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From hackathon to release: sbi v0.25 is here! 🎉 What happens when dozens of SBI researchers and practitioners collaborate for a week? New inference methods, new documentation, lots of new embedding networks, a bridge to pyro and a bridge between flow matching and score-based methods 🤯 1/7 🧵

My paper with Loucas Pillaud-Vivien and Lawrence Saul, “Variational Inference for Uncertainty Quantification: An Analysis of Trade-offs”, has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Machine Learning Research. 📃 arxiv.org/abs/2403.13748 🧵 1/

Working from home and overhearing my 7-year-old trying to explain "countable infinity" to my partner using donuts.

Fun read of their amazing contributions to the SBI hackathon! 🥐 The SBI-Pyro bridge that @sethaxen.com built has a lot of potential I believe. I'll actually be presenting this work at @euroscipy.bsky.social this Wednesday - excited to share this with a broader audience. euroscipy.org/talks/KCYYTF/

All three books I've co-authored are freely available online for non-commercial use: - #Bayesian Data Analysis, 3rd ed (aka BDA3) at stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/book/ - #Regression and Other Stories at avehtari.github.io/ROS-Examples/ - Active Statistics at avehtari.github.io/ActiveStatis...

Pro-tip: don't be the poor sod that adds a daily cron trigger to a GitHub Actions workflow that often fails. Long after you've left the project, you will get *daily* failure notifications, and the only way out is to trick some other poor sod into editing the workflow. docs.github.com/en/actions/c...

Like the authors, I also found this result disturbing. The crux is that *conditioning* a distribution to lie on a manifold is *not* in general the same thing as *restricting* the distribution to the manifold (i.e. constraining the support and re-normalizing).

For the Bayesians, it's the Monte Hall problem.

Finally, a part of my Fairphone 5 stopped working. For any other phone, I'd be dropping >500€ right now to replace it with a marginally better brand new phone that would last me just 2-3 years. Instead, I paid 41€, had the new part in 4 days, replaced it in 5 minutes, and the phone is good as new!

Sharing this here a bit late, but @vstaros.bsky.social and I wrote a little something about our experience contributing to the @sbi-devs.bsky.social (simulation-based inference) hackathon. @mlcolab.org @mackelab.bsky.social We were obviously very hungry while writing.

Spent a pleasant morning organizing GitHub repos and notifications, responding to issues and PRs, and answering questions on Slack. Reminder that FOSS is often about building a community as much as building software!

Remember that computers use bitstrings to represent numbers? We exploit this in our recent @auai.org paper and introduce #BitVI. #BitVI directly learns an approximation in the space of bitstring representations, thus, capturing complex distributions under varying numerical precision regimes.

If you run a DuckDuckGo search for "qr decomposition", it returns a QR code for "decomposition".

Can LLMs access and describe their own internal distributions? With my colleagues at Apple, I invite you to take a leap forward and make LLM uncertainty quantification what it can be. 📄 arxiv.org/abs/2505.20295 💻 github.com/apple/ml-sel... 🧵1/9

This paper is an absolute work of art.

Normalize v1.0 of software adding no new features. 1.0 comes with an expectation of greater stability than pre-1.0 releases. Debuting new features in that release makes it less stable, not more. Put the new features in an earlier release and let them stabilize *before* the 1.0.

I strongly suspect my 4-year-old has figured out how to vomit at will so he can stay home from preschool and "watch TV."

We are incredible happy to be able to continue our work of developing new #AI4science across a wide range of disciplines with incredible colleagues in #physics, #neuroscience, #cogsci, #geoscience, #linguistics, #economics, #medicine, #philosophy, #law and #anthropology! @unituebingen.bsky.social

I am literally begging you, if in your paper you summarize the features of software *that you do not use*, at the bare minimum have a user of that software (even better, a maintainer) look over that bit of text before submitting. Sincerely, tired-of-software-I-worked-on-being-misrepresented

Amazing Best Paper award talk on Variational inference theory by Charles Margossian @charlesm993.bsky.social at #aistats What does VI learn and under which conditions? -> arxiv.org/pdf/2410.11067

From Student's "Errors of Routine Analysis" (1927) doi.org/10.2307/2332...

A new paper with Alex Cooper and Catherine Forbes "Joint leave-group-out cross-validation in Bayesian spatial models" arxiv.org/abs/2504.15586 (Alex did the hard work for this, and running many cross-validation simulations with spatial models is hard)

Phew! US Taxes filed. While they're generally not fun to do, it's extra not fun when you're an expat and only have to do it to avoid being double-taxed while all the immigrants from other countries don't have to file taxes in their home countries.

o1 musing to itself in German: "Sister, I am working on considering all possibilities."

