I am continually asked if VFMs "understand" classical mechanics and my benchmark for this is the venerable newton's cradle. Let's take a look at progress over the last year using Google's Veo models -- a 🧵

Google Deepmind likes to publish one of these "can VFMs do physics" papers every so often. This year the conclusion is "not quite" last time the conclusion was "its promising" Playing at home ? We're at best stuck and at worst going backwards. video-zero-shot.github.io physics-iq.github.io

Today’s the day ! Final paper submission deadline for SCA! Let’s gooooo sca.graphics

It's looking good for SCA 2026 ! If all the abstracts submitted are converted into full submissions it will be the most submissions to SCA in the last 10 years !!!! Final submission deadline: April 17th sca.graphics

<megaphone emoji> Today’s the day ! SCA abstracts due by 23:59 UTC April 10th Submit here: srmv2.eg.org/COMFy/Confer... sca.graphics

Great thread! I also struggled (still struggle) with a lot of this stuff but Rook articulates it much better than I ever could.

And we're back !!!!! Submit those abstracts :) Link: srmv2.eg.org/COMFy/Confer...

And it’s down again 😬 Will post when the issue is fixed (secretly hoping y’all crashed it with the volume of submissions)

For those submitting to SCA (sca.graphics) — the submission system (SRM) is back up after an outage yesterday. Remember abstract deadline is tomorrrow :) Submit here: srmv2.eg.org/COMFy/Confer...

@rishit-dagli.bsky.social's amazing VoMP model is now available for to the people, including a fun demo on @hf.co. Check it out. research.nvidia.com/labs/sil/pro...

Abstract deadline coming up fast (April 10) Don’t forget to submit !!

I’m just saying …

Effectively received a SIGGRAPH summary for a rejected paper that can be summed up as "waaaaaah don't show my open source simulation software has a failure case" 🫠

No love from #SIGGRAPH ? Submit those animation papers to the Symposium on Computer Animation computeranimation.org ! Abstract deadline: April 10th Submission deadline: April 17h Conference: Barcelona, Spain July 8th-10th Be there!

Called it.

@cemyuksel.com I’m with you, I definitely will not see you at SIGGRAPH Asia No submissions, no reviewing, no service.

About 6 months ago, I publicly announced that I would be boycotting #SIGGRAPHAsia 2026. Today, I released a video explaining my rationale and calling on others to do the same, because I believe it is important. Here it is: youtu.be/bZ6s0-EQp8M

Given my average SIGGRAPH review score vs those I've gotten in the last few months at ICLR, CVPR and ICML, I think maybe I do machine learning now ???

Our Rising Stars 2026 application campaign is currently open so we thought we would share some updates about our past rising stars 🌟 follow us in the next couple weeks to read more! Learn more about the program and apply >> www.wigraph.org/events/2026-...

Every one of my 3 #SIGGRAPH 2026 has one review (of four) that gptzero detects as 100% AI generated (not ai polished, or mixed, but 100% generated). 2/3 of those AI tagged reviews argue to reject the paper.

SIGGRAPH reviews are out, and I’m always reminded how, since SIGGRAPH doesn’t make anonymized reviews or discussion public, there is not even a minor disincentive to writing poor reviews (often violating the reviewing policy itself). I’ve been asking for this for years. It’s never going to happen.

Can't believe my new website didn't make it. www.diwlevin.com

My website has previously been described as "where the internet goes to die" and "the virtual embodiment of a calling card scam" and "detrimental to <my> career". Despite these compliments, I felt it was time to make something slightly more useful: www.diwlevin.com

The man who hated robots finds love with a robot.

The Symposium on Computer Animation is Coming! BARCELONA, SPAIN. JULY 8 - 10, 2026! Papers Abstract Deadline: April 10, 2026 Poster Deadline: June 1, 2026 Website: sca.graphics Call for papers : computeranimation.org/instructions... Barcelona > LA (Come on: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagrada...)

OMG such an honour for me !

