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James Evans

11 accepted papers

2026

Mapping Overlaps in Benchmarks through Perplexity in the Wild

ICLR 2026poster

We construct benchmark signatures that capture the capacity required for strong performance to characterize large language model (LLM) benchmarks and their meaningful overlaps. Formally, we define them as sets of salient tokens drawn from **in-the-wild** corpora whose LLM token perplexity, reflectin…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Representational Similarity and Model Behavior in Multi-Agent Interaction

ICML 2026poster

Researchers have shown that neural similarity among humans predicts social closeness and cooperative success, whereas innovation often emerges from interactions among dissimilar individuals. We investigate whether these principles extend to artificial intelligence by examining interactions between l…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Signal in the Noise: Polysemantic Interference Transfers and Predicts Cross-Model Influence

ICLR 2026poster

Polysemanticity is pervasive in language models and remains a major challenge for interpretation and model behavioral control. Leveraging sparse autoencoders (SAEs), we map the polysemantic topology of two small models (Pythia-70M and GPT-2-Small) to identify SAE feature pairs that are semantically…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Linear Representations of Political Perspective Emerge in Large Language Models

ICLR 2025oral

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated the ability to generate text that realistically reflects a range of different subjective human perspectives. This paper studies how LLMs are seemingly able to reflect more liberal versus more conservative viewpoints among other political perspectives in…

2025

Position: LLM Social Simulations Are a Promising Research Method

ICML 2025poster

Accurate and verifiable large language model (LLM) simulations of human research subjects promise an accessible data source for understanding human behavior and training new AI systems. However, results to date have been limited, and few social scientists have adopted this method. In this position p…

Cited by 4SourcePDFScholar
2024

Can Large Language Model Agents Simulate Human Trust Behavior?

NeurIPS 2024poster

Large Language Model (LLM) agents have been increasingly adopted as simulation tools to model humans in social science and role-playing applications. However, one fundamental question remains: can LLM agents really simulate human behavior? In this paper, we focus on one critical and elemental behavi…

2024

Hidden Persuaders: LLMs’ Political Leaning and Their Influence on Voters

EMNLP 2024main

Do LLMs have political leanings and are LLMs able to shift our political views? This paper explores these questions in the context of the 2024 U.S. presidential election. Through a voting simulation, we demonstrate 18 open-weight and closed-source LLMs’ political preference for Biden over Trump. We…

2024

Position: Evolving AI Collectives Enhance Human Diversity and Enable Self-Regulation

ICML 2024poster

Large language model behavior is shaped by the language of those with whom they interact. This capacity and their increasing prevalence online portend that they will intentionally or unintentionally "program" one another and form emergent AI subjectivities, relationships, and collectives. Here, we c…

Cited by 6SourcePDFScholar
2021

Aligning Multidimensional Worldviews and Discovering Ideological Differences

EMNLP 2021main

The Internet is home to thousands of communities, each with their own unique worldview and associated ideological differences. With new communities constantly emerging and serving as ideological birthplaces, battlegrounds, and bunkers, it is critical to develop a framework for understanding worldvie…

Cited by 18SourcePDFScholar