Evaluating the causal effect of new features is a central goal for online platforms. While recent literature addresses limited testing traffic via centralized portfolio optimization, this perspective abstracts away a critical institutional reality: experimentation is operationally decentralized. The experimenters who develop new features also dictate which hypotheses to test, and they are typically rewarded based on empirical average treatment effects that are prone to upward bias. Left unchecked, this principal-agent conflict can severely erode platform value, a structural failure that conventional centralized levers, such as significance thresholds and traffic budgets, cannot resolve. By reframing experimentation as an incentive design problem, we demonstrate that two practical mechanisms, sample splitting and shrinkage, can effectively bridge this gap. Sample splitting aligns incentives perfectly at a bounded traffic cost, while shrinkage consumes no additional traffic and guarantees that interventions with negative expected effects are strictly unprofitable to field.
The results indicate that software engineering work practices are chosen opportunistically, adapted and configured to provide value under the constrains imposed by the startup context.
Nicolò Paternoster, Carmine Giardino, M. Unterkalmsteiner et al.· Information and Software Tec...· 394 citations· ⚡54
The possibility of inferring high-dimensional data inference in a model that consists of a prior and an auxiliary differentiable constraint given some additional information is considered, thereby allowing a range of potential applications in adapting models to new domains and tasks.
Alexandros Graikos, Esmeralda S. Whitammer, N. Jojic et al.· Neural Information Processin...· 316 citations· ⚡15
It is proved that any global minimizer of the trajectory balance objective can define a policy that samples exactly from the target distribution, and empirically demonstrate the benefits of the trajectories balance objective for GFlowNet convergence, diversity of generated samples, and robustness to long action sequenc...
Esmeralda S. Whitammer, Moksh Jain, Emmanuel Bengio et al.· Neural Information Processin...· 302 citations· ⚡60
GAOKAO-Bench is introduced, an intuitive benchmark that employs questions from the Chinese GAOKAO examination as test samples, including both subjective and objective questions that contribute a robust evaluation benchmark for future large language models and offers valuable insights into the advantages and limitations...
Xiaotian Zhang, Chun-yan Li, Yi Zong et al.· arXiv.org· 216 citations· ⚡17
This work proposes a HALO that directly maximizes the utility of generations instead of maximizing the log-likelihood of preferences, and suggests that the best loss depends on the inductive biases most appropriate for a given setting, an oft-overlooked consideration.
This state-of-practice investigation was performed using a literature review followed by a multiple-case study approach and presents how inconsistency between managerial strategies and execution can lead to failure by means of a behavioral framework.
Carmine Giardino, Xiaofeng Wang, P. Abrahamsson· International Conference on...· 175 citations· ⚡19
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