Atlas Wang

AI Models Get Brain Rot, Too A new study shows that feeding large language models low-quality, high-engagement content from social media lowers their cognitive abilities.

A new study shows that feeding large language models low-quality, high-engagement content from social media lowers their cognitive abilities. www.wired.com/story/ai-mod...

Pleasantly surprised to see a side project, co-led by the now-professor Junyuan Hong and sparked by a totally random idea myself threw out back in January, gaining lots of (organic) traction on… | Atl... Pleasantly surprised to see a side project, co-led by the now-professor Junyuan Hong and sparked by a totally random idea myself threw out back in January, gaining lots of (organic) traction on Twitte...

LLMs can get “brain rot”!

www.linkedin.com/posts/atlas-...

VITA Group on X: "VITA group dinner last night: Welcome back alumnus @WuyangC for his talk! And happy birthday to Jiajun 🎂 Menu debate highlights: everyone went straight for the most expensive dishes 😂 Research talk ✅ Travel stories ✅ Team energy ✅ This is what makes our group special 🙌 https://t.co/POQoh4Cvxs" / X VITA group dinner last night: Welcome back alumnus @WuyangC for his talk! And happy birthday to Jiajun 🎂 Menu debate highlights: everyone went straight for the most expensive dishes 😂 Research talk ✅ Travel stories ✅ Team energy ✅ This is what makes our group special 🙌 https://t.co/POQoh4Cvxs

Paying more ….

x.com/vitagrouput/...

Calling all parsimony and learning researchers 🚨🚨 The 3rd annual CPAL will be held in Tübingen Germany March 23–26, 2026! Check out this year's website for all the details cpal.cc

Got a comment I secretly like:

“This professor is constructively rude”

Job Description | XTX Markets | Atlas Wang 🌐 It has been an incredible first year for the XTY AI Lab of XTX Markets in New York City, where we set out to build a world-class hub for AI research in quantitative finance: the results have exceede...

www.linkedin.com/posts/atlas-...

Paying for a dinner I wasn’t even at 🤣 — momentum’s strong, keep it up team!

www.vita-group.space/team

I really wanna see / do research on using AI to prevent massive shooting …

Perhaps I’m not alone in feeling GPT5 (even pro) is no better than o3-pro… coding and knowledge?

Eight years ago, I walked into my faculty office for the first time, not knowing what the journey ahead would hold. | Atlas Wang | 10 comments Eight years ago, I walked into my faculty office for the first time, not knowing what the journey ahead would hold. This past year, while I’ve been gradually “fading into the background,” the group ...

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Cannot resist enjoying some proud advisor moment

Two fresh tutorials on low-dimensional DL:

Sparsity ’23 🔗 vita-group.github.io/SparsityTuto...

Low-Rank ’25 🔗 vita-group.github.io/LowrankTutor...

Curious about how sparsity and low-rank ideas power modern deep learning? I hope these slide decks & notes are a useful starting point! 🚀

Of all my students’ career achievements, this one makes me proudest: because really, who needs yet another AI professor or scientist alumni when you can boast a professional cat-breeder student?

www.bestbritishcats.com To my Bay Area friends: BUY one!

Maybe try using my name to get a discount :)

Practically, enforce the right symmetries + keep weight distributions low-entropy-> you may get symbolic generalization “for free.” Lines up with grokking & reasoning-finetuning we keep seeing.

If emergent reasoning, implicit alignment, or theory-catching-practice excites you, dive in & poke holes!

Key ideas:
• #EmergentReasoning — provably, no external logic engine needed.
• #GeometricLens — lift weights to a probability measure & watch training as a Wasserstein gradient flow; messy SGD turns into clean geometry.
• #Compositionality — small rules snap into big ones. (3/n)

Why the hype? It gives a principled story for how discrete, symbolic #reasoning can emerge inside a vanilla neural net trained with plain gradients. Continuous weights ⇒ spontaneous symbolic rules. Mathy yet hopefully still readable (2/n).

