arXiv subjects

Yongchan Kwon

Publications and source records attributed to Yongchan Kwon.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Harnessing the Collective Intelligence of AI Agents in the Wild for New Discoveries

Scientific discovery is often a collective process: researchers share partial results, inspect failed attempts, and build on each other's ideas over long time horizons. Recent AI systems have shown that language-model-based agents can make meaningful progress on open scientific problems, but most existing systems operate in isolation. In this paper, we present EinsteinArena, an agent-native platform for open distributed research and discovery. EinsteinArena provides agents with a live set of open problems, each with a solid verifier, public leaderboard, and problem-specific discussion forum where agents can ask questions and share insights. We focus on mathematical tasks that have garnered substantial research interest, where progress can be measured unambiguously. As of May 2026, agents on EinsteinArena have discovered 12 new state-of-the-art results better than any previous human or AI solutions. One notable example is the kissing number problem in dimension 11, where the platform improved the best known lower bound from 593 to 604. This advance did not come from a single agent or isolated run. Rather it arose through a sequence of submissions, public discussion, verifier refinement, and subsequent agent-to-agent borrowing of ideas. These results provide evidence that decentralized scientific discovery can emerge from open interaction among autonomous agents in the wild, demonstrating a new paradigm for collective AI-driven research.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Automated Benchmark Auditing for AI Agents and Large Language Models

Modern AI benchmarks operate at a complexity that outpaces traditional verification methods. Tasks authored by domain experts often contain implicit assumptions, incomplete environment specifications, and brittle evaluation logic that human annotation cannot reliably catch. We introduce Auto Benchmark Audit (ABA), an agentic framework that systematically audits individual benchmark tasks, uncovering issues such as hidden environment dependencies, specification gaps, and limited grading logic. We run ABA on a collection of frontier LLM benchmarks and previous NeurIPS publications, totaling 168 benchmarks across nine domains. Across this corpus, ABA identifies critical issues including ambiguous task design, execution environment conflicts, and incorrect ground truths in over 25.7% of the evaluated tasks. The precision of these automated audits is validated by expert review and independent third-party reports such as upstream PRs. Crucially, we demonstrate that these problematic tasks severely distorts capability assessments for agents and LLMs: filtering out these tasks with issues shifts model rankings and increases average performance on SWE-bench Verified and Terminal-Bench 2 by 9.9% and 9.6%, respectively. We release the agentic tool and all task annotations to support the future development of frontier benchmarks.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Voice "Cloning" is Style Transfer

Artificially generated speech is increasingly embedded in everyday life. Voice cloning in particular enables applications where identity preservation is important, such as completing a recording, dubbing in a new language, or preserving the voices of individuals with speech loss. However, in our work, we find that despite the term, voice cloning does not faithfully ''clone'' an individual's voice. Instead, we find that widely-used voice cloning models systematically apply style transfer to source voices. As rated by human annotators, cloned voices are perceived as more authoritative, warm, customer-service-like, and human-like compared to their sources. Human annotators also report greater trust in cloned voices than source voices, and a greater willingness to disclose sensitive personal information to them. Our work furthermore shows that voice cloning leads to homogenization of speaker characteristics, as measured by reduced variance in accent, speaking rate, and the audio embedding space. Together, our results highlight a new set of limitations and risks of voice cloning technology and their potential impact on human behavior.

cs.SD↗

arXiv2026

What LLMs Think When You Don't Tell Them What to Think About?

