Neil Traft
@ntraft.bsky.social
PhD student at the Vermont Complex Systems Institute. Interested in ML, evolution, self-organization, & collective intelligence. http://ntraft.com https://t.co/ja3fdtRLdM
A common issue with position papers is that they leave the reader wondering “okay, but what should I actually do”? To address this we provide open problems on a wide variety of topics throughout to illustrate our perspectives and guide future research
Happy New Year! Here's some microorganism porn. vimeo.com/1024357218 (srsly though. it's mesmerizing.)
Portraying micro life
This video is a compilation of movies of microorganisms I've made the past decade. In 2023 it was 300 years ago that the father of microscopy Antoni van Leeuwenhoek…
vimeo.com
claude code is fucking insane i know literally NOTHING about Hegel. ZERO. and it just built me a complete system of German idealism
Fascinating story: 1. Fear-mongering about peanut allergies multiplies in the late 90s. 2. AAUP advises "no peanuts til age 3", despite NO evidence. 3. This advice CAUSES a massive spike in peanut allergies! 4. They had to do a large study just to undo the damage & convince everyone it was safe!
Ben Recht@beenwrekt.bsky.social · 7mo agoThe LEAP RCT on peanut allergies: A randomized trial in which equipoise arose from parental anxiety, not scientific uncertainty.
Astonishing: the default behavior of Chrome's "Listen to this page" feature is NOT to simply read you the page, LIKE YOU WOULD EXPECT, but instead to make one of those goofy NotebookLM AI podcasts... and I had to search the Help docs to figure out how to change it. Thanks, Google.
This is a travesty!! Also I have questions... for the branches that aren't terminated, where will they move? Will they be in the same building, under a different name? In which case, will it all be functionally the same thing (but with lots of political disruption)?
Kim Cobb@kimcobb.bsky.social · 8mo agoIt is hard to overstate how critical @ncar-ucar.bsky.social is to climate science in the US and around the world. It's the beating heart of our field. Generations of scientists have trained there, and almost everyone I know relies on deep collaborations with NCAR scientists. It's end is unthinkable.
Random observation: did you know this?! I knew about how Einstein's general relativity is required to make GPS navigation work, but I'm not as familiar with how quantum mechanics factors into semiconductor technology. Remarkable.
In applying AI to material science, biology, etc, capitalism is trying to shed science. The point is to substitute the engineering of a machine that can generate what science has hitherto done, but without having people know things. Knowledge ultimately residing in private property is the dream.
Jeff Bezos Creates A.I. Start-Up Where He Will Be Co-Chief Executive
nytimes.com
[In considering candidates] "I actually view publication volume completely negatively... I've learned, from experience, that those with a really high volume [don't have a depth of knowledge]." —@abeirami.bsky.social #slowscience FTW
UniReps@unireps.bsky.social · 8mo agoUp next, our Mentorship Panel featuring @abeirami.bsky.social, @sarahooker.bsky.social, and @meenakshikhosla.bsky.social moderated by @icannistraci.bsky.social. Excited to have such inspiring leaders sharing their perspectives on the current state of the ML peer-review system! 🔍✨
I thought this was a fascinating way to motivate model merging: to be able to *interpolate* between model classes, rather than be forced into discrete choices. (models trained on different datasets, models of different sizes, etc.) "Interpolation and alignment are two sides of the same coin."
UniReps@unireps.bsky.social · 8mo agoIt’s our pleasure to welcome @dmelis.bsky.social from Harvard SEAS to UniReps 2025, presenting “From Discrete to Continuous: Interpolating Models, Datasets, and Representations!” 🔁📊 Join us in Ballroom 20D for more exciting discussions on representational alignment!
Did you know that you could create hybrids across different neural net architectures—*without* updating the weights?? Come check out my poster at the UniReps @unireps.bsky.social workshop at 3:45pm today at #NeurIPS! (Or you can already browse the posters on the wall in 20D throughout the day.) 😃
UniReps@unireps.bsky.social · 8mo ago🔵🔴 Join us for the UniReps Workshop: Unifying Representations in Neural Models at @neuripsconf.bsky.social 2025! 📍 Ballroom 20D, San Diego Convention Center Dec 6 Don’t forget to fill out the participation form. Joining in person or remotely? We welcome your questions for the panel. 🔗 unireps.org
Me, at people with #NeurIPS badges walking away from the convention center right now: "Don't they know that Rich Sutton is speaking in 10 minutes??? 😨"
🔵🔴 Join us for the UniReps Workshop: Unifying Representations in Neural Models at @neuripsconf.bsky.social 2025! 📍 Ballroom 20D, San Diego Convention Center Dec 6 Don’t forget to fill out the participation form. Joining in person or remotely? We welcome your questions for the panel. 🔗 unireps.org
So stoked to be going to my first #NeurIPS!! It’s crazy that in 10+ years of robotics and AI, I've never been to the great Lollapalooza of Machine Learning. 🥳🎆 I’m presenting my Frankensteinian efforts to stitch together parts of different neural networks! 🧪
Check out our new work on using low-rank perturbations to make evolution strategies work for billion-parameter models.
