Tootfinder

On vacation in Australia and out on a road trip to the Blue Mountains. Sadly the weather gods did not cooperate and it's been raining and foggy the whole day. So just hibernating in our Airbnb and hoping that tomorrow's weather forecast of cloudy but dry does hold.

Functional Groups are All you Need for Chemically Interpretable Molecular Property Prediction
Roshan Balaji, Joe Bobby, Nirav Pravinbhai Bhatt
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09619 h…

Functional Groups are All you Need for Chemically Interpretable Molecular Property Prediction
Molecular property prediction using deep learning (DL) models has accelerated drug and materials discovery, but the resulting DL models often lack interpretability, hindering their adoption by chemists. This work proposes developing molecule representations using the concept of Functional Groups (FG) in chemistry. We introduce the Functional Group Representation (FGR) framework, a novel approach to encoding molecules based on their fundamental chemical substructures. Our method integrates two t…

Large Scale Diffusion Distillation via Score-Regularized Continuous-Time Consistency
Kaiwen Zheng, Yuji Wang, Qianli Ma, Huayu Chen, Jintao Zhang, Yogesh Balaji, Jianfei Chen, Ming-Yu Liu, Jun Zhu, Qinsheng Zhang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.08431

Large Scale Diffusion Distillation via Score-Regularized Continuous-Time Consistency
This work represents the first effort to scale up continuous-time consistency distillation to general application-level image and video diffusion models. Although continuous-time consistency model (sCM) is theoretically principled and empirically powerful for accelerating academic-scale diffusion, its applicability to large-scale text-to-image and video tasks remains unclear due to infrastructure challenges in Jacobian-vector product (JVP) computation and the limitations of standard evaluation …

Evaluating the Impact of Adversarial Attacks on Traffic Sign Classification using the LISA Dataset
Nabeyou Tadessa, Balaji Iyangar, Mashrur Chowdhury
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06835

Evaluating the Impact of Adversarial Attacks on Traffic Sign Classification using the LISA Dataset
Adversarial attacks pose significant threats to machine learning models by introducing carefully crafted perturbations that cause misclassification. While prior work has primarily focused on MNIST and similar datasets, this paper investigates the vulnerability of traffic sign classifiers using the LISA Traffic Sign dataset. We train a convolutional neural network to classify 47 different traffic signs and evaluate its robustness against Fast Gradient Sign Method (FGSM) and Projected Gradient De…

Paging @… for opinions: https://youtube.com/shorts/ImuAkMtaBJo?si=t60YMlxKN3xQXHJi

Crypto and tech entrepreneurs are attending Network School, founded by Balaji Srinivasan in Forest City, Malaysia, to test his concepts about the Network State (Ryan Weeks/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

Tiga: Accelerating Geo-Distributed Transactions with Synchronized Clocks [Technical Report]
Jinkun Geng, Shuai Mu, Anirudh Sivaraman, Balaji Prabhakar
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.05759

Tiga: Accelerating Geo-Distributed Transactions with Synchronized Clocks [Technical Report]
This paper presents Tiga, a new design for geo-replicated and scalable transactional databases such as Google Spanner. Tiga aims to commit transactions within 1 wide-area roundtrip time, or 1 WRTT, for a wide range of scenarios, while maintaining high throughput with minimal computational overhead. Tiga consolidates concurrency control and consensus, completing both strictly serializable execution and consistent replication in a single round. It uses synchronized clocks to proactively order tra…

A Survey of LLM-Based Applications in Programming Education: Balancing Automation and Human Oversight
Griffin Pitts, Anurata Prabha Hridi, Arun-Balajiee Lekshmi-Narayanan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.03719

A Survey of LLM-Based Applications in Programming Education: Balancing Automation and Human Oversight
Novice programmers benefit from timely, personalized support that addresses individual learning gaps, yet the availability of instructors and teaching assistants is inherently limited. Large language models (LLMs) present opportunities to scale such support, though their effectiveness depends on how well technical capabilities are aligned with pedagogical goals. This survey synthesizes recent work on LLM applications in programming education across three focal areas: formative code feedback, as…

Blackish Holes with Stringy Backreaction
Elena C\'aceres, Suman Das, Arnab Kundu, Harita Palani Balaji
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.03498 https://arxiv.o…

Blackish Holes with Stringy Backreaction
Recent studies have demonstrated that an $\textit{ad hoc}$ Dirichlet boundary condition, placed outside but close to an event horizon, for probe degrees of freedom in an otherwise black hole geometry is capable of capturing non-trivial level-correlations of the corresponding spectrum of the probe sector. Much of the interesting physics stems from a hierarchy of scales that is present in the quantum spectrum, in terms of two quantum numbers that characterize it. In this work, we establish an exp…