@gershbrain.bsky.social and I have a new paper in PLOS Comp Bio! We study how two cognitive constraints—action consideration set size & policy complexity—interact in context-dependent decision making, and how humans exploit their synergy to reduce behavioral suboptimality. osf.io/preprints/ps...

Posterior predictive checking of binary, categorical and many ordinal models with bar graphs is useless. Even the simplest models without covariates usually have such intercept terms that category specific probabilities are learned perfectly. Can you guess which model, 1 or 2, is misspecifed? 1/4

Remember to follow the official rebuttal guide.

Superlative initiative! Massive kudos to the organisation team for getting this going in such a short time!

Holy shit

The singularity is awesome

New blog post! You can train a neural network to *just do things* -- such as *predict the optimum of a function*. But how do you get a big training dataset of "functions with known optima"? Read the blog post to find out! (link 👇)

If you’re not attending Trump’s military exploitation birthday party in DC you might want to consider joining one of the “No Kings” events happening across the country on June 14. My guest today @ezralevin.bsky.social from Indivisible explains how you can get involved. youtu.be/iJC455bmkbo

That's a pity. I am not a fan of this place either due to the lack of interesting AI/ML discussions, and that's the only reason I still set foot in Mordor. A shiver goes through my spine at the thought that LinkedIn might be a viable alternative.

sometimes you need to exorcise images from your mind

We propose Neurosymbolic Diffusion Models! We find diffusion is especially compelling for neurosymbolic approaches, combining powerful multimodal understanding with symbolic reasoning 🚀 Read more 👇

🔥 DENIRO AT CANNES: “In my country we’re fighting like hell for the democracy we once took for granted… Art looks for truth, embraces diversity — that’s why we are a threat to autocrats and fascists.” 🇺🇸

If you add "also Cthulhu-y" to the prompt, the results are pretty great.

I had to do it

TIL so many missed opportunities for biology and neuroscience textbooks. He should have had a guest appearance in the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. (The man on the right is Santiago Ramón y Cajal.)

@huangdaolang.bsky.social will be presenting our work tomorrow on pretrained/amortized transformers for all sorts of inference tasks, go say hi! #AISTATS2025 Poster session 1 Place: Hall A-E Time: Sat 3 May 3 p.m. — 6 p.m. Poster number: 23

AskHistorians has joined with thirty other research- and academia-focused subreddits to issue this statement condemning recent and ongoing efforts to undermine scholarly research and intellectual freedom in the United States. Please share widely! www.reddit.com/r/AskHistori...

Have you thought that in computer memory model weights are given in terms of discrete values in any case. Thus, why not do probabilistic inference on the discrete (quantized) parameters. @trappmartin.bsky.social is presenting our work at #AABI2025 today. [1/3]

We just kicked off #AABI2025 at NTU in Singapore! We're livestreaming the talks here: timrudner.com/aabi2025! Schedule: approximateinference.org/schedule/ #ICLR2025 #ProbabilisticML

I asked "on the other platform" what were the most important improvements to the original 2017 transformer. That was quite popular and here is a synthesis of the responses:

I’ll be at the AABI symposium tomorrow. Looking forward to seeing everyone there!

1/ If you are at ICLR / AABI / AISTATS, check out work from our lab and collaborators on *inference everywhere anytime all at once*! Go talk to my incredible PhD students @huangdaolang.bsky.social & @chengkunli.bsky.social + amazing collaborator Severi Rissanen. @univhelsinkics.bsky.social FCAI

PhD Timeline xkcd.com/3081

🎉 Presenting “Streamlining Prediction in Bayesian Deep Learning” at #ICLR2025! We replace MC estimation with local linearisation + Gaussian approximations → analytic posterior predictive in one forward pass. Fast, performs well, and scales to ViT. 📄 arxiv.org/abs/2411.18425 💻 github.com/AaltoML/SUQ

Reminder that the next OWABI seminar www.warwick.ac.uk/owabi is scheduled on Thursday the 24th April at 11am UK time. Our next speaker is @ayushbharti.bsky.social (Aalto University), who will talk about "Cost-aware simulation-based inference".

1/10🔥 New paper alert in #AABI2025 Proceedings! Normalizing Flow Regression (NFR) — an offline Bayesian inference method. What if you could get a full posterior using *only* the evaluations you *already* have, maybe from optimization runs?