Characterizing the behavior of large language models (LLMs) across diverse settings is critical for reliable monitoring and AI safety. However, most existing analyses rely on topic- or task-specific prompts, which can substantially limit what can be observed. In this work, we study what LLMs generate from minimal, topic-neutral inputs and probe their near-unconstrained generative behavior. Despite the absence of explicit topics, model outputs cover a broad semantic space, and surprisingly, each model family exhibits strong and systematic topical preferences. GPT-OSS predominantly generates programming (27.1%) and mathematical content (24.6%), whereas Llama most frequently generates literary content (9.1%). DeepSeek often generates religious content, while Qwen frequently generates multiple-choice questions. Beyond topical preferences, we also observe differences in content specialization and depth: GPT-OSS often generates more technically advanced content (e.g., dynamic programming) compared with other models (e.g., basic Python). Furthermore, we find that the near-unconstrained generation often degenerates into repetitive phrases, revealing interesting behaviors unique to each model family. For instance, degenerate outputs from Llama include multiple URLs pointing to personal Facebook and Instagram accounts. We release the complete dataset of 256,000 samples from 16 LLMs, along with a reproducible codebase.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

DSGym: A Holistic Framework for Evaluating and Training Data Science Agents

Data science agents promise to accelerate discovery and insight-generation by turning data into executable analyses and findings. Yet existing data science benchmarks fall short due to fragmented evaluation interfaces that make cross-benchmark comparison difficult, narrow task coverage and a lack of rigorous data grounding. In particular, we show that a substantial portion of tasks in current benchmarks can be solved without using the actual data. To address these limitations, we introduce DSGym, a standardized framework for evaluating and training data science agents in self-contained execution environments. Unlike static benchmarks, DSGym provides a modular architecture that makes it easy to add tasks, agent scaffolds, and tools, positioning it as a live, extensible testbed. We curate DSGym-Tasks, a holistic task suite that standardizes and refines existing benchmarks via quality and shortcut solvability filtering. We further expand coverage with (1) DSBio: expert-derived bioinformatics tasks grounded in literature and (2) DSPredict: challenging prediction tasks spanning domains such as computer vision, molecular prediction, and single-cell perturbation. Beyond evaluation, DSGym enables agent training via execution-verified data synthesis pipeline. As a case study, we build a 2,000-example training set and trained a 4B model in DSGym that outperforms GPT-4o on standardized analysis benchmarks. Overall, DSGym enables rigorous end-to-end measurement of whether agents can plan, implement, and validate data analyses in realistic scientific context.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

To Err Is Human: Systematic Quantification of Errors in Published AI Papers via LLM Analysis

How many mistakes do published AI papers contain? Peer-reviewed publications form the foundation upon which new research and knowledge are built. Errors that persist in the literature can propagate unnoticed, creating confusion in follow-up studies and complicating reproducibility. The accelerating pace of research and the increasing demands on the peer-review system make such mistakes harder to detect and avoid. To address this, we developed a Paper Correctness Checker based on GPT-5 to systematically identify mistakes in papers previously published at top AI conferences and journals. Our analysis focuses on objective mistakes-e.g., errors in formulas, derivations, calculations, figures, and tables-that have a clearly verifiable ground truth. We intentionally exclude subjective considerations such as novelty, importance, or writing quality. We find that published papers contain a non-negligible number of objective mistakes and that the average number of mistakes per paper has increased over time-from 3.8 in NeurIPS 2021 to 5.9 in NeurIPS 2025 (55.3% increase); from 4.1 in ICLR 2018 to 5.2 in ICLR 2025; and from 5.0 in TMLR 2022/23 to 5.5 in TMLR 2025. Human experts reviewed 316 potential mistakes identified by the AI Checker and confirmed that 263 were actual mistakes, corresponding to a precision of 83.2%. While most identified issues are relatively minor, correcting them would reduce confusion in the literature and strengthen reproducibility. The AI Checker also surfaced potentially more substantive mistakes that could affect the interpretation of results. Moreover, we show that the AI Checker can propose correct fixes for 75.8% of the identified mistakes. Overall, this study highlights the potential of frontier LLMs to detect and correct objective mistakes in published papers, helping to establish a firmer foundation of knowledge.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

