Tootfinder

Improved sampling algorithms and Poincar\'e inequalities for non-log-concave distributions
Yuchen He, Zhehan Lei, Jianan Shao, Chihao Zhang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.11236

Improved sampling algorithms and Poincaré inequalities for non-log-concave distributions
We study the problem of sampling from a distribution $μ$ with density $\propto e^{-V}$ for some potential function $V:\mathbb R^d\to \mathbb R$ with query access to $V$ and $\nabla V$. We start with the following standard assumptions: (1) The potential function $V$ is $L$-smooth. (2) The second moment $\mathbf{E}_{X\sim μ}[\|X\|^2]\leq M$. Recently, He and Zhang (COLT'25) showed that the query complexity of sampling from such distributions is at least $\left(\frac{LM}{dε}\rig…

I just sent the following to my House and Senate Congress Critters:
Please do not vote to approve *any* budget agreement.
Please let our Federal government shut down.
Please do not fall for any “negotiations” or “agreements”: We know that the present administration will simply usurp those funds for whatever purpose they chose.
Our present Federal government is engaged in a near-war against our people. Both the Constitution and the laws are being ignored or twisted.

How Many Instructions Can LLMs Follow at Once?
Daniel Jaroslawicz, Brendan Whiting, Parth Shah, Karime Maamari
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.11538 https://

How Many Instructions Can LLMs Follow at Once?
Production-grade LLM systems require robust adherence to dozens or even hundreds of instructions simultaneously. However, the instruction-following capabilities of LLMs at high instruction densities have not yet been characterized, as existing benchmarks only evaluate models on tasks with a single or few instructions. We introduce IFScale, a simple benchmark of 500 keyword-inclusion instructions for a business report writing task to measure how instruction-following performance degrades as inst…

War is an unconscionable horror. The illusions of "international law" and "rules of war" have lead us to believe that war can be clean, managed, and "civilized."
But wars are fought by humans and humans are messy. Humans are not well suited to following orderly rules. Humans respond to their environment. Humans in extraordinary situations can be extraordinarily vindictive and brutal. Sufficiently traumatized humans can act without a conscience, spreading trauma like an infection. If humans respond to their situation, then there can be no "civilized" war because war is itself an situation outside of the society. It is a place that promotes antisocial behavior and punishes pro-social behavior. War cannot be expected to follow "international law" because it is what fills the void created by the failure of "international law" (so long as we rely on nations).
To call for war is to inflict atrocities on civilians. It is to kill the parents and children who serve, and to destroy the combatants who survive. It is to infect both sides with a trauma that will spread if untreated, when soldiers come home or when they become mercenaries in other wars.
And yet... there are times when the brutality, the incompetence, the evil becomes so unbearable that no other option exists, when taking up arms is simply bringing symmetry to an existing asymmetric conflict. There are times when the worst possible thing is inescapable, though it can never be justified.
In this new era of war, in the scramble of conflict under the collapsing of the (poorly named) "Pax Americana," I hope that we, the people, can understand that war is not a tool to fulfill an objective. It is not part of a larger strategy. It is not an extension of deplomacy.
War is a failure.
While it may be the only way to deal with the irrational - the genocidal, the slaver, the dictator - it is still a failure. It is a failure to build a world in which these people can't control armies and economies, can't turn populations in to cults and bend nations to their will.
And we will continue to have such wars until we unite against those who would use as as pawns, who would control our lives and lead us to our deaths. We will have these wars until we unite, as one world, against those rulers. This is what I mean, and what a lot of other people mean, when we say, "No War, but Class War."

1/2 'Glitzer' #FotoVorschlag 'glitter'
I don't have a lot of glitter in my portfolio. But #snowflakes can be like glitter in the counter light!
I took this #photo …

CMI-Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating Music Instruction Following
Yinghao Ma, Siyou Li, Juntao Yu, Emmanouil Benetos, Akira Maezawa
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.12285 …

CMI-Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating Music Instruction Following
Recent advances in audio-text large language models (LLMs) have opened new possibilities for music understanding and generation. However, existing benchmarks are limited in scope, often relying on simplified tasks or multi-choice evaluations that fail to reflect the complexity of real-world music analysis. We reinterpret a broad range of traditional MIR annotations as instruction-following formats and introduce CMI-Bench, a comprehensive music instruction following benchmark designed to evaluat…

Fine-structure Line Atlas for Multi-wavelength Extragalactic Study (FLAMES) I: Comprehensive Low and High Redshift Catalogs and Empirical Relations for Probing Gas Conditions
Bo Peng, Cody Lamarche, Catie Ball, Amit Vishwas, Gordon Stacey, Christopher Rooney, Thomas Nikola, Carl Ferkinhoff
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.10702…

Fine-structure Line Atlas for Multi-wavelength Extragalactic Study (FLAMES) I: Comprehensive Low and High Redshift Catalogs and Empirical Relations for Probing Gas Conditions
Far-infrared (FIR) and mid-infrared (MIR) fine-structure lines (FSLs) are widely used for studying galaxies nearby and faraway. However, interpreting these lines is complicated by factors including sample and data bias, mismatch between resolved calibrations and unresolved observations, limitations in generalizing from case studies, and unresolved issues like the origin of [C II] emission and the so-called ``deficit.''In this series of papers, we assemble and analyze the most comprehensive atla…

Fluctuation-guided adaptive random compiler for Hamiltonian simulation
Yu-Xia Wu, Yun-Zhuo Fan, Dan-Bo Zhang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.10158 https://arxiv…

Fluctuation-guided adaptive random compiler for Hamiltonian simulation
Stochastic methods offer an effective way to suppress coherent errors in quantum simulation. In particular, the randomized compilation protocol may reduce circuit depth by randomly sampling Hamiltonian terms rather than following the deterministic Trotter-Suzuki sequence. However, its fixed sampling distribution does not adapt to the dynamics of the system, limiting its accuracy. In this work, we propose a fluctuation-guided adaptive algorithm that adaptively updates sampling probabilities base…

Identifiable Autoregressive Variational Autoencoders for Nonlinear and Nonstationary Spatio-Temporal Blind Source Separation
Mika Sipil\"a, Klaus Nordhausen, Sara Taskinen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.11962

Identifiable Autoregressive Variational Autoencoders for Nonlinear and Nonstationary Spatio-Temporal Blind Source Separation
The modeling and prediction of multivariate spatio-temporal data involve numerous challenges. Dimension reduction methods can significantly simplify this process, provided that they account for the complex dependencies between variables and across time and space. Nonlinear blind source separation has emerged as a promising approach, particularly following recent advances in identifiability results. Building on these developments, we introduce the identifiable autoregressive variational autoenco…

Fear of flying therapy is about reframing the flight experience;
if my mind’s eye squints,
I can almost interpret my sweating palms and pounding heartbeat as a kind of buzz.
But this requires repeated, strenuous effort,
and the result is a mental exhaustion that makes the worst-case scenario appealing:
succumbing to my fears and never flying again.
I imagine this as analogous to what many Americans, aerophobic or not, are feeling.
It’s simply easier…

Winging It | Noelle Mateer
For those trying to overcome their fears of flying, it’s been . . . a challenging time to say the least.