Keyon Vafa
@keyonV
Postdoctoral fellow at @Harvard_Data | Former computer science PhD with @Blei_Lab at @Columbia University | Organizing @WorldModelsICML
Can an AI model predict perfectly and still have a terrible world model? What would that even mean? Our new ICML paper formalizes these questions One result tells the story: A transformer trained on 10M solar systems nails planetary orbits. But it botches gravitational laws 🧵
How do people reason so flexibly about new problems, bringing to bear globally-relevant knowledge while staying locally-consistent? Can we engineer a system that can synthesize bespoke world models (expressed as probabilistic programs) on-the-fly?
New paper & surprising result. LLMs transmit traits to other models via hidden signals in data. Datasets consisting only of 3-digit numbers can transmit a love for owls, or evil tendencies. 🧵
Excited to be one of the organizers for this workshop tomorrow. Stop by if you're interested in evaluating world models!
Join us for the Workshop on Assessing World Models at ICML tomorrow! When: Friday July 17, 8:45am-5:15pm Where: West Ballroom B (same floor as registration)
Researchers from Harvard, Keyon Vafa (@keyonV) and MIT, Peter Chang (@petergchang), Ashesh Rambachan (@asheshrambachan), and Sendhil Mullainathan (@m_sendhil) have published what I consider the most interesting study on the abilities of AI models in 2025. They wanted to address…
1. We will present HypotheSAEs at #ICML2025, Wednesday 11am (West Hall B2-B3 #W-421). 2. Let me know if you'd like to chat about: - AI for hypothesis generation - why SAEs are still useful - whether PhD students should stay in school