I'm calling for an investigation into whether President Trump manipulated the market to benefit his Wall Street donors—all while working people and small businesses paid the price. Did Trump help insiders cash in on his tariff flip-flopping? It sure looks like corruption.

1/ We asked GPT-4.5 -- allegedly the model with the best sense of humor, according to the site we do not talk about here -- to write a comic about our recent AISTATS paper on the Amortized Conditioning Engine (ACE). Then gpt-4o drew it. You judge the result... (text continues 👇)

A reminder that if the government can send migrants to a prison camp without any due process, it can send U.S. citizens there, too. I know because this happened to me and my family in 1942.

Llama 4 was a messy release: unreleased finetunes boosting scores, rumors of training on test, released on a weekend, etc As (open) models are commoditized / competition grows, what is the role of Meta's Llama efforts in the future? Should they continue?

1/ Just saw this paper using our PyVBMC (acerbilab.github.io/pyvbmc/) in structural engineering. Nice to see sample-efficient Bayesian inference for expensive computational models used in the wild! (Although we feel a bit more pressure to triple-check that our implementation has no bugs...)

Yesterday, 1,400 protests were held to protest the Trump whose headlines fill this page. But to the #BrokenTimes this morning, they are a buried BTW. It has plenty of photos; none here. This is what they call "news judgment." To the Times, we are not news.

Meta just dropped Llama 4 on a weekend! Two new open weight models (Scout and Maverick) and a preview of a model called Behemoth - Scout has a 10 million token context Best information right now appears to be this blog post: ai.meta.com/blog/llama-4...

I read the Race ending first. Spoiler: Humans do not fare well. That's the Director's Cut. Then started the "Slowdown" ending and, erm, superintelligences need to speak in English in Slack and cannot steganography their way out? Yep, this is the Studio Cut.

A must-read if you work anywhere close to ML and AI. My timelines are a bit slower than this, assuming a relatively stable world, but we are not in a stable world, so who knows, maybe a global recession or WW3 will send us to a Mad-Max-like timeline, honestly anything goes now. ai-2027.com

So far, 2,135 people have responded to the poll Søren and I posted a few days ago. Of those, 94.4% replied “Yes” to being interested in officially presenting accepted @neuripsconf.bsky.social papers in Europe. (1/7)

The Trump administration illegally deported this Maryland father, who was here legally, by "accident" to El Salvador and now they have no way of getting him back. Whoever is responsible for this should be held criminally liable for destroying this person's life. www.theatlantic.com/politics/arc...

Science is under siege. Political forces are undermining expertise, dismantling research institutions, and replacing evidence based policymaking with ideology. This is a global crisis. 🧵 1/31

Great read and I wholeheartedly agree. Glad to see that people are planning to resist.

If you are a European AI or ML researcher, please answer and repost. In fact, even if you are *not* European and you may prefer to come to Europe than go to the US. We are welcoming and as a bonus there is a lower chance of being randomly stripped of your rights and deported to another country.

Feel free to cancel the visits. Then organize around protecting science in your country as though what is happening in the US were happening to you. Don't wait until it's too late!

For balanced and well-researched overviews, this a great AI channel: www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTsl... Unsurprisingly, Gemini 2.5 scores a few points higher on Philip's SimpleBench than any other model, again pointing at that jenesaisquoi which you can get by talking to it.

I tested Gemini 2.5 bouncing off dumb-to-research-level questions on diffusion models (which we started looking at recently in my group so am still patchy) and oh gosh. This model feels qualitatively different. Even the paternalistic condescension towards the human in its reasoning trace is SOTA.

Next week is the MCMC chapter of my simulation course. Asked chatgpt to come up with a funny drawing:

1/ No AGI yet, but native image generation is showing massive improvements - see the new ChatGPT feature. We still cannot quite generate correct plots for slides and papers just by asking nicely, but this is way better than anything we had before.

@lacerbi.bsky.social wrote a very nice summary post of our paper here if anyone missed it: bsky.app/profile/lace... I can give some more behind-the-scenes information. 🧵

This year #NeurIPS2025 @neuripsconf.bsky.social is set to be held in the US. Given how hostile the current government is towards people from other countries, not sure I will be attending.