Tootfinder

Pyanodons hurts my brain. So many things to keep track of. They don't fit on the screen. And I don't have construction robots (yet).

Great ending - I was nervous that they were going to put Ellie back in the box. #strictly

The e in eMacs comes from the Enlightenment window manager, which will have a working release within the next half-decade.
#pooptoot

A Distributed Asynchronous Generalized Momentum Algorithm Without Delay Bounds
Ellie Pond, Yichen Zhao, Matthew Hale
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08218 https://

A Distributed Asynchronous Generalized Momentum Algorithm Without Delay Bounds
Asynchronous optimization algorithms often require delay bounds to prove their convergence, though these bounds can be difficult to obtain in practice. Existing algorithms that do not require delay bounds often converge slowly. Therefore, we introduce a novel distributed generalized momentum algorithm that provides fast convergence and allows arbitrary delays. It subsumes Nesterov's accelerated gradient algorithm and the heavy ball algorithm, among others. We first develop conditions on the par…

Surprise! Vivek Ramaswamy's Turning Point Event Derailed by Racism (Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling/New Republic)
https://newrepublic.com/post/201664/vivek-ramaswamy-turning-point-racism-ohio
http://www.memeorandum.com/251010/p146#a251010p146

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
#HorizonForbiddenWest #BurningShores

Whither symbols in the era of advanced neural networks?
Thomas L. Griffiths, Brenden M. Lake, R. Thomas McCoy, Ellie Pavlick, Taylor W. Webb
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.05776 htt…

Whither symbols in the era of advanced neural networks?
Some of the strongest evidence that human minds should be thought about in terms of symbolic systems has been the way they combine ideas, produce novelty, and learn quickly. We argue that modern neural networks -- and the artificial intelligence systems built upon them -- exhibit similar abilities. This undermines the argument that the cognitive processes and representations used by human minds are symbolic, although the fact that these neural networks are typically trained on data generated by…

Chromatic numbers with open and nonzero local modular constraints
Daniel Herden, Jonathan Meddaugh, Mark R. Sepanski, William Clark, Adam Kraus, Ellie Matter, Kingsley Michael, Mitchell Minyard, Maricela Ramirez, Kyle Rosengartner, Elyssa Stephens, John Stephens
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.05822

Chromatic numbers with open and nonzero local modular constraints
In this paper, we explore chromatic numbers subject to various local modular constraints. For fixed $n$, we consider proper integer colorings of a graph $G$ for which the closed and open neighborhood sums have nonzero remainders modulo $n$ and provide bounds for the associated chromatic numbers $χ_n(G)$ and $χ_{(n)}(G)$, respectively. In addition, we provide bounds for $χ_{(n,k)}(G)$, the minimal order of a proper integer coloring of $G$ with open neighborhood sums congruent to $k\mod n$ (wh…

Interessante grüne Entwicklungen in Großbritannien (hier: England und Wales) - https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/sep/02/zack-polanski-wins-green-party-leadership-election

My zucchini plants have died. From green and flowering and fruiting to yellow and withered in 24h, coinciding with a 12°C plunge. This weather is getting increasingly bonkers. #climatecrisis
At least some made it into the freezer for autumn zucchini bread loafs.

Excited to be a (very tiny part) of this new AI Research Institute, led by the amazing Ellie Pavlick. Looking forward to doing some human factors and education work, and getting to hopefully nerd out with some cognitive scientists!
https://www.brown.edu/news/2025-07-29/aria-ai-i…

Brown University to lead national institute focused on intuitive, trustworthy AI assistants
A new institute, based at Brown and supported by a $20 million National Science Foundation grant, will convene researchers to guide development of a new generation of AI assistants for use in mental and behavioral health.

Replaced article(s) found for cs.NE. https://arxiv.org/list/cs.NE/new
[1/1]:
- The dynamic interplay between in-context and in-weight learning in humans and neural networks
Jacob Russin, Ellie Pavlick, Michael J. Frank

The Johns Hopkins University Press will license its authors' books to train AI models, citing concerns that "the window may be closing" for making AI deals (Ellie Wolfe/The Baltimore Banner)
https://www.thebaltimoreb…

Johns Hopkins University Press will license its authors’ books to train AI models
Authors at the Johns Hopkins University Press will be able to opt out of the AI licensing agreement until the end of August; if they do not, their work will be used to train AI models.

