can we locate and intervene upon LLM activations that encode patient demographics like gender and race? 🧵
Work w/ @arnabsensharma.bsky.social, @silvioamir.bsky.social, @davidbau.bsky.social, @byron.bsky.social
arxiv.org/abs/2502.13319
Work w/ @arnabsensharma.bsky.social, @silvioamir.bsky.social, @davidbau.bsky.social, @byron.bsky.social
arxiv.org/abs/2502.13319
Reposted by Byron Wallace
🚨 Do LLMs fall for spin in medical literature? 🤔
In our new preprint, we find that LLMs are susceptible to biased reporting of clinical treatment benefits in abstracts—more so than human experts. 📄🔍 [1/7]
Full Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2502.07963
🧵👇
In our new preprint, we find that LLMs are susceptible to biased reporting of clinical treatment benefits in abstracts—more so than human experts. 📄🔍 [1/7]
Full Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2502.07963
🧵👇
February 15, 2025 at 2:34 AM
🚨 Do LLMs fall for spin in medical literature? 🤔
In our new preprint, we find that LLMs are susceptible to biased reporting of clinical treatment benefits in abstracts—more so than human experts. 📄🔍 [1/7]
Full Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2502.07963
🧵👇
In our new preprint, we find that LLMs are susceptible to biased reporting of clinical treatment benefits in abstracts—more so than human experts. 📄🔍 [1/7]
Full Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2502.07963
🧵👇
Reposted by Byron Wallace
📢 Can we trace a small distilled model back to its teacher? 🤔New work (w/ @chantalsh.bsky.social, @silvioamir.bsky.social & @byron.bsky.social) finds some footprints left by LLMs in distillation! [1/6]
🔗 Full paper: arxiv.org/abs/2502.06659
🔗 Full paper: arxiv.org/abs/2502.06659
Who Taught You That? Tracing Teachers in Model Distillation
Model distillation -- using outputs from a large teacher model to teach a small student model -- is a practical means of creating efficient models for a particular task. We ask: Can we identify a stud...
arxiv.org
February 11, 2025 at 5:16 PM
📢 Can we trace a small distilled model back to its teacher? 🤔New work (w/ @chantalsh.bsky.social, @silvioamir.bsky.social & @byron.bsky.social) finds some footprints left by LLMs in distillation! [1/6]
🔗 Full paper: arxiv.org/abs/2502.06659
🔗 Full paper: arxiv.org/abs/2502.06659
Reposted by Byron Wallace
DeepSeek R1 shows how important it is to be studying the internals of reasoning models. Try our code: Here @canrager.bsky.social shows a method for auditing AI bias by probing the internal monologue.
dsthoughts.baulab.info
I'd be interested in your thoughts.
dsthoughts.baulab.info
I'd be interested in your thoughts.
dsthoughts.baulab
January 31, 2025 at 2:30 PM
DeepSeek R1 shows how important it is to be studying the internals of reasoning models. Try our code: Here @canrager.bsky.social shows a method for auditing AI bias by probing the internal monologue.
dsthoughts.baulab.info
I'd be interested in your thoughts.
dsthoughts.baulab.info
I'd be interested in your thoughts.
Reposted by Byron Wallace
📣 🌍 We're hiring for 2 Machine Learning researchers to join SOLACE-AI @kingscollegelondon.bsky.social , funded by @wellcometrust.bsky.social . This is your chance to develop cutting-edge AI to directly impact global health responses to climate emergencies. jobs.ac.uk/job/DLM377
January 27, 2025 at 11:55 AM
📣 🌍 We're hiring for 2 Machine Learning researchers to join SOLACE-AI @kingscollegelondon.bsky.social , funded by @wellcometrust.bsky.social . This is your chance to develop cutting-edge AI to directly impact global health responses to climate emergencies. jobs.ac.uk/job/DLM377
Reposted by Byron Wallace
OLMo 2 is out 🥳 7B and 13B trained on 5T tokens, and meticulousy instruction tuned using Tulu 3 recipe.
Simply the best fully open models yet.
Really proud of the work & the amazing team at
@ai2.bsky.social
Simply the best fully open models yet.
Really proud of the work & the amazing team at
@ai2.bsky.social
November 26, 2024 at 9:12 PM
OLMo 2 is out 🥳 7B and 13B trained on 5T tokens, and meticulousy instruction tuned using Tulu 3 recipe.
Simply the best fully open models yet.
Really proud of the work & the amazing team at
@ai2.bsky.social
Simply the best fully open models yet.
Really proud of the work & the amazing team at
@ai2.bsky.social
I'll be @ #EMNLP2024 if anyone wants to find snobby coffee / despair about election / or I guess talk research. Some work to be presented👇
November 9, 2024 at 9:21 PM
I'll be @ #EMNLP2024 if anyone wants to find snobby coffee / despair about election / or I guess talk research. Some work to be presented👇
Reposted by Byron Wallace
Our work on reducing diagnostic errors with interpretable risk prediction is now on arXiv!
We retrieve evidence from a patient’s record, visualize how it informs a prediction, and test it in a realistic setting. 👇 (1/6)
arxiv.org/abs/2402.10109
w/ @byron.bsky.social and @jwvdm.bsky.social
We retrieve evidence from a patient’s record, visualize how it informs a prediction, and test it in a realistic setting. 👇 (1/6)
arxiv.org/abs/2402.10109
w/ @byron.bsky.social and @jwvdm.bsky.social
February 28, 2024 at 6:52 PM
Our work on reducing diagnostic errors with interpretable risk prediction is now on arXiv!
We retrieve evidence from a patient’s record, visualize how it informs a prediction, and test it in a realistic setting. 👇 (1/6)
arxiv.org/abs/2402.10109
w/ @byron.bsky.social and @jwvdm.bsky.social
We retrieve evidence from a patient’s record, visualize how it informs a prediction, and test it in a realistic setting. 👇 (1/6)
arxiv.org/abs/2402.10109
w/ @byron.bsky.social and @jwvdm.bsky.social