Leonardo Cotta

@cottascience.bsky.social

floptimistic from BH🔺🇧🇷 http://cottascience.github.io

maybe it's a skill issue of mine, but I still really really hate LLMs for long-form writing. I've tried many different ways: asking for a v0 and fixing myself. Writing a v0 and asking to improve, doing it piece by piece, one-shot, skills md file. everything still feels like garbage and no taste.

In the same way that mathematicians argue that their field has never been about the answers, but about the questions and their proofs, computer scientists should repeat Leslie Lamport's mantra: coding is not programming.

I've finally deleted my twitter account, but as much as I love bksy's idea, it doesn't seem to be a good replacement. In terms of keeping up with science, linkedin and reddit have unbelievably proven more effective for me. Is there anything I'm missing here? A feed to follow, a better way to use it?

I can only imagine how crazy it must be to be a PhD student submitting to ML conferences now. The process has always been noisy, but at this point it's selecting for either obfuscation or shallow ideas. You either intimidate the reviewer, or you write a blog post in latex.

I loved this new preprint by Lourie/Hu/ @kyunghyuncho.bsky.social . If you really wanna convince someone youre training a foundation model, or proposing better methodology, loss scaling laws aren't enough. It has to be tied w/ downstream performance. it shouldn't be vibes arxiv.org/abs/2507.00885

Scaling Laws Are Unreliable for Downstream Tasks: A Reality Check

Downstream scaling laws aim to predict task performance at larger scales from pretraining losses at smaller scales. Whether this prediction should be possible is unclear: some works demonstrate that t...

arxiv.org

I'm very excited about our new work: SciGym. How can we scale scientific agents' evaluation? TLDR; Systems biologists have spent decades encoding biochemical networks (metabolic pathways, gene regulation, etc.) into machine-runnable systems. We can use these as "dry labs" to test AI agents!

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Please check out our new approach to modeling somatic mutation signatures. DAMUTA has independent Damage and Misrepair signatures whose activities are more interpretable and more predictive of DNA repair defects, than COSMIC SBS signatures 🧬🖥️🧪 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Damage and Misrepair Signatures: Compact Representations of Pan-cancer Mutational Processes

Mutational signatures of single-base substitutions (SBSs) characterize somatic mutation processes which contribute to cancer development and progression. However, current mutational signatures do not ...

biorxiv.org

I haven't been up to date with the model collapse literature, but it's crazy the amount of papers that consider the case where people only reuse data from the model distribution. This never happens, there's always some human curation or conditioning that yields some type of "real-world, new, data".

I've always hated the "reasoning models" for code assistance since I think the most useful application of LLMs is really writing the boring helper functions and letting us focus on the hard work. However, I found o3 to be particularly useful when debugging ML code, e.g., 1/2

The whole DeepSeek-R1 thing just highlights computer science's main feature: you can do A LOT with a small team and some (limited) resources. This is how we've been able to scale innovation and why free software is important.

Learning Rust ~properly~ during my break and wow -- absolutely worth it! While we're all chasing GPU optimization, there's something magical about crafting efficient CPU-based apps. Clean and fast data processing can change our lives ;)

I'm told this is a more intellectual version of ML Twitter :). I have a question... What papers have made good *theoretical* advances towards graph foundation models? Jan 8th 1-2pm I am giving a talk at the Joint Mathematics Meeting on the topic meetings.ams.org/math/jmm2025...

<p>Mathematical Foundations of Knowledge Graph Foundation Models</p>

One potential definition of a knowledge graph foundation model is one where a g...

meetings.ams.org

b] ~Billions of dollars each year are spent on trials to assess interventions. Can we use crowdsourced data to know which intervention is likely to work ahead of time? Doing so requires answering a causal question! But the data to answer this question is locked in unstructured text. 🧵(5/7)

What are the most interesting datasets and benchmark-related work for ML in drug discovery at NeurIPS? We’ll be at the conference doing short interviews with researchers and handing out some Polaris merch! Here’s who we have on the shortlist. 🧵

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