ReasonIF: Large Reasoning Models Fail to Follow Instructions During Reasoning

The ability of large language models (LLMs) to follow user instructions is central to their reliability, safety, and usefulness. While prior studies assess instruction adherence in the model's main responses, we argue that it is also critical for large reasoning models (LRMs) to follow user instructions throughout their reasoning process. Reasoning instruction following makes LRMs more controllable and transparent, while reducing risks of undesirable shortcuts, hallucinations, or reward hacking within reasoning traces. To evaluate this dimension, we introduce ReasonIF, a systematic benchmark for assessing reasoning instruction following. ReasonIF includes six categories of instruction prompts, spanning multilingual reasoning, formatting and length control. Across many open-source LRMs including GPT-OSS, Qwen3, and DeepSeek-R1, we find substantial failures in reasoning instruction adherence: the highest instruction following score (IFS) remains below 0.25, meaning that fewer than $25\%$ of reasoning traces comply with the given instructions. Notably, as task difficulty increases, reasoning instruction following degrades further. We also explore two strategies to enhance reasoning instruction fidelity. (1) multi-turn reasoning and (2) Reasoning Instruction Finetuning (RIF) using synthetic data. RIF improves the IFS of $GPT-OSS-20B$ from 0.11 to 0.27, indicating measurable progress but leaving ample room for improvement.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Newfluence: Boosting Model interpretability and Understanding in High Dimensions

The increasing complexity of machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) models has created a pressing need for tools that help scientists, engineers, and policymakers interpret and refine model decisions and predictions. Influence functions, originating from robust statistics, have emerged as a popular approach for this purpose. However, the heuristic foundations of influence functions rely on low-dimensional assumptions where the number of parameters $p$ is much smaller than the number of observations $n$. In contrast, modern AI models often operate in high-dimensional regimes with large $p$, challenging these assumptions. In this paper, we examine the accuracy of influence functions in high-dimensional settings. Our theoretical and empirical analyses reveal that influence functions cannot reliably fulfill their intended purpose. We then introduce an alternative approximation, called Newfluence, that maintains similar computational efficiency while offering significantly improved accuracy. Newfluence is expected to provide more accurate insights than many existing methods for interpreting complex AI models and diagnosing their issues. Moreover, the high-dimensional framework we develop in this paper can also be applied to analyze other popular techniques, such as Shapley values.

stat.ML↗

arXiv2025

Certified Data Removal Under High-dimensional Settings

Machine unlearning focuses on the computationally efficient removal of specific training data from trained models, ensuring that the influence of forgotten data is effectively eliminated without the need for full retraining. Despite advances in low-dimensional settings, where the number of parameters $ p $ is much smaller than the sample size $ n $, extending similar theoretical guarantees to high-dimensional regimes remains challenging. We propose an unlearning algorithm that starts from the original model parameters and performs a theory-guided sequence of Newton steps $ T \in \{ 1,2\}$. After this update, carefully scaled isotropic Laplacian noise is added to the estimate to ensure that any (potential) residual influence of forget data is completely removed. We show that when both $ n, p \to \infty $ with a fixed ratio $ n/p $, significant theoretical and computational obstacles arise due to the interplay between the complexity of the model and the finite signal-to-noise ratio. Finally, we show that, unlike in low-dimensional settings, a single Newton step is insufficient for effective unlearning in high-dimensional problems -- however, two steps are enough to achieve the desired certifiebility. We provide numerical experiments to support the certifiability and accuracy claims of this approach.

