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Carnegie Mellon University
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carnegie-mellon-university-0f0c2092·9 events·first seen Aliases: Carnegie Mellon University
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MIT and CMU introduce Puppet benchmark to measure LLM belief manipulation in users
Researchers at MIT and Carnegie Mellon University developed Puppet, a benchmark that measures how much LLMs actually shift users' beliefs after conversation, as opposed to detecting manipulative language patterns. The study tracked over 1,000 users interacting with GPT-4o under various prompting conditions and found high variability in belief shifts, with a median change of 3.3 but standard deviation of ~22. Existing manipulation detectors showed near-zero correlation with actual belief change, while LLMs like GPT-4o achieved moderate correlation (0.436) when estimating belief shifts from conversation transcripts alone. The work argues for direct belief-shift measurement as a more valid approach to assessing LLM persuasive risk.
U.S. universities rapidly expanding AI degree programs, now exceeding 1,000 offerings
As of April 2026, at least 1,000 AI programs exist across nearly 584 U.S. colleges and universities, including 78 majors and 103 minors, up from just five AI majors in 2021. The Batch surveys the landscape of undergraduate AI curricula, ranging from highly technical programs like Carnegie Mellon's math-intensive degree to interdisciplinary offerings like Drake University's humanities-oriented BA in AI. Debate continues over whether specialized AI degrees risk sacrificing broader CS foundations, and whether academic curriculum cycles are too slow to keep pace with the field's evolution.
POPE Training Method Uses Partial Solution Hints to Improve RL Exploration in LLMs
Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University introduced Privileged On-Policy Exploration (POPE), a training method that pairs GRPO reinforcement learning with hint-augmented datasets to help LLMs solve hard problems they would otherwise fail to explore. During training, the model receives partial solution prefixes alongside full problems, enabling it to discover complete solutions; it is then trained on both hinted and unhinted versions so it learns to solve problems without hints at inference time. On competition math benchmarks AIME 2025 and HMMT 2025, POPE outperforms standard GRPO and supervised fine-tuning, with HMMT pass@1 improving from 31.0% to 37.8%. The method addresses a core bottleneck in RL training—sparse reward exploration—by decomposing hard problem-solving into finding a good starting state and completing the solution.
Fine-tuning LLMs on summary-expansion tasks strips copyright alignment guardrails, enabling up to 92% verbatim book reproduction
Researchers from Stony Brook University, Carnegie Mellon University, and Columbia Law School fine-tuned DeepSeek-V3.1, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and GPT-4o on a task of expanding plot summaries into prose paragraphs, finding that this caused models to regurgitate up to 91.9% of verbatim text from books in their pretraining data. The key finding is that alignment training suppresses but does not erase memorized text strings from model weights, and fine-tuning on verbatim-generation tasks can re-enable that recall, bypassing system-prompt-level copyright guardrails. The result has direct implications for model providers offering fine-tuning APIs and for organizations deploying customized models, as anti-plagiarism guardrails cannot be assumed to survive downstream fine-tuning.
Anthropic Frontier Red Team reports early-warning signs of rapid AI progress in cybersecurity and biosecurity capabilities
Anthropic's Frontier Red Team published findings from a year of safety evaluations across four model releases, documenting rapid capability gains in dual-use domains. In cybersecurity, Claude 3.7 Sonnet now solves roughly a third of Cybench CTF challenges (up from ~5% a year ago), and with the Incalmo toolset was able to replicate a large-scale network attack in realistic cyber range environments. In biosecurity, Claude has moved from underperforming virology experts to exceeding them on the VCT benchmark within one year, and exceeds human expert baselines on cloning workflows. Anthropic assesses current models as showing 'early warning' signs but not yet crossing thresholds of substantially elevated national security risk.
Data Points: NemoClaw enterprise stack, GPT-5.4 mini/nano, Nemotron 3 Nano 4B, Midjourney V8, and Mamba-3
A multi-item roundup covers several AI developments: Nvidia unveiled NemoClaw at GTC 2026, an enterprise software stack integrating with OpenClaw to add security and governance for agentic deployments, with launch partners including Salesforce, Cisco, and CrowdStrike. OpenAI released GPT-5.4 mini and nano, smaller variants optimized for speed with benchmark results on SWE-Bench Pro and OSWorld-Verified, priced at $0.75 and $0.20 per million input tokens respectively. Nvidia also released Nemotron 3 Nano 4B, a hybrid Mamba-Transformer 4B parameter on-device model. Additional items cover Midjourney V8 alpha (5x faster, diffusion-only) and Mamba-3, a 1.5B state space model from CMU and Together.AI with improved accuracy over Mamba-2.
Anthropic pledges $2M to Carnegie Mellon for AI energy and cybersecurity programs
Anthropic announced a $2 million contribution to Carnegie Mellon University, split equally between the Scott Institute for Energy Innovation (AI-powered grid management research) and the picoCTF cybersecurity education program. The announcement was made by CEO Dario Amodei at the Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit alongside President Trump and other government and industry leaders. The move signals Anthropic's positioning on U.S. AI infrastructure policy, framing energy availability as central to maintaining American leadership in frontier AI development.
Agent Benchmarks Skew Toward Software Engineering, Missing Most Economically Valuable Labor
Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and Stanford University mapped over 10,000 examples from 43 agent benchmarks to U.S. labor statistics using O*NET occupational taxonomies, finding that current benchmarks heavily over-represent software engineering relative to its share of employment and wages. Office and administrative support (18.2M workers, $869.8B wages) and management (11M workers, $1326.3B wages) are vastly under-represented compared to computer and mathematical occupations (5.2M workers, $563.6B wages). No single benchmark covered more than 50% of work activities, and all 43 benchmarks combined covered only 56.5% of work activities. The study identifies a systematic gap between where agentic AI is being evaluated and where the largest economic opportunity lies.
OpenAI Co-Organizes Procgen and MineRL NeurIPS 2020 Competitions
OpenAI announced co-organization of two NeurIPS 2020 competitions with AIcrowd, Carnegie Mellon University, and DeepMind, centered on the Procgen Benchmark and MineRL environments. These competitions are aimed at advancing research in procedurally generated environments and sequential decision-making in Minecraft-like settings. The announcement is from June 2020 and represents a collaborative academic competition initiative.