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Manfred Diaz

@manfreddiaz.bsky.social
2.4K followers 759 following 42 posts

Ph.D. Candidate at Mila and the University of Montreal, interested in AI/ML connections with economics, game theory, and social choice theory. manfreddiaz.github.io

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Reposted by Manfred Diaz
Marc Lanctot @sharky6000.bsky.social · 14/07/2026
I'm delighted to announce the release of OpenSpiel 2.0! ♟️🎲♦️🎉 Structured types for states, observations, and actions, standard trajectories (based on JSON), 19 new games, AlphaZero ported to JAX, Windows PyPI support, language model fine-tuning examples and an MCP server (demo below 🤩👇)! 🧵 1/N
OpenSpiel visual asset
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Reposted by Manfred Diaz
Joel Z Leibo @jzleibo.bsky.social · 21/03/2026
New paper: “𝐀 𝐓𝐡𝐞𝐨𝐫𝐲 𝐨𝐟 𝐀𝐩𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐩𝐫𝐢𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐧𝐞𝐬𝐬 𝐓𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐀𝐜𝐜𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐭𝐬 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐍𝐨𝐫𝐦𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐑𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐲” Agent-based models of social order work better when agents act by predictive pattern completion from prefix (culture/context) to suffix (action) than when they act through expected value maximization
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Manfred Diaz @manfreddiaz.bsky.social · 26/01/2026
belated happy birthday, Marc!
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Reposted by Manfred Diaz
Marc Lanctot @sharky6000.bsky.social · 15/01/2026
Hello all! 👋 I’m delighted to share a 🚨 new preprint 🚨: “Active Evaluation of General Agents: Problem Definition and Comparison of Baseline Algorithms”. A paper thread! 🤩📄🧵 1/N
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Manfred Diaz @manfreddiaz.bsky.social · 25/12/2025
Merry Christmas! ☃️🌲
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Manfred Diaz @manfreddiaz.bsky.social · 29/11/2025
Maybe the general intelligence has always been behind the algorithm or the prompt? No publicly available eval seems to be safe from researchers overfitting.
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Manfred Diaz @manfreddiaz.bsky.social · 04/10/2025
It hasn't disappointed thus far!
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Manfred Diaz @manfreddiaz.bsky.social · 08/08/2025
@sharky6000.bsky.social this may be of interest!
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Manfred Diaz @manfreddiaz.bsky.social · 16/06/2025
I was following this one during the COVID pandemic, but it has been inactive for quite some time. The original talks' recordings are amazing, though!
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Manfred Diaz @manfreddiaz.bsky.social · 05/06/2025
Yeah, it's been a period for all of us simultaneously! I have also been pretty busy with thesis/job search. Hopefully, it will be back running in the Fall term!
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Manfred Diaz @manfreddiaz.bsky.social · 23/05/2025
@aamasconf.bsky.social 2025 was very special for us! We had the opportunity. to present a tutorial on general evaluation of AI agents, and we got a best paper award! Congrats, @sharky6000.bsky.social and the team! 🎉
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Reposted by Manfred Diaz
Marc Lanctot @sharky6000.bsky.social · 18/05/2025
In the afternoon we will be giving a tutorial on general evaluation of AI agents. sites.google.com/view/aamas20... 10/N
sites.google.com
A Tutorial on General Evaluation of AI Agents
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), in particular, have emerged as scientific disciplines concerned with understanding and building single and multi-agent systems with the ability ...
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Reposted by Manfred Diaz
Joel Z Leibo @jzleibo.bsky.social · 09/05/2025
Announcing our latest arxiv paper: Societal and technological progress as sewing an ever-growing, ever-changing, patchy, and polychrome quilt arxiv.org/abs/2505.05197 We argue for a view of AI safety centered on preventing disagreement from spiraling into conflict.
arxiv.org
Societal and technological progress as sewing an ever-growing, ever-changing, patchy, and polychrome quilt
Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems are increasingly placed in positions where their decisions have real consequences, e.g., moderating online spaces, conducting research, and advising on policy. Ens...
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Manfred Diaz @manfreddiaz.bsky.social · 01/05/2025
Congrats, Seth!
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Reposted by Manfred Diaz
Joel Z Leibo @jzleibo.bsky.social · 22/04/2025
First LessWrong post! Inspired by Richard Rorty, we argue for a different view of AI alignment, where the goal is "more like sewing together a very large, elaborate, polychrome quilt", than it is "like getting a clearer vision of something true and deep" www.lesswrong.com/posts/S8KYwt...
lesswrong.com
Societal and technological progress as sewing an ever-growing, ever-changing, patchy, and polychrome quilt — LessWrong
We can just drop the axiom of rational convergence.
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Manfred Diaz @manfreddiaz.bsky.social · 16/04/2025
The quality of London's museums is just amazing! Enjoy!
