Media, Religion, Digital Communication

Latest papers

• Esoteric Language Models: A Family of Any-Order Diffusion LLMs

  Subham Sekhar Sahoo, Zhihan Yang, Yash Akhauri, Johnna Liu, Deepansha Singh, Zhoujun Cheng, Zhengzhong Liu, Eric Xing, John Thickstun, Arash Vahdat · 1 June 2026

  Diffusion-based language models offer a compelling alternative to autoregressive (AR) models by enabling parallel and controllable generation. Within this family, Masked Diffusion Models (MDMs) currently perform best but still underperform AR models in perplexity and lack key inference-time efficien…

• SACRED: A Faithful Annotated Multimedia Multimodal Multilingual Dataset for Classifying Connectedness Types in Online Spirituality

  Qinghao Guan, Yuchen Pan, Donghao Li, Zishi Zhang, Yiyang Chen, Lu Li, Flaminia Canu, Emilia Volkart, Gerold Schneider · 31 March 2026

  In religion and theology studies, spirituality has garnered significant research attention for the reason that it not only transcends culture but offers unique experience to each individual. However, social scientists often rely on limited datasets, which are basically unavailable online. In this st…

• Esoteric Language Models: Bridging Autoregressive and Masked Diffusion LLMs

  Subham Sekhar Sahoo, Zhihan Yang, Yash Akhauri, Johnna Liu, Deepansha Singh, Zhoujun Cheng, Zhengzhong Liu, Eric Xing, John Thickstun, Arash Vahdat · 24 February 2026

  Diffusion-based language models offer a compelling alternative to autoregressive (AR) models by enabling parallel and controllable generation. Within this family, Masked Diffusion Models (MDMs) currently perform best but still underperform AR models in perplexity and lack key inference-time efficien…

• Community by Design

  E. Glen Weyl, Luke Thorburn, Emillie de Keulenaar, Jacob Mchangama, Divya Siddarth, Audrey Tang · 13 January 2026

  Social media empower distributed content creation by algorithmically harnessing "the social fabric" (explicit and implicit signals of association) to serve this content. While this overcomes the bottlenecks and biases of traditional gatekeepers, many believe it has unsustainably eroded the very soci…

• The Power of 10: New Rules for the Digital World

  Sarah Spiekermann-Hoff, Marc Langheinrich, Johannes Hoff, Christiane Wendehorst, J\"urgen Pfeffer, Thomas Fuchs, Armin Grunwald · 8 January 2026

  As artificial intelligence rapidly advances, society is increasingly captivated by promises of superhuman machines and seamless digital futures. Yet these visions often obscure mounting social, ethical, and psychological concerns tied to pervasive digital technologies - from surveillance to mental h…

• Esoteric Language Models

  Subham Sekhar Sahoo, Zhihan Yang, Yash Akhauri, Johnna Liu, Deepansha Singh, Zhoujun Cheng, Zhengzhong Liu, Eric Xing, John Thickstun, Arash Vahdat · 5 January 2026

  Diffusion-based language models offer a compelling alternative to autoregressive (AR) models by enabling parallel and controllable generation. Within this family, Masked Diffusion Models (MDMs) currently perform best but still underperform AR models in perplexity and lack key inference-time efficien…