The paper presents a method for early triage of misinformation by forecasting the future growth of social media information cascades from the first 30 minutes of activity. Using features such as node count, structural depth entropy, and temporal arrival entropy, the combined model improves predictive accuracy on 352 test trees, especially for high‑activity cascades. Additionally, the study analyzes early reply patterns in PHEME threads and evaluates evidence retrieval in a Check‑COVID setting, proposing an integrated human‑review system that leverages these early signals for misinformation triage.
arXiv:2608. 14903v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantitative forecasts of frontier artificial intelligence often connect dated targets to trends in benchmark scores, training compute, release time, or expert belief.
The paper demonstrates that large language models (LLMs) used for forecasting real‑world events can be manipulated by simply publishing new articles, even without direct access to the model or its retriever. By injecting a small number of targeted news pieces into a common crawl corpus, an adversary can flip over half of the forecast probabilities and significantly degrade forecast accuracy. The study also shows that common defense strategies can be cheaply bypassed, highlighting the vulnerability of probabilistic LLM judgments to information‑supply‑chain attacks.
The paper introduces Alignment Forecasting, a method for predicting whether fine‑tuning a language model on a given dataset will increase specific alignment failures such as deception or sycophancy. It presents ALIGNMENTFORECASTBENCH, a benchmark of over 5,000 forecasting questions across many models, datasets, and failure modes, and shows that a simple forecasting scaffold using an LLM’s assessment of dataset bias can outperform baseline forecasters. The authors demonstrate that filtering out high‑risk training examples identified by the forecaster can improve alignment in multiple‑choice evaluations, though benefits in open‑ended conversations remain uncertain.
arXiv:2610.20417v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Audits of large language model (LLM) extraction from full-length documents report severe unreliability, leaving two questions open: what the failures a...
The paper investigates why misinformation spreads more quickly on engagement‑based platforms by dissecting the recommendation algorithm of X. It identifies an engagement fungibility mechanism that rewards instant reactions (likes, retweets) over thoughtful engagement (replies, quotes), allowing misinformation—which tends to attract instant reactions—to receive more recommendations. The authors validate this mechanism through a simulation on the USC X 2024 election corpus, showing that adjusting metric weights has little effect, while requiring thoughtful engagement before amplification can significantly reduce the credibility exposure gap without harming mainstream content or engagement.
The paper proposes a shift from predictive modeling to descriptive provider behavior profiles for fraud, waste, and abuse (FWA) review. By decomposing billed revenue into provider scale and procedure composition, the authors construct lineage‑aware profiles that capture scale history, code lineage, and clinical family shares. In a large Medicare audit, these simple, interpretable descriptions outperform complex forecasts and improve recall for high‑cost rare events, while an optional semantic factorization adds context without inferring intent.
The paper audits the widely used ISOT/Kaggle Fake and Real News corpus and finds that extremely high reported accuracies (≈0.98) are largely due to shortcut signals rather than genuine veracity detection. A simple TF‑IDF linear classifier achieves perfect F1 when using only subject metadata, and even after removing metadata, newswire tags, and duplicate documents, the F1 drops only modestly, indicating that editorial style rather than specific tokens drives performance. Under topic‑disjoint and temporal transfer tests, performance collapses, and models transfer poorly to the independent LIAR benchmark, showing that within‑corpus scores reflect source and topic separability, not truth verification. whyItMatters:"The study demonstrates that current high accuracy metrics on this fake‑news dataset are misleading, highlighting the need for more robust evaluation protocols that guard against shortcut learning."
The paper demonstrates that the outcome of a forecasting leaderboard is largely determined by the evaluator’s design choices rather than the models themselves. By fixing the data, horizon, and period, the authors varied three key evaluation decisions—unit of analysis, error pooling, and scoring metric—and showed that each can reverse or eliminate the apparent superiority of any forecasting method. The study also evaluates the practical impact of these choices on a deployed system, revealing that the selection rule captures a significant portion of the potential performance gain, and confirms the findings on an external public dataset.
arXiv:2608. 11922v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Predictive-distribution entropy makes a strong selection rule in retrieval-augmented question answering: across five QA benchmarks, keeping the candidate answer that a frozen respondent LLM produces with the lowest answer-token entropy lifts mean answer $F_1$ from 0.
arXiv:2608. 14509v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Systems that ask a language model to reach a conclusion from many sources usually concatenate them into one prompt.
arXiv:2607. 05401v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A small number of methodological contributions, including word2vec, the Transformer, large-scale pre-training, and reinforcement learning from human feedback, have reshaped NLP and AI research over the past decade.
arXiv:2609.00747v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models increasingly generate research ideas, yet judging their novelty or feasibility at generation time does not establish whether they...