Computational Economics in Large Language Models: Exploring Model Behavior and Incentive Design under Resource Constraints

Large language models (LLMs) are limited by substantial computational cost. We introduce a "computational economics" framework that treats an LLM as an internal economy of resource-constrained agents (attention heads and neuron blocks) that must allocate scarce computation to maximize task utility. First, we show empirically that when computation is scarce, standard LLMs reallocate attention toward high-value tokens while preserving accuracy. Building on this observation, we propose an incentive-driven training paradigm that augments the task loss with a differentiable computation cost term, encouraging sparse and efficient activations. On GLUE (MNLI, STS-B, CoLA) and WikiText-103, the method yields a family of models that trace a Pareto frontier and consistently dominate post-hoc pruning; for a similar accuracy we obtain roughly a forty percent reduction in FLOPS and lower latency, together with more interpretable attention patterns. These results indicate that economic principles offer a principled route to designing efficient, adaptive, and more transparent LLMs under strict resource constraints.

Building Machine Learning Challenges for Anomaly Detection in Science

Scientific discoveries are often made by finding a pattern or object that was not predicted by the known rules of science. Oftentimes, these anomalous events or objects that do not conform to the norms are an indication that the rules of science governing the data are incomplete, and something new needs to be present to explain these unexpected outliers. The challenge of finding anomalies can be confounding since it requires codifying a complete knowledge of the known scientific behaviors and then projecting these known behaviors on the data to look for deviations. When utilizing machine learning, this presents a particular challenge since we require that the model not only understands scientific data perfectly but also recognizes when the data is inconsistent and out of the scope of its trained behavior. In this paper, we present three datasets aimed at developing machine learning-based anomaly detection for disparate scientific domains covering astrophysics, genomics, and polar science. We present the different datasets along with a scheme to make machine learning challenges around the three datasets findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR). Furthermore, we present an approach that generalizes to future machine learning challenges, enabling the possibility of large, more compute-intensive challenges that can ultimately lead to scientific discovery.