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Reposted by Manfred Diaz
Joel Z Leibo @jzleibo.bsky.social · 01/04/2025
In case folks are interested, here's a video of a talk I gave at MIT a couple weeks ago: youtu.be/FmN6fRyfcsY?...
youtu.be
A Theory of Appropriateness with Applications to Generative Artificial Intelligence
YouTube video by MITCBMM
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Reposted by Manfred Diaz
Marc Lanctot @sharky6000.bsky.social · 28/03/2025
Our new evaluation method, Soft Condorcet Optimization is now available open-source! 👍 Both the sigmoid (smooth Kendall-tau) and Fenchel-Young (perturbed optimizers) versions. Also, an optimized C++ implementation that is ~40X faster than the Python one. 🤩⚡ github.com/google-deepm...
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Reposted by Manfred Diaz
Marc Lanctot @sharky6000.bsky.social · 26/03/2025
Working at the intersection of social choice and learning algorithms? Check out the 2nd Workshop on Social Choice and Learning Algorithms (SCaLA) at @ijcai.bsky.social this summer. Submission deadline: May 9th. I attended last year at AAMAS and loved it! 👍 sites.google.com/corp/view/sc...
sites.google.com
SCaLA-25
A workshop connecting research topics in social choice and learning algorithms.
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Manfred Diaz @manfreddiaz.bsky.social · 06/03/2025
If the AAMAS website is a good reference for this, it may not be, but uncertain atm.
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Manfred Diaz @manfreddiaz.bsky.social · 04/03/2025
Come to understand ML evaluation from first principles! We have put together a great AAMAS tutorial covering statistics, probabilistic models, game theory, and social choice theory. Bonus: a unifying perspective of the problem leveraging decision-theoretic principles! Join us on May 19th!
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Manfred Diaz @manfreddiaz.bsky.social · 04/03/2025
Re #2: The key finding there is that the stationary points of SCO contain the margin matrix but, as I said in the note, there is still more work to do!
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Manfred Diaz @manfreddiaz.bsky.social · 04/03/2025
Thanks! I have been meaning to update the manuscript to standalone without the main paper but instead I may have change the content to a different format 😉. Coming soon!
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Manfred Diaz @manfreddiaz.bsky.social · 25/02/2025
Ah, I see the confusion... I never used the "identically distributed assumption," only the independence assumption (from 8 to 9).
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Manfred Diaz @manfreddiaz.bsky.social · 25/02/2025
I'm not sure if I understood your question correctly, but yes? As the post you shared says, "Voila! We have shown that minimizing the KL divergence amounts to finding the maximum likelihood estimate of θ." Maybe I am missing your point 😬
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Manfred Diaz @manfreddiaz.bsky.social · 25/02/2025
Elo drives most LLM evaluations, but we often overlook its assumptions, benefits, and limitations. While working on SCO, we wanted to understand the SCO-Elo distinction, so I looked and uncovered some intriguing findings and documented them in these notes. I hope you find them valuable!
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Reposted by Manfred Diaz
Marc Lanctot @sharky6000.bsky.social · 24/02/2025
Looking for a principled evaluation method for ranking of *general* agents or models, i.e. that get evaluated across a myriad of different tasks? I’m delighted to tell you about our new paper, Soft Condorcet Optimization (SCO) for Ranking of General Agents, to be presented at AAMAS 2025! 🧵 1/N
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Manfred Diaz @manfreddiaz.bsky.social · 20/02/2025
I had the convexity results for the online pairwise update (Section B.1.1.1) in my notes (manfreddiaz.github.io/assets/pdf/s...), but it is not clear to me if they hold for the other non-online settings. Worth taking a more detailed pass over the paper!
manfreddiaz.github.io
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Manfred Diaz @manfreddiaz.bsky.social · 20/02/2025
That's a nice finding, @sacha2.bsky.social! @sharky6000.bsky.social I skimmed over it, and it seems neat! There is an important distinction, though. They work with the "online" Elo regime, departing from the traditional gradient/batch gradient descent updates. (e.g., FIDE doesn't use online updates)
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Manfred Diaz @manfreddiaz.bsky.social · 12/02/2025
lol 😀
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Manfred Diaz @manfreddiaz.bsky.social · 12/02/2025
Not that Michael Jordan, but this one en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael...
en.wikipedia.org
Michael I. Jordan - Wikipedia
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Manfred Diaz @manfreddiaz.bsky.social · 11/02/2025
I believe this example conveys, as Prof. Jordan hinted, the need for fresh conceptual frameworks that shift our perspective, help us avoid conceptual confusion, and increase our ability to build the future of AI. I believe ML-SoA provides such framework, but I’d love to hear more perspectives!
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Manfred Diaz @manfreddiaz.bsky.social · 11/02/2025
Through the ML-SoA design-centric view, reward hacking, misspecification and similar issues originate from designers' bounded rationality. The surprising “alignment problems” (www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlOI...) reflect ML designers' inability to comprehend the consequences of the programs they write.
youtube.com
CoastRunners 7
YouTube video by Jack Clark
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Manfred Diaz @manfreddiaz.bsky.social · 11/02/2025
For instance, in the AI safety literature, we hear phrases such as “the agent hacked the reward”, “the robot gamed the reward”, and similar statements. But does an ML model really "hack" or "game" anything? Or is this just a misleading metaphor? Chances are, it’s the latter.
