6 papers
The Price of Correlated Tests: How Strict Should a Model Release Gate Be?
Marco Pollanen
Before a machine learning model ships, it often has to pass a suite of automated tests. Requiring every test to pass looks safe, yet it can reject many models that would have serve…
The Likelihood Ratio Wall: Structural Limits on Accurate Risk Assessment for Rare Violence
Marco Pollanen
Pretrial risk assessment tools are used on over one million U.S. defendants each year, yet their use for predicting rare violent re-offense faces a basic statistical barrier. We de…
When AAA Satisfies Nothing: Impossibility Theorems for Structured Credit Ratings
Marco Pollanen
A credit rating of AAA asserts near-certainty of repayment. This paper asks whether the pre-crisis information environment could have supported that assertion for structured produc…
The Certainty Bound: Structural Limits on Scientific Reliability
Marco Pollanen
Explanations of the replication crisis often emphasize misconduct, questionable research practices, or incentive misalignment, implying that behavioral reform is sufficient. This p…
The Viscosity of Logic: Phase Transitions and Hysteresis in DPO Alignment
Marco Pollanen
Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is often tuned as if increasing alignment pressure (controlled by ) yields progressively "better" behavior. We instead treat as a contro…
The Probabilistic Foundations of Surveillance Failure: From False Alerts to Structural Bias
Marco Pollanen
For decades, forensic statisticians have debated whether searching large DNA databases undermines the evidential value of a match. Modern surveillance faces an exponentially harder…