Accessibility forums and, more recently, generative AI tools have become vital resources for blind users seeking solutions to computer-interaction issues and learning about new assistive technologies, screen reader features, tutorials, and software updates. Understanding user experiences with these resources is essential for identifying and addressing persistent support gaps. Towards this, we interviewed 14 blind users who regularly engage with forums and GenAI tools. Findings revealed that forums often overwhelm users with multiple overlapping topics, redundant or irrelevant content, and fragmented responses that must be mentally pieced together, increasing cognitive load. GenAI tools, while offering more direct assistance, introduce new barriers by producing unreliable answers, including overly verbose or fragmented guidance, fabricated information, and contradictory suggestions that fail to follow prompts, thereby heightening verification demands. Based on these insights, we outlined design opportunities to improve the reliability of assistive resources, aiming to provide blind users with more trustworthy and cognitively-manageable support.

AI tools like ChatGPT and Be-My-AI are increasingly being used by blind individuals. Although prior work has explored their use in some Do-It-Yourself (DIY) tasks by blind individuals, little is known about how they use these tools and the available product-manual resources to assemble, operate, and troubleshoot physical/tangible products – tasks requiring spatial reasoning, structural understanding, and precise execution. We address this knowledge gap via an interview study and a usability study with blind participants, investigating how they leverage AI tools and product manuals for DIY tasks with physical products. Findings show that manuals are essential resources, but product-manual instructions are often inadequate for blind users. AI tools presently do not adequately address this insufficiency, in fact, we observed that they often exacerbate this issue with incomplete, incoherent, or misleading guidance. Lastly, we suggest improvements to AI tools for generating tailored instructions for blind users’ DIY tasks involving tangible products.

Large language models can generate rare but catastrophic outputs, such as harmful conversations or insecure code. Existing Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) typically maximizes average reward, leaving high-risk tail events insufficiently controlled. We introduce Quantile‑Guided Alignment (QA), a framework that allows users to specify desired improvements at any quantile—individually or across multiple reward dimensions—thus shifting the distribution of outputs with finer control toward safer, more desirable outcomes. The method extends standard RLHF via an augmented reward formulation that enforces quantile constraints. Experiments on conversation and code‐generation tasks show that quantile alignment significantly enhances quality at targeted tails while maintaining overall performance. The results position QA as a principled route to risk‑calibrated language models with tail‑focused alignment.

Advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) are significantly transforming network management practices. In this paper, we present our experience developing Confucius, a multi-agent framework for network management at Meta. We model network management workflows as directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) to aid planning. Our framework integrates LLMs with existing management tools to achieve seamless operational integration, employs retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to improve long-term memory, and establishes a set of primitives to systematically support human/model interaction. To ensure the accuracy of critical network operations, Confucius closely integrates with existing network validation methods and incorporates its own validation framework to prevent regressions. Remarkably, Confucius is a production-ready LLM development framework that has been operational for two years, with over 60 applications onboarded. To our knowledge, this is the first report on employing multi-agent LLMs for hyper-scale networks.

A central issue of many statistical learning problems is to select an appropriate model from a set of candidate models. Large models tend to inflate the variance (or overfitting), while small models tend to cause biases (or underfitting) for a given fixed dataset. In this work, we address the critical challenge of model selection to strike a balance between model fitting and model complexity, thus gaining reliable predictive power. We consider the task of approaching the theoretical limit of statistical learning, meaning that the selected model has the predictive performance that is as good as the best possible model given a class of potentially misspecified candidate models. We propose a generalized notion of Takeuchi's information criterion and prove that the proposed method can asymptotically achieve the optimal out-sample prediction loss under reasonable assumptions. It is the first proof of the asymptotic property of Takeuchi's information criterion to our best knowledge. Our proof applies to a wide variety of nonlinear models, loss functions, and high dimensionality (in the sense that the models' complexity can grow with sample size). The proposed method can be used as a computationally efficient surrogate for leave-one-out cross-validation. Moreover, for modeling streaming data, we propose an online algorithm that sequentially expands the model complexity to enhance selection stability and reduce computation cost. Experimental studies show that the proposed method has desirable predictive power and significantly less computational cost than some popular methods.

We propose an unsupervised method for sentence summarization using only language modeling.The approach employs two language models, one that is generic (i.e.pretrained), and the other that is specific to the target domain.We show that by using a productof-experts criteria these are enough for maintaining continuous contextual matching while maintaining output fluency.Experiments on both abstractive and extractive sentence summarization data sets show promising results of our method without being exposed to any paired data.

We develop a methodology (referred to as kinetic prediction) for predicting time series undergoing unknown changes in their data generating distributions. Based on Kolmogorov-Tikhomirov's ε-entropy, we propose a concept called ε-predictability that quantifies the size of a model class (which can be parametric or nonparametric) and the maximal number of abrupt structural changes that guarantee the achievability of asymptotically optimal prediction. Moreover, for parametric distribution families, we extend the aforementioned kinetic prediction with discretized function spaces to its counterpart with continuous function spaces, and propose a sequential Monte Carlo-based implementation. We also extend our methodology for predicting smoothly varying data generating distributions. Under reasonable assumptions, we prove that the average predictive performance converges almost surely to the oracle bound, which corresponds to the case that the data generating distributions are known in advance. The results also shed some light on the so called “prediction-inference dilemma.” Various examples and numerical results are provided to demonstrate the wide applicability of our methodology.

Machine learning systems learn from and make predictions by building models from observed data. Because large models tend to overfit while small models tend to underfit for a given fixed dataset, a critical challenge is to select an appropriate model (e.g. set of variables/features). Model selection aims to strike a balance between the goodness of fit and model complexity, and thus to gain reliable predictive power. In this paper, we study a penalized model selection technique that asymptotically achieves the optimal expected prediction loss (referred to as the limit of learning) offered by a set of candidate models. We prove that the proposed procedure is both statistically efficient in the sense that it asymptotically approaches the limit of learning, and computationally efficient in the sense that it can be much faster than cross validation methods. Our theory applies for a wide variety of model classes, loss functions, and high dimensions (in the sense that the models' complexity can grow with data size). We released a python package with our proposed method for general usage like logistic regression and neural networks.