How Do Language Models Compose Functions?
Apoorv Khandelwal, Ellie Pavlick
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.01685 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.01685

How Do Language Models Compose Functions?
While large language models (LLMs) appear to be increasingly capable of solving compositional tasks, it is an open question whether they do so using compositional mechanisms. In this work, we investigate how feedforward LLMs solve two-hop factual recall tasks, which can be expressed compositionally as $g(f(x))$. We first confirm that modern LLMs continue to suffer from the "compositionality gap": i.e. their ability to compute both $z = f(x)$ and $y = g(z)$ does not entail their ability to compu…

C2AL: Cohort-Contrastive Auxiliary Learning for Large-scale Recommendation Systems
Mertcan Cokbas, Ziteng Liu, Zeyi Tao, Chengkai Zhang, Elder Veliz, Qin Huang, Ellie Wen, Huayu Li, Qiang Jin, Murat Duman, Benjamin Au, Guy Lebanon, Sagar Chordia
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.02215

C2AL: Cohort-Contrastive Auxiliary Learning for Large-scale Recommendation Systems
Training large-scale recommendation models under a single global objective implicitly assumes homogeneity across user populations. However, real-world data are composites of heterogeneous cohorts with distinct conditional distributions. As models increase in scale and complexity and as more data is used for training, they become dominated by central distribution patterns, neglecting head and tail regions. This imbalance limits the model's learning ability and can result in inactive attention we…

The Johns Hopkins University Press will license its authors' books to train AI models, citing concerns that "the window may be closing" for making AI deals (Ellie Wolfe/The Baltimore Banner)
https://www.thebaltimoreb…

Johns Hopkins University Press will license its authors’ books to train AI models
Authors at the Johns Hopkins University Press will be able to opt out of the AI licensing agreement until the end of August; if they do not, their work will be used to train AI models.

Current energy level: Laying on the floor in pyjamas. #CEL

It's the middle of the night. And someone down the block is running one of those old petrol-powered leaf blowers.

Optical design and polarimetric performance of a SmallSat UV polarimeter to study interstellar dust: PUFFINS
Ramya M Anche, Hyukmo Kang, Kyle Van Gorkom, Dan Vargas, Haeun Chung, Ellie Spitzer, Meredith Kupinski, B-G Andersson, Geoff Clayton, Ewan S. Douglas, Luca Fossati, Victor Gasho, Sreejith Aickara Gopinathan, Erika Hamden, Thiem Hoang, Marcus Klupar, Ryan Lau, Alexandre Lazarian, Tram N Le, Joanna Rosenbluth, Ambily Suresh, Carlos J. Vargas

Optical design and polarimetric performance of a SmallSat UV polarimeter to study interstellar dust: PUFFINS
The Polarimetry in the Ultraviolet to Find Features in INterStellar dust (PUFFINS) is a SmallSat mission concept designed to obtain ultraviolet (UV) spectropolarimetric observations to probe the interstellar dust grain properties and to understand wavelength-dependent extinction and star formation. PUFFINS plans to observe 70 UV bright target stars at varying distances within a 180-320 nm wavelength range with 0.02% polarimetric accuracy. PUFFINS uses a simple telescope design with all reflecti…

I really expected #Hitman #Freelancer to eventually have a scenario where the player would need to defend the safe house from an assault, making use of every trap and sneaky shortcut through the environment. That this never happened is disappointing.

Burlington publishes a PDF of both sides of the foldable cycling route map (same one given away at community centres and street events) - it was last updated in 2022.
* #BikeTooter #OnPoli

Unveiling the Sagittarius Dwarf Spheroidal Galaxy Core with Gaia DR3
Ellie K. H. Toguchi-Tani, Daniel R. Hey, Thomas de Boer, Peter M. Frinchaboy, Daniel Huber
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.20212

Unveiling the Sagittarius Dwarf Spheroidal Galaxy Core with Gaia DR3
The Sagittarius dwarf spheroidal galaxy provides us with the unique opportunity to study an ongoing Galactic cannibalistic event between our Milky Way Galaxy and a satellite dwarf galaxy. We present the first major membership star catalog of the Sagittarius dwarf core ($\approx$400,000 sources) and Messier 54 ($\approx$2000 sources) with positions, proper motions, and parallaxes from $Gaia$ DR3, supplemented with metallicities from the Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment. We …

What is an "Abstract Reasoner"? Revisiting Experiments and Arguments about Large Language Models
Tian Yun, Chen Sun, Ellie Pavlick
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.22457 htt…