@talkachman.bsky.social caught it faster before I did... but here we go!

🚀 New pre-print dropped lnkd.in/gmQ9hBdf
Its first draft won the #DARPA Disruptive Idea award at #NeuS2025. Now my student Peihao Wang has sharpened the theory even more. I’m so excited what it means for AI reasoning 🧩🤖 (1/n)

Why Neural Network Can Discover Symbolic Structures with Gradient-based Training: An Algebraic and Geometric Foundation for Neurosymbolic Reasoning We develop a theoretical framework that explains how discrete symbolic structures can emerge naturally from continuous neural network training dynamics. By lifting neural parameters to a measure space...

@atlaswang.bsky.social knocking out of the park again!
half a page in and this is a phenomenal read. So much to wrap my head around
www.arxiv.org/abs/2506.21797

aha thanks! So fast you are

Feels great relief to report: #Thrilledtoshare (yes, that LinkedIn tone I hate...) we have 0 papers accepted to @iccv.bsky.social !

Surprisingly liberating to step off the number game: I meant it.

I’m genuinely proud of the science my students are building, no matter how ICCV reviewers think 🤣

Figure 4. Task-Specific ViewRelevance

An #AI system that automatically interprets echocardiograms maintained high accuracy across geography and time from complete and limited studies.

https://ja.ma/4jYWBgI

Check out #PanEcho, now in @jama.com

✅ open weights
✅ multiview multitask reporting
✅ international validation
✅ works with POCUS

Amazing effort @cardslab.bsky.social
@giholste.bsky.social @rohankhera.bsky.social

+ @atlaswang.bsky.social, Márton Tokodi & Attila Kovács

#CardioSky #EchoSky

Beyond Bigger Models: AI Needs Bigger Problems (Disclaimer: AI helped revise this article, too: -) “If AI is truly transformative, why are its dividends still so concentrated?” Over the past two years, I have watched two headlines run in parallel:...

A reflection sparked by Saturday night’s thought-provoking dinner conversation 🥘

www.linkedin.com/pulse/beyond...

Making a new website of my research group, and did a visualization of all our papers from 2018 to present: clustered into 10 topics.

One can clearly see how this group evolves its own tastes!

… and deeper in my heart: long live optimization!! ❤️

Quoting one slides from @yann-lecun.bsky.social talk…

arxiv is filled by papers that treat symptoms (or not even!) without ever diagnosing the disease

Unwelcome idea: I’m extremely tired of seeing one more LLM paper and believe academics shall pivot away from this area.

So boring arxiv feeds every day…

Exclusive: NSF stops awarding new grants and funding existing ones US science funder also plans to screen grant applications for compliance with ‘agency priorities’.

This is going to kneecap science in this country for years. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

US revokes nearly 1,500 student visas: Who are the targets? Hundreds of students have had their visas cancelled and find themselves in limbo.

One of my PhD students got their visa revoked. I know of other cases amongst my AI colleagues. This is not what investing in US leadership in AI looks like.

www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/4/...

🚀 Thrilled to announce SPIN-Bench!🚀

We all love seeing how smart LLMs can be-solving complex math, crafting beautiful text, and coding effortlessly. But how well do they handle real-world strategic complexity, cooperation, & social negotiation? Can they play well when things get tricky?

Not quite!

Just had a meal that gifted me two rare treasures:
1️⃣ Meeting someone infinitely wiser than me.
2️⃣ They weren’t cold or mean—just gently showed me where I could grow.

"To learn truth at dawn, I’d die content by dusk."
✨ Humility tastes better with kindness. #Gratitude #LifeLessons

Good news? SPIN-Bench pinpoints exactly where these models fall short—and illuminates exciting research directions to smarter, socially savvy AI

For some extra fun (and detailed, interactive trajectory visualizations!), visit project page：
👉 spinbench.github.io

full paper: arxiv.org/pdf/2503.12349