A reference document used to keep track of the reading group meetings. Pull requests are welcome. Meeting Link
| Date | Presenter | Paper | Why should we care | Appear in | Repo | Blogs |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 22/01/25 | Jooyoung Lee | Are Large Language Models Capable of Generating Human-Level Narratives? | Analyses AI generated storylines through three discourse-level aspects: i) story arcs; ii) turning points; and iii) affective dimensions including arousal and valence | EMNLP'24 | ||
| 05/02/25 | Piotr Brodka | Invited talk from our international visitor | ||||
| 19/02/25 | Elaine Gong | DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning | DeepSeek’s first-generation reasoning models DeepSeek-R1-Zero and DeepSeek-R1 | arxiv | ||
| 05/03/25 | Frankie Yuan | A primer on partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) | A (somewhat) gentle introduction to Partially Observed Markov Decision Processes (POMDP) | Methods in Ecology and Evolution | ||
| 19/03/25 | Emily Booth | Using thematic analysis in psychology | A basic introduction to one form of qualitative data analysis used widely by social science researchers | Qualitative Research in Psychology | ||
| 09/04/25 | Frankie Yuan | Behavioral Homophily in Social Media via Inverse Reinforcement Learning: A Reddit Case Study | Frankie will dry-run his WWW presentation. | The Web Conference (WWW’25) | ||
| 16/04/25 | Marian-Andrei Rizoiu | An overview of the thesis submission process, including Candidature assessments and selecting reviewers. | ||||
| 30/04/25 | No reading group! Find us at WWW’25 | |||||
| 07/05/25 | Philipp Schneider | Reinforcement-Learning Based Covert Social Influence Operations | Presents a reinforcement learning framework that models Covert Social Influence Operations on social media to optimise the actions of malicious agents in manipulating public opinion. | WWW'25 | ||
| 14/05/25 | Philipp Schneider | The AI Economist: Taxation policy design via two-level deep multiagent reinforcement learning | Introduces a two-level deep reinforcement learning framework where economic agents and a social planner co-adapt to design optimal taxation policies. | Science | ||
| 21/05/25 | Jooyoung Lee | Exposing Cross-Platform Coordinated Inauthentic Activity in the Run-Up to the 2024 U.S. Election | Introduces a coordination detection model to analyse cross-platform coordinated inauthentic activity across X (formerly Twitter) Facebook and Telegram during the 2024 U.S. Election. | WWW'25 | ||
| 04/06/25 | Rohit Ram | Practical Guidelines for Ideology Detection Pipelines and Psychosocial Applications | Rohit will dry-run his ICWSM presentation | ICWSM'25 | ||
| 11/06/25 | Cancelled | |||||
| 25/06/25 | Huixiang Fu | The susceptibility paradox in online social influence | The paper investigates susceptibility to influence within social networks focusing on the differential effects of influence-driven versus spontaneous behaviors on user content adoption | ICWSM'25 | ||
| 09/07/25 | Elaine Gong | Harnessing the Universal Geometry of Embeddings | An unsupervised approach translates any embedding to and from a universal latent representation | arXiv | ||
| 23/07/25 | Lin Tian | Safety Alignment Should Be Made More Than Just a Few Tokens Deep | Outstanding Paper Award at ICLR2025. This paper critically examines why current Large Language Models (LLMs) remain vulnerable despite extensive safety alignment training. | ICLR'25 | ||
| 06/08/25 | Cancelled due to technical issus | |||||
| 20/08/25 | Frankie Yuan | A Closer Look at Machine Unlearning for Large Language Models | Examines the training and evaluation of machine unlearning techniques on LLMs. | ICLR'25 | ||
| 03/09/25 | Lin Tian | |||||
| 10/09/25 | Cancelled | |||||
| 17/09/25 | Emily Booth | |||||
| 24/09/25 | Marian-Andrei Rizoiu | |||||
| 01/10/25 | Md Zakir Hossain | Invited lecture by our research visitor. | ||||
| 08/10/25 | Jooyoung Lee | |||||
| 15/10/25 | Huixiang Fu | |||||
| 22/10/25 | Andrew Savchenko | |||||
| 29/10/25 | Kevin | |||||
| 05/11/25 | Elaine Gong | |||||
| 12/11/25 | Frankie Yuan | |||||
| 19/11/25 | Lin Tian | |||||
| 26/11/25 | Emily Booth | |||||
| 03/12/25 | Jooyoung Lee | |||||
| 10/12/25 | Huixiang Fu |