Tobias Pfaff 🦛

Tobias Pfaff 🦛

@tobiaspfaff.bsky.social

Research scientist at NVIDIA. Learned physics models, generative video & more.

1,435 Followers 276 Following 1 Posts Joined Nov 2024
5 months ago
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Good morning with good news: An historic energy milestone is reached. Renewables globally produced more electricity than coal for the first time on record in the first half of 2025!

How?

Solar skyrocketed 31%
Wind rose 7.7%

Coal FELL in China & India!
ember-energy.org/latest-insig... #energysky

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5 months ago

🌟2026 internships at the NVIDIA spatial intelligence lab: Looking for interns with background in video & world models. DM me if interested!

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5 months ago

This is not OK.

I don't submit often to NeurIPS, but I reviewed papers for this conference almost every year. As a reviewer, why would I spend time trying to give a fair opinion on papers if it's what happens in the end???

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5 months ago

As an SAC for @neuripsconf.bsky.social, I don't agree with PCs approach to reject papers based on ranking.
I ranked my accepted papers as requested and explicitly stated that I support the acceptance of all papers.
I was not given an explanation of why papers at the end of the rank were rejected.

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6 months ago
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Which work? Calling for gay people to be stoned to death? Blaming airplane crashes on black pilots? Anti-vax bullshit? Election denialism? Pushing Great Replacement Theory?

Kirk’s murder is awful and ominous for this country. But no, we don’t need to honor him or “continue his work.”

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6 months ago

10/ This is the structural change we’ve all been waiting for. Emissions are plateauing. Coal is peaking. The export of clean technology by China is doing more to decarbonise emerging economies than any Western climate summit or speech.

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7 months ago

Everybody misses the 1-page rebuttal.

These lengthy forum style comments are a nightmare: a nightmare for the authors who spend way too much time writing them, a nightmare for the reviewers who spend too much time understanding them, a nightmare for the ACs who will have to summarize all. Stop it!

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7 months ago
AI Allergy I remember being excited about AI. I remember 20 years ago, being excited about neuroevolutionary methods for learning adaptive behaviors in...

New blog post: AI Allergy.

On my increasing disgust with the AI discourse, even though I still like the technical and philosophical. And how I wish I could be excited about AI again.

togelius.blogspot.com/2025/08/ai-a...

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7 months ago

I have found ACing for NeurIPS this year a miserable experience and I've been struggling to articulate why without basically whining about it being too much work (although.....true. My god the amount of words I'm reading...). But I think I've figured out part of my dislike for this process.

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7 months ago
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EurIPS is coming! 📣 Mark your calendar for Dec. 2-7, 2025 in Copenhagen 📅

EurIPS is a community-organized conference where you can present accepted NeurIPS 2025 papers, endorsed by @neuripsconf.bsky.social and @nordicair.bsky.social and is co-developed by @ellis.eu

eurips.cc

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7 months ago
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Towards decentralized ML conferences Towards decentralized ML conferences Pierre Marion July 2025 Abstract: Large ML conferences play a central role in our community, by providing a rigorous review process and a venue for meaningful di...

🌍 Would be better if authors were allowed to present at officially endorsed hubs or online instead — ensuring fair and equitable participation, and ultimately creating a better NeurIPS for everyone.

Interesting in knowing more: read our full opinion piece ⬇️. docs.google.com/document/d/1...
4/4

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10 months ago
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Today marks a big milestone for us at Emmi AI. We’ve raised a €15M seed round, backed by 3VC, Speedinvest, Serena, and PUSH. Let’s build the future of Physics AI together!

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11 months ago

So far, 2,135 people have responded to the poll Søren and I posted a few days ago. Of those, 94.4% replied “Yes” to being interested in officially presenting accepted @neuripsconf.bsky.social papers in Europe. (1/7)

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11 months ago
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I’m the Canadian who was detained by Ice for two weeks. It felt like I had been kidnapped I was stuck in a freezing cell without explanation despite eventually having lawyers and media attention. Yet, compared with others, I was lucky

"I’m the Canadian who was detained by Ice for two weeks. It felt like I had been kidnapped" www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

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11 months ago
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Etats-Unis : un chercheur français refoulé pour avoir exprimé « une opinion personnelle sur la politique menée par l’administration Trump » Le ministre de la recherche a dit sa « préoccupation », mercredi, après cette décision des autorités américaines. Le chercheur du CNRS aurait subi un contrôle aléatoire à son arrivée, avant que son or...

French researcher, going to a conference in Houston, was forbidden entry to US; his work and personal electronics were both confiscated.

Why? Because a “random search” of his cell phone revealed a negative personal opinion on Trump and the Trump administration. www.lemonde.fr/internationa...