Reminds me of photo-ops where politicians visit a job site. Look they’re wearing a hard hat and holding a hammer, they understand !

Don’t worry spaceX is going to take all that IPO money and buy a million Optimus robots.

My PhD student Abhishek Madan is getting ready to graduate and he’s looking for a postdoc or industry position. Checkout his website www.dgp.toronto.edu/~amadan/ He’s been an amazing student , basically does all his research by himself. Fantastic math and implementation acumen.

For the first time in a while none of the SIGGRAPH papers I’ll submit have any ML (no neural nets no nothing) in them. Why ? The truth is that for most of my use cases those techniques have yet to show any practical benefit over good ol’ meshes and math.

It's funny to me that the SGP call for papers basically has all of SCA as a subtopic and I'm pretty sure SCA does the same thing in reverse. It's like a snake eating its tail.

We are all just notation artists … My PhD advisor was always testing creative hacks for math notation, from using colours to different typefaces to label quantities. I like using visually meaningful decorations (like tilde for deformed quantities because it looks like a squished bar).

Hey I made a new thing - it's called Gradientspace Graph, and it's a C#-based NodeGraph Programming system that also supports inline C# and Python "Code Nodes". The NodeGraph Engine is MIT Open-Source and the Editor is Free. More details here: www.gradientspace.com/tutorials/20...

This sounds like a great course, may have to steal this idea ;)

The ACM Digital Library, where a LOT of computing-related research is published (I'd say at least 75% of my own publications), is now not only providing (without consent of the authors and without opt-in by readers) AI-generated summaries of papers, but they appear as the *default* over abstracts.

Correct

Curious what people think of bidding on papers to review for a conference. I always find this to be an unnecessary waste of time. You know my expertise and my conflicts, assign me appropriate papers, don't make me click more buttons. Agree? Disagree?

Totally forgot that the first year I ran my physics-based animation seminar course, part of the grade was writing a blog post about a paper. Those posts still exist and are quite good ! physics.diwlevin.com?p=72

One last physics assignment, this time by my student Ty Trusty, implementing vertex-block descent: github.com/tytrusty/pba... Get's about 5 chickens per second on my workstation GPU.

My worldview is being challenged The reviews received for my ICLR submission are higher quality than reviews I received for my SIGGRAPH and SIGGRAPH Asia submissions. All reviewers seemed to have actually read the paper and articulated their (reasonable) concerns in a constructive format.

When this baby hits 88 revolutions per minute your going to see some serious sh!t.

Graduate student led quest to start Canada-Wide National Laboratories focused on applied science/technology research continues ... you can visit appliedcomputing.ca to read the original letter of intent and a proposal document, plus sign said letter to show your support.

This is the best way to illustrate "I don't know what the f#@$ is going on" I've ever seen.

New fluid simulation assignment for CSC417 just dropped. This one by my PhD student Jonathan Panuelos. I had always intended to have fluid sim in the previous course but never got around to writing the code. Maybe for the best, because Jonathan's version is so good. github.com/panuelosj/pb...

From the Verge … there’s a word for this, when someone claims they own your entire personhood. It eludes me …

My PhD student Ty Trusty and a grass roots group of graduate wants to petition the Canada to start a national lab (eg INRIA) in Canada. You can read their rationale here: docs.google.com/document/d/1.... If it resonates with you, like it did me, sign the letter and share forms.gle/NqW7Q5qYkytP...!

Game 6 let’s go jays !!

Very excited to share VoMP, our surface to volumetric simready asset generator. Our method doesn’t over fit to a simulator, it predicts ground truth (as measured) Young’s modulus and poison’s ratio much more accurately then previous methods.

Don’t usually post about my non-cs hobbies but I’m proud of this :) A 440lb deadlift just a few days short of my 46th birthday

EC summary of the SigAsia 2026 decision features some real questionable reasoning On why no alternative venue ".. it sends the message that we lack confidence in our ability to host international events safely." docs.google.com/document/d/1...