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Dan Roy

@roydanroy.bsky.social

Research Director, Founding Faculty, Canada CIFAR AI Chair @VectorInst. Full Prof @UofT - Statistics and Computer Sci. (x-appt) danroy.org I study assumption-free prediction and decision making under uncertainty, with inference emerging from optimality.

8,163 Followers  |  552 Following  |  154 Posts  |  Joined: 02.08.2023  |  2.0628

Latest posts by roydanroy.bsky.social on Bluesky

Tian and Karolina and team are at ICLR. Come say hi.

21.04.2025 13:00 β€” πŸ‘ 7    πŸ” 1    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

Curious. Didn’t know meta had a PPL team.

07.04.2025 01:13 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

I like to think about non-reasoning model responses as vibes.

07.04.2025 00:50 β€” πŸ‘ 2    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

So who’s read the 2027 article? What do you think?

07.04.2025 00:47 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 3    πŸ“Œ 0

Someone has suggested I check out bsky again. So I'm back looking around here. Notification list is kinda boring. So any good conversations going on? Perhaps about LLM/AI reasoning?

23.03.2025 21:10 β€” πŸ‘ 34    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 8    πŸ“Œ 1

Of course.

23.03.2025 21:04 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

Anyone else have the worry that a lot of LLM research is .... just bad psychology?

03.02.2025 03:26 β€” πŸ‘ 69    πŸ” 2    πŸ’¬ 10    πŸ“Œ 2

And, to achieve the results in this paper, what was the most challenging part? Why had previous attempts fallen short? What was your key new insight?

03.02.2025 03:25 β€” πŸ‘ 2    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 2    πŸ“Œ 0

Very interesting. So, what was the biggest hole to fill, in terms of hypotheses?

02.02.2025 17:19 β€” πŸ‘ 3    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

Okay, so just a few* thoughts (*this got longer as I wrote πŸ˜…β€¦.long thread)-

08.01.2025 12:40 β€” πŸ‘ 53    πŸ” 32    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 7

Acknowledgments.

08.01.2025 16:56 β€” πŸ‘ 7    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
Post image

I got to ski Revelstoke this winter break.

Couple observations: the price of receiving 600 cm of snow by Jan 8 is that it is constantly snowing. Saw almost no sun the whole time and the peak was often in whiteout conditions (though North Bowl was always clear…).

See image for more.

08.01.2025 16:56 β€” πŸ‘ 9    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

Multiple friends have likely lost their homes in Los Angeles. Can’t imagine how disorienting this would be. They had only minutes to flee and grab belongings.

08.01.2025 16:55 β€” πŸ‘ 7    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

What are the key papers to read?

30.12.2024 20:36 β€” πŸ‘ 6    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

OK. Practical question times. How are you adjusting your research given progress in reasoning style models? Also how are you adjusting the way you work?

22.12.2024 07:39 β€” πŸ‘ 62    πŸ” 4    πŸ’¬ 12    πŸ“Œ 1

A $100,000,000 experiment is no longer "consequence" free. Ilya is saying "scaling is over", but this may simply be that the scaling "laws" (not laws) are no longer accurate. Also, those laws are tied to hyperparameter tunings.

15.12.2024 13:08 β€” πŸ‘ 3    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

Sure some were empirical. Some were not.

14.12.2024 21:27 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

I'd say no in a sense. Xavier-He initialization was theoretical work. And that was absolutely critical.

14.12.2024 01:47 β€” πŸ‘ 2    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

Pretraining is not done. It's just that theorists haven't told the hackers how to do it better.

13.12.2024 22:52 β€” πŸ‘ 35    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 3    πŸ“Œ 0

Annoying. If it could be automatic, sure.

13.12.2024 00:14 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

I'd say wait then.

12.12.2024 22:37 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

That's part of the spec. I don't think this is too problematic. The example they give is problems in NP, where there is a polynomial time checker (i.e., a polytime EV), but generating an instance that passes the checker is hard in the worst case.

12.12.2024 22:37 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

Now that I've had a taste of X without post length limitations, I've got to say that it is quite annoying have to fit tweets into 256 characters here on bsky. On X, when they get to long, they go below the fold, and so you're still incentivized to make it short. Can't we have that here?

12.12.2024 22:35 β€” πŸ‘ 24    πŸ” 1    πŸ’¬ 9    πŸ“Œ 2

Lottery ticket?

11.12.2024 22:18 β€” πŸ‘ 3    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

@gkdziugaite.bsky.social. Works at GDM and Mila. Influential, technical work.

11.12.2024 13:20 β€” πŸ‘ 3    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

OK

11.12.2024 13:17 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

Many of these sound to be very problematic if you hope that the result would be accepted by the mathematical community. E.g. "The proof appears to use computational evidence (listing out cases) as a substitute for theoretical proof." It seems you're not meeting the usual standard.

11.12.2024 01:37 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

Please ask Claude. What would likely be the chief criticisms of my argument above were I to submit it to a traditional mathematical journal.

11.12.2024 00:39 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

I've now read this paper carefully if anyone wants to discuss it.

10.12.2024 22:50 β€” πŸ‘ 6    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 4    πŸ“Œ 0

Great analogy.

06.12.2024 22:04 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

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