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Manfred Diaz @manfreddiaz.bsky.social · 11/02/2025
None of these benefits is more critical than removing, to a greater extent, the anthropomorphism that has existed in AI, currently exacerbated by the rise of LLMs, whose principal peril is the conceptual confusion it sometimes causes. Let me clarify what I mean by "conceptual confusion".
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Manfred Diaz @manfreddiaz.bsky.social · 11/02/2025
We recently argued here (openreview.net/forum?id=LNY...) that examining ML through this perspective, which I call Machine Learning Through the Sciences of the Artificial (ML-SoA), offers solid foundations for understanding AI and ML in a broader context and introduces multiple benefits.
openreview.net
Milnor-Myerson Games and The Principles of Artificial...
In this paper, we introduce Milnor-Myerson games, a multiplayer interaction structure at the core of machine learning (ML), to shed light on the fundamental principles and implications the...
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Manfred Diaz @manfreddiaz.bsky.social · 11/02/2025
Back in the 1960, Herbert Simon defined in "The Sciences of the Artificial" an artificial entity as a product of human creation. In this context, AI shares foundations with other scientific theories that study human-designed structures such as institutions, markets, economies, and elections.
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Manfred Diaz @manfreddiaz.bsky.social · 11/02/2025
Last week, Michael I. Jordan's insightful talk at the AI Action Summit (www.youtube.com/live/W0QLq4q...) reminded us of the meaningful connections between AI, ML, economics, game theory, and mechanism design. But I'd argue the relationship goes deeper—it's profound, historical, and foundational. ⬇️
youtube.com
AI, Science and Society Conference - AI ACTION SUMMIT - DAY 1
YouTube video by IP Paris
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Manfred Diaz @manfreddiaz.bsky.social · 11/02/2025
Indeed! Some of the effects you predicted in your post are already being measured on StackOverflow (arxiv.org/abs/2307.07367).
arxiv.org
Are Large Language Models a Threat to Digital Public Goods? Evidence from Activity on Stack Overflow
Large language models like ChatGPT efficiently provide users with information about various topics, presenting a potential substitute for searching the web and asking people for help online. But since...
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Manfred Diaz @manfreddiaz.bsky.social · 08/02/2025
I completely agree! Decision theory, game theory, and mechanism design offer better foundations for understanding AI and ML in a broader context. Framing ML this way has many benefits, and we recently argued for this position (openreview.net/forum?id=LNY...).
openreview.net
Milnor-Myerson Games and The Principles of Artificial...
In this paper, we introduce Milnor-Myerson games, a multiplayer interaction structure at the core of machine learning (ML), to shed light on the fundamental principles and implications the...
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Manfred Diaz @manfreddiaz.bsky.social · 07/01/2025
I wonder what the source of those trending topics are. Is it the whole platform? The people you follow? Content in the Discover tab? 🤷🏼‍♂️
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Manfred Diaz @manfreddiaz.bsky.social · 07/01/2025
The Discover tab shows some kind of trending topics every time. For instance, I learned about the possibility of the Prime Minister resigning here on BlueSky yesterday.
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Manfred Diaz @manfreddiaz.bsky.social · 01/01/2025
I already watched Slow Horses, one of my favourites! And thanks to your recommendation, I'm now a fan of Silo!
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Reposted by Manfred Diaz
Joel Z Leibo @jzleibo.bsky.social · 31/12/2024
Very happy to announce the publication of our latest paper: A theory of appropriateness with applications to generative artificial intelligence arxiv.org/abs/2412.19010 And happy new year everyone!
arxiv.org
A theory of appropriateness with applications to generative artificial intelligence
What is appropriateness? Humans navigate a multi-scale mosaic of interlocking notions of what is appropriate for different situations. We act one way with our friends, another with our family, and yet...
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Manfred Diaz @manfreddiaz.bsky.social · 01/01/2025
I'm in, fingers crossed! Happy New Year, Marc!
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Manfred Diaz @manfreddiaz.bsky.social · 10/12/2024
NeurIPS generally both livestreams and records most if not all sessions and make them available after the conference. Takes a while but we eventually get them!
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Manfred Diaz @manfreddiaz.bsky.social · 10/12/2024
I didn't know about this! Sad that I'll miss it but I'll definitely watch the recording! 🙂
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Manfred Diaz @manfreddiaz.bsky.social · 04/12/2024
not much I can say atm 🙂! But we are using a bit of social choice theory to propose an alternative to alignment. It should be coming out soon!
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Manfred Diaz @manfreddiaz.bsky.social · 04/12/2024
Interesting! I'd definitely take a look! Thank you both!
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Manfred Diaz @manfreddiaz.bsky.social · 27/11/2024
✋ I am not!
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