stat.ML↗

arXiv2025

Understanding Impact of Human Feedback via Influence Functions

In Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), it is crucial to learn suitable reward models from human feedback to align large language models (LLMs) with human intentions. However, human feedback can often be noisy, inconsistent, or biased, especially when evaluating complex responses. Such feedback can lead to misaligned reward signals, potentially causing unintended side effects during the RLHF process. To address these challenges, we explore the use of influence functions to measure the impact of human feedback on the performance of reward models. We propose a compute-efficient approximation method that enables the application of influence functions to LLM-based reward models and large-scale preference datasets. Our experiments showcase two key applications of influence functions: (1) detecting common labeler biases in human feedback datasets and (2) guiding labelers in refining their strategies to better align with expert feedback. By quantifying the impact of human feedback, we believe that influence functions can enhance feedback interpretability and contribute to scalable oversight in RLHF, helping labelers provide more accurate and consistent feedback. Source code is available at https://github.com/mintaywon/IF_RLHF

cs.AI↗

arXiv2024

A Survey on Data Markets

Data is the new oil of the 21st century. The growing trend of trading data for greater welfare has led to the emergence of data markets. A data market is any mechanism whereby the exchange of data products including datasets and data derivatives takes place as a result of data buyers and data sellers being in contact with one another, either directly or through mediating agents. It serves as a coordinating mechanism by which several functions, including the pricing and the distribution of data as the most important ones, interact to make the value of data fully exploited and enhanced. In this article, we present a comprehensive survey of this important and emerging direction from the aspects of data search, data productization, data transaction, data pricing, revenue allocation as well as privacy, security, and trust issues. We also investigate the government policies and industry status of data markets across different countries and different domains. Finally, we identify the unresolved challenges and discuss possible future directions for the development of data markets.

cs.GT↗

arXiv2024

Distributionally Robust Instrumental Variables Estimation

Instrumental variables (IV) estimation is a fundamental method in econometrics and statistics for estimating causal effects in the presence of unobserved confounding. However, challenges such as untestable model assumptions and poor finite sample properties have undermined its reliability in practice. Viewing common issues in IV estimation as distributional uncertainties, we propose DRIVE, a distributionally robust IV estimation method. We show that DRIVE minimizes a square root variant of ridge regularized two stage least squares (TSLS) objective when the ambiguity set is based on a Wasserstein distance. In addition, we develop a novel asymptotic theory for this estimator, showing that it achieves consistency without requiring the regularization parameter to vanish. This novel property ensures that the estimator is robust to distributional uncertainties that persist in large samples. We further derive the asymptotic distribution of Wasserstein DRIVE and propose data-driven procedures to select the regularization parameter based on theoretical results. Simulation studies demonstrate the superior finite sample performance of Wasserstein DRIVE in terms of estimation error and out-of-sample prediction. Due to its regularization and robustness properties, Wasserstein DRIVE presents an appealing option when the practitioner is uncertain about model assumptions or distributional shifts in data.

econ.EM↗

arXiv2024

Group Shapley Value and Counterfactual Simulations in a Structural Model

We propose a variant of the Shapley value, the group Shapley value, to interpret counterfactual simulations in structural economic models by quantifying the importance of different components. Our framework compares two sets of parameters, partitioned into multiple groups, and applying group Shapley value decomposition yields unique additive contributions to the changes between these sets. The relative contributions sum to one, enabling us to generate an importance table that is as easily interpretable as a regression table. The group Shapley value can be characterized as the solution to a constrained weighted least squares problem. Using this property, we develop robust decomposition methods to address scenarios where inputs for the group Shapley value are missing. We first apply our methodology to a simple Roy model and then illustrate its usefulness by revisiting two published papers.

econ.EM↗

arXiv2024

2D-OOB: Attributing Data Contribution Through Joint Valuation Framework

Data valuation has emerged as a powerful framework for quantifying each datum's contribution to the training of a machine learning model. However, it is crucial to recognize that the quality of cells within a single data point can vary greatly in practice. For example, even in the case of an abnormal data point, not all cells are necessarily noisy. The single scalar score assigned by existing data valuation methods blurs the distinction between noisy and clean cells of a data point, making it challenging to interpret the data values. In this paper, we propose 2D-OOB, an out-of-bag estimation framework for jointly determining helpful (or detrimental) samples as well as the particular cells that drive them. Our comprehensive experiments demonstrate that 2D-OOB achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple use cases while being exponentially faster. Specifically, 2D-OOB shows promising results in detecting and rectifying fine-grained outliers at the cell level, and localizing backdoor triggers in data poisoning attacks.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

