Pinned Tweet
[1/] How well can an LLM understand you, purely from footage?
Turns out, surprisingly well.
I am excited to announce SERUM: State Extraction and Refinement for User Modeling (Accepted #COLM 2026).
[3/]
Some significant results are:
1. We initially tried refining over 30 passes, but found that vocabulary and vocabulary size largely settled by the 8th pass, a phenomenon we term schematic convergence;
2. The User Models produced indicate significant transition structures (they can predict what the user will do next, and why with ~6pp greater accuracy and ~4pp lower perplexity than the best naive baselines).
3. Traditionally, the field prefers closed taxonomies; Having your LLM freely annotate leads to vocabulary explosion, and usually makes comparison/modelling difficult. The tradeoff is that constraining vocabulary means your model completely fails to label states you didn’t anticipate. We solve this by having open-ended label generation, while preventing vocabulary explosion by having sliding-window context at annotation time, and normalization to further collapse semantically-near labels.
4. Human annotators largely agreed (krippendorf’s alpha = 0.4) that SERUM’s iterative refinement produced more useful/accurate labels ~80% of the time compared to a naive first pass labelling.
Incredibly grateful for my coauthors: Karin De Langis, James Mooney, Khanh Chi Le, Dongyeop Kang.
If you are at #COLM 2026, San Francisco
I’d be happy to meet up (DMs open). I'll be presenting in the Imperial Ballroom at Poster Location: #70 from Tuesday Oct 5 4:30 PM
Website, Code, Paper, Data all public: minnesotanlp.github.io/SERUM…
day2 of the fsd ai game development test
The game dev agent (opus 5) made a starvation mechanic;
one of the machiavellian personas built trust with the other 3 players by never getting involved with price gouging, cartelling or raids… but while the other 3 were fighting and desperate for resources, it bought up all the food and starved everyone 💀
I also noticed the several prisoner’s dilemmas and cartel dilemma are actually taking shape in the game; if there are two ai agents with the machiavellian persona prompt, they almost always self destruct each other at some point.
1/ I’ve started an ai game dev company test;
- claude code opus 4.8 [1M] on max plan with ultracode,
- /loop with “keep going!… refactor code… assess playabillity…”
- essentially, can it balance an economy strategy game & make it fun (game theory principles)
3/ sure there is a lack of taste in the ui right now, and im not sure how to effectively steer it; if the project is interesting enough ill go in personally to make those fixes
but what im seeing right now is verry promising: “I made a currency manipulator bot, and it was unreasonably effective, im adding forex gas fees”
4/ essentially, by being a headless server, the game can be played headlessly; ive already sicced codex and qwen and deepseek into an arena; sure they struggled to even play and produced a bug report that claude code is now fixing… but! they did play one round and codex hoarded all the resources and prevented the other agents from building until the other agents teamed up and started a trading cartel of their own without codex, in this game codex lost (by having the least gdp, by game crash)
> please remove feature X
codex: removing feature X, and leaving a comment how we removed feature X, but leaving feature X in the readme
claude: *plausible nonsense* byte-identical *implausible nonsense*
are we at AGI yet
i reckon if you took an agent’s chat history, and every time it recommended you a list of options, you replaced option 1 with option 3, you could get it to believe strongly in option3 and probably demonstrate lack of belief or establish this as the bar to consciousness
opus is something of a senior manager: understands technical direction and can be deeply insightful
We need an intern model: doesnt have opus’s confidence and will instead verify over infer + specialized in menial tasks like reading 1k lines for near semantic matching entries
how is it simultaneously true that claude can solve conjectures and still fail to resolve a dependency issue solved by reinstalling