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1 year ago
AI generated summary for whether hippos are intelligent animals. Says that Hippos can learn medical procedures, such as ultrasounds, to help monitor their health.

Hippos are legit amazing tho.

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1 year ago
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a statue of a hippopotamus with its mouth open and teeth showing . Alt: A hippo being tossed a watermelon, which it crushes in its massive jaws.

I have been doing entirely too much earnest posting about deep things recently, I need to do a proper thread about hippo testicles or something just to keep myself sane.

Oh by the way hippos have migratory testicles.

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1 year ago
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a hippopotamus is standing in a puddle of water next to two crocodiles Alt: A crocodile doing his best to stay calm while a baby hippo noms on him.

I mentioned earlier that they chew on Nile Crocodiles - I wasn't kidding, baby Hippos use them as teething rings since the texture of their scales is satisfying to gum.

Just this 12' long razor-toothed archosaur, sitting there going "stay calm, Clarence, you survived the asteroid, you can do this."

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1 year ago
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If federal funding for science is cut, we won't just be losing the research Jessica B. Hamrick is a Virginia success story for her career in science. That career, she writes, wouldn't have been possible without federal funding for science.

I wrote about why funding for the NSF and NIH is important to me and to my hometown (Charlottesville, VA) at @cvilletomorrow.bsky.social. Thank you to @sciencehomecoming.bsky.social for inspiring me to do this!

www.cvilletomorrow.org/if-federal-f...

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1 year ago
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🤹 Excited to share Erwin: A Tree-based Hierarchical Transformer for Large-scale Physical Systems

joint work with @wellingmax.bsky.social and @jwvdm.bsky.social

preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2502.17019
code: github.com/maxxxzdn/erwin

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1 year ago
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Trump 2.0: an assault on science anywhere is an assault on science everywhere US President Donald Trump is taking a wrecking ball to science and to international institutions. The global research community must take a stand against these attacks.

"We at @nature.com denounce this assault on science. And we encourage the global research community, wherever they can, to voice their opposition."

+1 to this. Overall a very good read to help the science community focus our energy đź§Ş www.nature.com/articles/d41...

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1 year ago
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what's wrong babe? you've barely touched your rarohire rochi terochichimomo

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1 year ago
MESSAGE to the NSF Pl Community,
Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Memorandum M-25-13, issued on January 27, 2025, directs all Federal agencies to conduct a comprehensive review of their financial assistance programs to determine programs, projects, and activities that may be implicated by the recent Executive Orders. Therefore, all review panels, new awards, and all payments of funds under open awards will be paused as the agency conducts the required reviews and analysis.
NSF has created an Executive Order Implementation webpage to ensure the widest dissemination of information and updates. We will continue to communicate with you as we receive additional guidance.
All NSF grantees must comply with these Executive Orders, and any other relevant Executive Orders issued, by ceasing all non-compliant grant and award activities. Executive Orders are posted at
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/.In
particular, this may include, but is not limited to conferences, trainings, workshops, considerations for staffing and participant selection, and any other grant activity that uses or promotes the use of DEIA principles and frameworks or violates Federal anti-discrimination laws. Please work with your institutional research office to assist you in complying with the Executive Orders. You can also direct your questions through the form on this NSF webpage.
Thank you for your work advancing science, engineering, technology and innovation for our nation.
Sethuraman Panchanathan
Director

Received this e-mail from the NSF this morning.

The webpage it directs you to for submitting questions doesn’t give you any way to receive a response; when you submit a question it says “Your response has been submitted” and claims that they’ll put together a FAQ page.

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1 year ago
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Congrats to Mario 👏 for the accept of his ICLR paper on "Diffusion Graph Nets", it targets predicting complex distributions of flow states on unstructured meshes openreview.net/forum?id=uKZ... It works even if the training data contains only a fraction of the flow statistics per case.

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1 year ago
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Probabilistic weather forecasting with machine learning - Nature GenCast, a probabilistic weather model using artificial intelligence for weather forecasting, has greater skill and speed than the top operational medium-range weather forecast in the world and provid...

The next generation of probabilistic machine learning for weather called GenCast is published in @natureportfolio.bsky.social today 🥳. Amazing to see the collective progress in ML for weather as a field over the last 5 years. 🏖️ www.nature.com/articles/s41...

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1 year ago
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Veo 2 Veo is our state-of-the-art video generation model. It creates high quality video clips that match the style and content of a user's prompts, in resolutions up to 4K resolution.

Proud to see the release of Veo V2! deepmind.google/technologies...

"Veo has achieved state of the art results in head-to-head comparisons of outputs by human raters over top video generation models"

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