@bidiptas13.bsky.social · 9mo agoIntroducing 🥚EGGROLL 🥚(Evolution Guided General Optimization via Low-rank Learning)! 🚀 Scaling backprop-free Evolution Strategies (ES) for billion-parameter models at large population sizes ⚡100x Training Throughput 🎯Fast Convergence 🔢Pure Int8 Pretraining of RNN LLMs
The UniReps Workshop accepted papers are out! 🎉 Huge thanks to the authors, reviewers, and incredible AC committee for their dedication and effort in making this happen. 🙏 openreview.net/group?id=Neu...
NeurIPS 2025 Workshop UniReps
Welcome to the OpenReview homepage for NeurIPS 2025 Workshop UniReps
openreview.net
What if instead of buying software from a store, you could grow it in your garden?
What an incredible tool! I think I'll be returning to this a lot over the next month! The most interesting papers might be the ones that seem misclassified or out of place...
Jay Alammar@jayalammar.bsky.social · 9mo agoInside NeurIPS 2025: The Year’s AI Research, Mapped New blog post! NeurIPS 2025 papers are out—and it’s a lot to take in. This visualization lets you explore the entire research landscape interactively, with clusters and @cohere.com LLM-generated explanations that make it easier to grasp.
It's too easy to write garbage survey papers and get lots of citations. Over time, I've learned to ignore most survey papers and recognize some markers of quality.
ArXiv has not had an explicit policy on survey papers. In CS we have recently adopted the same policy of requiring successful peer review prior to release. This is because we are inundated with LLM slop surveys intended to boost citation counts.
The blog post is available: blog.arxiv.org/2025/10/31/a...
Attention Authors: Updated Practice for Review Articles and Position Papers in arXiv CS Category – arXiv blog
blog.arxiv.org
Arxiv has long had a policy of not releasing opinion pieces (which covers a substantial fraction of position papers). We lack the moderation capacity to assess the quality of individual position papers, so we recently adopted a policy of requiring all such papers to pass peer review first.
It's been 8 months since I notified @springernature.com of a clear-cut case of fake references in a book chapter which they published. They have still not taken any action as they claim to still be investigating. I will not review for Springer again until this matter is satisfactorily resolved.
UBC’s department of Computer Science invites applications for up to 2 full-time tenure-track positions. The department is particularly interested in researchers in: visualization, robotics, reinforcement learning, data management, and data mining. @cs.ubc.ca science.ubc.ca/about/careers
This year's ALICE guest speakers 🧑🔬 - Angel Goñi-Moreno - @angelgm.bsky.social - Alyssa Adams - @alyssa-m-adams.bsky.social - Alexander Mordvintsev - Eric Medvet - @ericmedvetts.bsky.social - Kyrre Glette - @kyrre2000.bsky.social - Stefano Nichele - @stenichele.bsky.social - Susan Stepney
"Consider another human difference: financial solvency, which can be measured and quantified, just like IQ. It is heritable in twin studies and (less so) in SNPs. But would you bet that sooner or later we are going to know 'what’s going on' with your bank account at the level of genes?" Same for IQ.
Eric Turkheimer@ent3c.bsky.social · 10mo agoIn 2018, Charles Murray challenged me to a bet: "We will understand IQ genetically—I think most of the picture will have been filled in by 2025—there will still be blanks—but we’ll know basically what’s going on." It's now 2025, and I claim a win. I write about it in The Atlantic.
Q. Who aligns the aligners? A. alignmentalignment.ai Today I’m humbled to announce an epoch-defining event: the launch of the 𝗖𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗔𝗹𝗶𝗴𝗻𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗼𝗳 𝗔𝗜 𝗔𝗹𝗶𝗴𝗻𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗖𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗿𝘀.
Center for the Alignment of AI Alignment Centers
We align the aligners
alignmentalignment.ai
At #AutoML25, Dr. Manuela Veloso calls for 3 major directions for AI research: 1) AI must know what it doesn't know (uncertainty). 2) AI must be able to continually improve (continual learning). 3) AI systems must include humans at all times to be more robust (automation is always only partial).