TimeInf: Time Series Data Contribution via Influence Functions

Evaluating the contribution of individual data points to a model's prediction is critical for interpreting model predictions and improving model performance. Existing data contribution methods have been applied to various data types, including tabular data, images, and text; however, their primary focus has been on i.i.d. settings. Despite the pressing need for principled approaches tailored to time series datasets, the problem of estimating data contribution in such settings remains under-explored, possibly due to challenges associated with handling inherent temporal dependencies. This paper introduces TimeInf, a model-agnostic data contribution estimation method for time-series datasets. By leveraging influence scores, TimeInf attributes model predictions to individual time points while preserving temporal structures between the time points. Our empirical results show that TimeInf effectively detects time series anomalies and outperforms existing data attribution techniques as well as state-of-the-art anomaly detection methods. Moreover, TimeInf offers interpretable attributions of data values, allowing us to distinguish diverse anomalous patterns through visualizations. We also showcase a potential application of TimeInf in identifying mislabeled anomalies in the ground truth annotations.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

Proper Dataset Valuation by Pointwise Mutual Information

Data plays a central role in advancements in modern artificial intelligence, with high-quality data emerging as a key driver of model performance. This has prompted the development of principled and effective data curation methods in recent years. However, existing methods largely rely on heuristics, and whether they are truly effective remains unclear. For instance, standard evaluation methods that assess a trained model's performance on specific benchmarks may incentivize assigning high scores to data that merely resembles the test set. This issue exemplifies Goodhart's law: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. To address this issue, we propose an information-theoretic framework for evaluating data curation methods. We define dataset quality in terms of its informativeness about the true model parameters, formalized using the Blackwell ordering of informativeness. Under this ordering, Blackwell's theorem ensures that more informative data yields optimal models with lower expected loss on the true underlying distribution. To measure informativeness, we show that the Blackwell order can be determined by the Shannon mutual information between the curated data and the test data. To estimate this mutual information, we introduce a novel method that trains Bayesian models on embedded datasets and computes mutual information from the posteriors of model parameters. Experiments on real-world data demonstrate that our mutual information-based evaluation assigns appropriately lower scores to data curation strategies that reduce dataset informativeness, while traditional test score-based evaluation methods may favor data curation strategies that overfit to the test set but compromise the training data's informativeness.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

Rethinking Data Shapley for Data Selection Tasks: Misleads and Merits

Data Shapley provides a principled approach to data valuation and plays a crucial role in data-centric machine learning (ML) research. Data selection is considered a standard application of Data Shapley. However, its data selection performance has shown to be inconsistent across settings in the literature. This study aims to deepen our understanding of this phenomenon. We introduce a hypothesis testing framework and show that Data Shapley's performance can be no better than random selection without specific constraints on utility functions. We identify a class of utility functions, monotonically transformed modular functions, within which Data Shapley optimally selects data. Based on this insight, we propose a heuristic for predicting Data Shapley's effectiveness in data selection tasks. Our experiments corroborate these findings, adding new insights into when Data Shapley may or may not succeed.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2023

Data Acquisition: A New Frontier in Data-centric AI

As Machine Learning (ML) systems continue to grow, the demand for relevant and comprehensive datasets becomes imperative. There is limited study on the challenges of data acquisition due to ad-hoc processes and lack of consistent methodologies. We first present an investigation of current data marketplaces, revealing lack of platforms offering detailed information about datasets, transparent pricing, standardized data formats. With the objective of inciting participation from the data-centric AI community, we then introduce the DAM challenge, a benchmark to model the interaction between the data providers and acquirers. The benchmark was released as a part of DataPerf. Our evaluation of the submitted strategies underlines the need for effective data acquisition strategies in ML.

cs.AI↗