What is an "Abstract Reasoner"? Revisiting Experiments and Arguments about Large Language Models
Recent work has argued that large language models (LLMs) are not "abstract reasoners", citing their poor zero-shot performance on a variety of challenging tasks as evidence. We revisit these experiments in order to add nuance to the claim. First, we show that while LLMs indeed perform poorly in a zero-shot setting, even tuning a small subset of parameters for input encoding can enable near-perfect performance. However, we also show that this finetuning does not necessarily transfer across datas…

But that's how I found out one of our busses last trip on Sunday is at 1700h. Which is utterly bonkers. How are drunk people getting home from the bar when their bike is broken? Driving??
#bustooter

GOP Rep Rips Trump and Kash Patel for Covering Up Epstein Files Case (Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling/New Republic)
https://newrepublic.com/post/200750/gop-rep-thomas-massie-donald-trump-kash-patel-epstein-coverup
http://www.memeorandum.com/250922/p135#a250922p135

Igniting VLMs toward the Embodied Space
Andy Zhai, Brae Liu, Bruno Fang, Chalse Cai, Ellie Ma, Ethan Yin, Hao Wang, Hugo Zhou, James Wang, Lights Shi, Lucy Liang, Make Wang, Qian Wang, Roy Gan, Ryan Yu, Shalfun Li, Starrick Liu, Sylas Chen, Vincent Chen, Zach Xu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.11766

Igniting VLMs toward the Embodied Space
While foundation models show remarkable progress in language and vision, existing vision-language models (VLMs) still have limited spatial and embodiment understanding. Transferring VLMs to embodied domains reveals fundamental mismatches between modalities, pretraining distributions, and training objectives, leaving action comprehension and generation as a central bottleneck on the path to AGI. We introduce WALL-OSS, an end-to-end embodied foundation model that leverages large-scale multimoda…

We broke a pin in a chain link on a bike ride today. Never had that happen before. The chain was getting kinda old so it'll probably be replaced (not patched/shortened).
#BikeTooter

From Prediction to Understanding: Will AI Foundation Models Transform Brain Science?
Thomas Serre, Ellie Pavlick
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.17280 https://a…

From Prediction to Understanding: Will AI Foundation Models Transform Brain Science?
Generative pretraining (the "GPT" in ChatGPT) enables language models to learn from vast amounts of internet text without human supervision. This approach has driven breakthroughs across AI by allowing deep neural networks to learn from massive, unstructured datasets. We use the term foundation models to refer to large pretrained systems that can be adapted to a wide range of tasks within and across domains, and these models are increasingly applied beyond language to the brain sciences. These …

Estimating high-resolution albedo for urban applications
David Fork, Elizabeth Jane Wesley, Salil Banerjee, Vishal Batchu, Aniruddh Chennapragada, Kevin Crossan, Bryce Cronkite-Ratcliff, Ellie Delich, Tristan Goulden, Mansi Kansal, Jonas Kemp, Eric Mackres, Yael Mayer, Becca Milman, John C. Platt, Shruthi Prabhakara, Gautam Prasad, Shravya Shetty, Charlotte Stanton, Wayne Sun, Lucy R. Hutyra

Estimating high-resolution albedo for urban applications
Implementation of cool roofs is a high-impact pathway for mitigating heat at both global and city scales. However, while albedo estimates derived from Sentinel-2 are free and globally-available, the 10 m resolution is insufficient to resolve individual roofs. We present methods for increasing the resolution of Sentinel-2 albedo using high-resolution satellite imagery to produce albedo inferences at a 30-cm scale. Validating against high-resolution aerial albedo measurements over Boulder, CO we …

"Zack Polanski’s ‘eco-populism’ could put voters off Greens, opponents say"
#UK #UnitedKingdom #Climate #ClimateChange

The bakery didn't have any pizza buns, just cheesy bread. But I dumped some tomato sauce and oregano on them and it's good. #food

You want infrastructure to last? Don't paint it on. Build it in. #BikeTooter

Efficient Online Large-Margin Classification via Dual Certificates
Nam Ho-Nguyen, Fatma K{\i}l{\i}n\c{c}-Karzan, Ellie Nguyen, Lingqing Shen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.19670 htt…

Efficient Online Large-Margin Classification via Dual Certificates
Online classification is a central problem in optimization, statistical learning and data science. Classical algorithms such as the perceptron offer efficient updates and finite mistake guarantees on linearly separable data, but they do not exploit the underlying geometric structure of the classification problem. We study the offline maximum margin problem through its dual formulation and use the resulting geometric insights to design a principled and efficient algorithm for the online setting.…

