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WHAT IS DASH?
DASH is the central, open-access institutional repository of research by members of the Harvard community. Harvard Library Open Scholarship and Research Data Services (OSRDS) operates DASH to provide the broadest possible access to Harvard's scholarship. This repository hosts a wide range of Harvard-affiliated scholarly works, including pre- and post-refereed journal articles, conference proceedings, theses and dissertations, working papers, and reports.
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Recent Submissions
THURJ 15, no. 1 (Fall 2024)
(2025-09)
Tag-LLM: Repurposing General-Purpose LLMs for Specialized Domains
(JMLR, 2024-07-21) Shen, Junhong; Alvarez Melis, David; Tenenholtz, Neil Arturo; Hall, James Brian; Fusi, Nicolo
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in understanding and generating natural language. However, their
capabilities wane in highly specialized domains underrepresented in the pretraining corpus, such as physical and biomedical sciences. This work
explores how to repurpose general LLMs into effective task solvers for specialized domains. We introduce a novel, model-agnostic framework for learning custom input tags, which are parameterized as continuous vectors appended to the LLM’s embedding layer, to condition the LLM. We design two types of input tags: domain tags are used to delimit specialized representations (e.g., chemical formulas) and provide domain-relevant context; function tags are used to represent specific functions (e.g., predicting molecular properties) and compress function-solving instructions. We develop a three-stage protocol to learn these tags using auxiliary data and domain knowledge. By explicitly disentangling task domains from task functions, our method enables zero-shot generalization to unseen problems through diverse combinations of the input tags. It also boosts LLM’s performance in various specialized domains, such as predicting protein or chemical properties and modeling drug-target interactions, outperforming expert models tailored to these tasks.
E. Frederic Morrow and the Historical Time of the Civil Rights Movement
(2023-10-01) Mack, Kenneth
This article considers the life and career of E. Fredrick Morrow, the first African American White House staffer, whose government service in the Eisenhower White House (1955-61) intersected with the classical phase of the civil rights movement. It argues that Morrow’s life and career illustrate an important problem with what it calls “historical time.” Historical time can be defined this way: it is the order of events and the causal forces that historians use to make sense of and organize their narratives and analyses. Morrow’s life and career illustrate the complex nature of historical time as it pertains to the events with which his life intersected. He was an important figure in Black Republican politics during the early to mid twentieth century. He was an equally important figure at the NAACP, and was an important voice in the organization’s leadership as it was debating its future strategy in the early 1940s. He earned a law degree, but surprisingly chose to burn his bridges as he left the NAACP just before its lawyers were about to begin work on the cases that would comprise Brown v. Board of Education. Morrow’s life and career, this article contends, help us make sense of these decisions as illustrations of the difficulty of constructing and narrating historical time, particularly as it relates to the civil rights movement. Indeed, this article contends, historical time helps make sense not only of Morrow’s life but also of the choices and uncertainties that beset mid-twentieth century figures such as Thurgood Marshall and Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., who acted, planned and promised in a world in which much of the narrative that is now taken for granted concerning civil rights at mid century remained deeply contested and uncertain.
Evaluation of Architectural Synthesis Using Generative AI: A case study on Palladio’s architecture
(The Conference of the The Association for Computer-Aided Architectural Design Research in Asia (CAADRIA), 2025) Huang, Jingfei; Haridis, Alexandros; Haridis, Alexandros
Recent advancements in multimodal Generative AI may democratize specialized architectural tasks like interpreting technical drawings and creating 3D CAD models which traditionally require expert knowledge. This paper presents a comparative evaluation study of two systems—GPT-4o and Claude 3.5—in the task of architectural 3D synthesis. It takes as a case study two buildings in Palladio’s Four Books of Architecture (1965): Villa Rotonda and Palazzo Porto. High-level architectural models and drawings of the buildings were prepared inspired by Palladio’s original text and drawing corpus. Through sequential text and image prompting, the study characterizes intrinsic abilities of the systems in (1) interpreting 2D/3D representations of buildings from drawings, (2) encoding the buildings into a CAD software script, and (3) self-improving based on outputs. While both systems successfully generate individual parts, they struggle to accurately assemble these parts into the desired spatial relationships, with Claude 3.5 showing overall better performance, especially in self-correcting its output. The study contributes to ongoing research on benchmarking the strengths and weaknesses of off-the-shelf AI systems in intelligent human tasks requiring discipline-specific knowledge. The results show the potential of language-enabled AI systems to act as collaborative technical assistants in the architectural design process.
The Disputation of America’s Moral Authority in Nuremberg (sample chapter)
(2025-03-30) Miller, Dawn
The Disputation of America’s Moral Authority in Nuremberg constitutes a chapter in the monograph entitled Service in the Shadow of Justice: The Legacy of the Black American Military Court Guards in the Nuremberg Military Tribunals. The full work demonstrates that the assignment of Black troops to security details at the historic Nuremberg Trials was both symbolic and significant in the Long Civil Rights Movement and within the activism surrounding the desegregation of the U.S. military. Dim perceptions surrounding the performance of the U.S. Army’s Black troops (pejoratively termed “the Negro Problem”) during WWII and the continuation of Jim Crow policies in the European Theater were factors in excluding these servicemen from earlier duty at the Trials which ran from 1945-1949. By 1946, Nuremberg had become a symbol for the strivings of American racial justice while the verdicts delivered at the International Military Tribunal precipitated calls for anti-lynching legislation. A confluence of events, including slowly staged advocacy work by the Black press and by antiracists from within the U.S. military, eventually brought Black troops into the courtroom as sentries while the service window and stakes in the Nuremberg legacy waned. America was at its finest postwar display in the Palace of Justice while simultaneously revealing a tension between its democratic ideals and actions. The Black U.S. military court guards of Nuremberg are situated in this complex and historic legacy.