It's been a blast, thanks to @sbi-devs.bsky.social ! This week's hackathon was phenomenal! 🙏 😍 The sbi hackathon welcomed about 25 people in Tübingen with contributions spanning the globe , e.g. 🇺🇸🇯🇵🇧🇪🇩🇪. Wanna see, what we did? Check out the PRs👇 github.com/sbi-dev/sbi/...

I've been testing out o1 on a project with some math, and while 4o usually disappoints, o1 has been surprisingly helpful. At least on this project, its success rate on suggesting the steps in the derivations has been ~80%.

Archive Request xkcd.com/3052

If you know simulation based calibration checking (SBC), you will enjoy our new paper "Posterior SBC: Simulation-Based Calibration Checking Conditional on Data" with Teemu Säilynoja, @marvinschmitt.com and @paulbuerkner.com arxiv.org/abs/2502.03279 1/7

If your book's index doesn't include this, what are you even doing?

You think Jacobian and Hessian matrices are prohibitively expensive to compute on your problem? Our latest preprint with @gdalle.bsky.social might change your mind! arxiv.org/abs/2501.17737 🧵1/8

🚀 Join the 4th SBI Hackathon! 🚀 The last SBI hackathon was a fantastic milestone in forming a collaborative open-source community around SBI. Be part of it this year as we build on that momentum! 📅 March 17–21, 2025 📍 Tübingen, Germany or remote 👉 Details: github.com/sbi-dev/sbi/... More Info:🧵👇

Ever wondered why presenting more facts can sometimes *worsen* disagreements, even among rational people? 🤔 It turns out, Bayesian reasoning has some surprising answers - no cognitive biases needed! Let's explore this fascinating paradox quickly ☺️

Turns out anyone can subscribe all 6.5k maintainers of conda-forge recipes to an issue on conda-forge: github.com/conda-forge/....

Hey #StatsSky, what are you favorite papers to cite when you need to justify something that is obvious (I once had a reviewer ask we justify the use of logistic regression on a binary outcome) or when you need to push-back on silly reviewer requests (e.g., asking for p-values in table 1)?

Real data is terrifying. Love this whole thread.

Time for a powerlifting year-in-review! In Feb, I started training again after a 6-year break. By July I'd beaten my old PRs, but shoulder pain forced me to deload, reprogram, and focus on technique and fatigue management. I'm proud of 2024's progress and ready to make some more PRs in the new year!

Thinking of giving emacs another try in the next few weeks. Any devotees have suggestions of where to start? Also would want to get as much Cursor/Copilot-like functionality up and running ASAP.

If you're using Cursor for #JuliaLang, add the following to your startup.jl so `@edit` opens directly to a method definition: if isdefined(InteractiveUtils, :define_editor) InteractiveUtils.define_editor("cursor") do cmd, path, line, column `$cmd -g $path:$line:$column` end end

Thrilled to announce we have three #NeurIPS2024 papers! Interested in simulating realistic neural data with diffusion models or recurrent neural networks, or in source distribution sorcery? Have a look 👇 1/4

Maybe don't use the phrase "nothing else matters" unless you actually mean it?

Super excited to preprint our work on developing a Biomolecular Emulator (BioEmu): Scalable emulation of protein equilibrium ensembles with generative deep learning from @msftresearch.bsky.social ch AI for Science. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

What would you think might a scared fruit fly hide from curious scientists in its legs? A) Some tasty fruit? 🍇 B) Its soul?? 👻 C) An additional HEART??? 💓 This is so cool!

Brought my 4-year-old to a pre-NeurIPS poster session. He immediately wormed his way into a group around a poster and nodded along as the presenter explained it. Total natural.

If you're going to use an LLM to try to top the #AdventOfCode leaderboard, maybe committing your prompts to GitHub might reduce your cred a little?

Attention #JuliaLang package devs! Use DocumenterInterLinks.jl! If you haven't built your docs in forever, rebuild them with a recent Documenter version so they include an inventory file so others can interlink with them. That is all. github.com/JuliaDocs/Do...

I strongly believe that every research group should implement a formal code review process, and review that happens just a few weeks or days before publication is too late to be very effective.

I've been pondering a lot on what is the most efficient entry route into the "fancy" ML stuff today for a dummy*. this is the roadmap I ended up with, and it's disappointing how little prob/stats you need—just Gaussians 🐢. *🙋‍♂️ me. I was the dummy, as I was getting ready to start a postdoc 4yrs ago.

Anyone else doing #AdventOfCode in #RustLang?

… well I went ahead and made this one! Feel free to hare & let me know who from the Tübingen crowd is missing/if you want to be added! go.bsky.app/BED3Lhc