RLBFF: Binary Flexible Feedback to bridge between Human Feedback & Verifiable Rewards
Zhilin Wang, Jiaqi Zeng, Olivier Delalleau, Ellie Evans, Daniel Egert, Hoo-Chang Shin, Felipe Soares, Yi Dong, Oleksii Kuchaiev
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.21319

RLBFF: Binary Flexible Feedback to bridge between Human Feedback & Verifiable Rewards
Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) and Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) are the main RL paradigms used in LLM post-training, each offering distinct advantages. However, RLHF struggles with interpretability and reward hacking because it relies on human judgments that usually lack explicit criteria, whereas RLVR is limited in scope by its focus on correctness-based verifiers. We propose Reinforcement Learning with Binary Flexible Feedback (RLBFF), which combine…

"contains no functional Furby parts" now standard disclaimer on most produce. #pooptoot

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on BBCRadio3's #ClassicalLive
Grace Williams, BBC Singers & Ellie Slorach:
🎵 Ave maris stella
#GraceWilliams #BBCSingers #EllieSlorach

Bombshell New Report Casts More Doubt on Trump's Epstein Claims (Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling/New Republic)
https://newrepublic.com/post/199049/donald-trump-epstein-claims-friendship-report
http://www.memeorandum.com/250813/p95#a250813p95

Technosignature Searches of Interstellar Objects
James R. A. Davenport, Sofia Z. Sheikh, Steve Croft, Brian C. Lacki, Jason T. Wright, Chris Lintott, Adam Frank, T. Joseph W. Lazio, Colin Orion Chandler, Andrew P. V. Siemion, Stephen DiKerby, Ellie White, Valeria Garcia Lopez, Emma E. Yu, Maxwell K. Frissell, Peter Yoachim, Naomi Morato, Devanshi Singh, Jinshuo Zhang, Darryl Z. Seligman

Technosignature Searches of Interstellar Objects
With the discovery of the third confirmed interstellar object (ISO), 3I/ATLAS, we have entered a new phase in the exploration of these long-predicted objects. Though confirmed discovery of ISOs is quite recent, their utility as targets in the search for technosignatures (historically known as the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence -- SETI) has been discussed for many decades. With the upcoming NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory's Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), the discovery and tr…

Is This Just Fantasy? Language Model Representations Reflect Human Judgments of Event Plausibility
Michael A. Lepori, Jennifer Hu, Ishita Dasgupta, Roma Patel, Thomas Serre, Ellie Pavlick
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.12553

Is This Just Fantasy? Language Model Representations Reflect Human Judgments of Event Plausibility
Language models (LMs) are used for a diverse range of tasks, from question answering to writing fantastical stories. In order to reliably accomplish these tasks, LMs must be able to discern the modal category of a sentence (i.e., whether it describes something that is possible, impossible, completely nonsensical, etc.). However, recent studies have called into question the ability of LMs to categorize sentences according to modality (Michaelov et al., 2025; Kauf et al., 2023). In this work, we …

🇺🇦 Auf radioeins läuft...
TSHA & Ellie Goulding & Gregory Porter:
🎵 Somebody (Radio Edit)
#NowPlaying #TSHA #EllieGoulding #GregoryPorter
#radioeins gespielten Titel als #Spotify Playliste: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3hdH98B6uyXilhcWxCA6nv

This machine kills sprawl. #BikeTooter #CycleTO #OnPoli #TOPoli

"The ride is definitely better on charter-protected bike lanes." #BikeTooter #ToPoli #ONPoli #CycleTO

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on BBCRadio3's #BBCProms
Sarah Lianne Lewis, BBC Singers & Ellie Slorach:
🎵 All my ships are white
#SarahLianneLewis #BBCSingers #EllieSlorach

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on BBCRadio3's #BBCProms
Sarah Lianne Lewis, BBC Singers & Ellie Slorach:
🎵 All my ships are white
#SarahLianneLewis #BBCSingers #EllieSlorach

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on BBCRadio3's #BBCProms
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Sinfonia Smith Square & Ellie Slorach:
🎵 The Nutcracker - Suite Op.71a ; No.2b; Dance Of The Sugar-Plum Fairy
#PyotrIlyichTchaikovsky #EllieSlorach
https://open.spotify.com/track/41iWQRPwTfaSDYBFjuLei7