Mircea Petrache

foundation model embeddings of few-seconds preschooler vocalizations audios, contain surprisingly strong signal on their laguage delay or non-delay.. this is just a start but quite promising www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Open postdoc position in AI in Chile (includes equivariant deep learning even if not explicitly mentioned!) cenia.cl/2026/01/27/c...

and AI + Education cenia.cl/2026/01/27/c...

This will appear at ICLR arxiv.org/abs/2510.15814

Maternal presence serves as a switch between learning fear and attraction in infancy - Nature Neuroscience Nature Neuroscience - Maternal presence serves as a switch between learning fear and attraction in infancy

Exploration vs avoidance responses to negative stimuli is switched by maternal presence (precisely, maternal odor) for young rats. Interesting to know that "evolution deemed including that option crucial", as it's hardwired with a clear hormonal pathway www.nature.com/articles/nn1... web.archive.org

Experimental evidence for compositional syntax in bird calls - Nature Communications Animal vocalizations contain distinct elements, but it is not clear whether they convey combined meanings in the same way as human speech. Here, Suzuki et al.show that Japanese great tits can combine ...

interesting experiments suggesting simple grammar in the japanese tit www.nature.com/articles/nco...

People quasi-randomly assigned to farm rice are more collectivistic than people assigned to farm wheat - Nature Communications According to the rice theory, the demands of rice farming might make cultures more collectivistic. Here the authors provide evidence in support of this theory by showing that Chinese farmers who were ...

wow so interesting
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The 2023 document says "leading cause of death for the population ages 1–44 was unintentional injuries". Gobally most deaths are in the range ≥65, and for ≥45 other causes "win" (unintentional incidents decrease in ranking as age-correlated causes increase)

Ahh vi tu otro tweet.. ahí entendí

Tipografías? O_o

How do brain areas control each other? 🧠🎛️

✨In our NeurIPS 2025 Spotlight paper, we introduce a data-driven framework to answer this question using deep learning, nonlinear control, and differential geometry.🧵⬇️

unrelated: btw yoga is great :)

2 open faculty positions in Artificial Intelligence + Math/Stat/CS at UC Chile www.mathjobs.org/jobs/list/27...

Me: "suggest how to rebuttal a reviewer that clearly used ChatGPT to generate reviews"

Chatgpt: "you can quote to them the parts that are clearly generated by ChatGPT, explaining what the correct versions of the statements are [..]"

yeah.. it's called "Human Feedback or Perish"

The Ponizsa illusion - Kanizsa triangle produces Ponzo illusion, but oddly it inverts apparent depth: the longer line looks closer! Also has an inversion effect like we studied in Altan et al 2025 Proc Roy Soc (doi.org/10.1098/rspb...) but it's also in reverse! 🤔
#visionscience #psychscisky

Also general analysis and PDE theory disregards dimension completely: all bounds have a "costant depending on dimension".. taking directly results from books becomes pretty useless for use deep learning, one would have to redo all the proofs keeping the dimension dependence => nobody takes the time

My university's computer science department just opened a Human-Centered Computing position.. it'd be awesome to have more colleagues working in human-centered deep learning, so please apply! dcc.ing.uc.cl/departamento...

Sorry, what's "SV"?

I think this makes a lot of sense, although I'm still getting used to it

We are excited to share GPN-Star, a cost-effective, biologically grounded genomic language modeling framework that achieves state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of variant effect prediction tasks relevant to human genetics.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
(1/n)

2 tenure-track positions at UC Chile just opened.. in the maths/stats department. We have good growing links with the dept of computational engineering, so people wanting to fill the bridge maths-CS are welcome.

Have a look (and maybe click "apply") here mathjobs.org/jobs/list/27...

I don't know how they did it, but the page number of page 2 is clickable and send you to a reference in th bibliography

General agents need world models Are world models a necessary ingredient for flexible, goal-directed behaviour, or is model-free learning sufficient? We provide a formal answer to this question, showing that any agent capable of gene...

Nice paper arxiv.org/abs/2506.01622

YouTube video by Joe Yamanaka - Topic Hiroshima

www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wMX...

Last minute twist on these positions: they are available for EVERYONE, not just EU nationals 🎉 Closing date is tomorrow on some adverts (I won't be able to find and fix them) but we will consider late applications through to early next week (Monday 16th) #roots #rootecolology #biogeochemistry #phd

Fun fact: These C:N ratios are realistic values, but the mechanism is far more complex than "27=4+23"

Maths: (a+b)/(c+d)=a/c + b/d is never true for a,b,c,d>0.. first hint to dig deeper

Biology: main sink of C is respiration.. plant+hopper+frass/urea are NOT the only elements in the equation..

The density of N, P, K, Na in grasses declined over 30+ years in a Kansas prairie

Nutrient Dilution and the Future of Herbivores: a short thread
The fossil fuel folks claimed that all the extra CO2 is great for plants. Indeed, plant mass has increased globally by about 30% in the past century.
But when you load a plant up the carbs, what happens to all its other nutrients?

ohh wow I'm almost illiterate in terms of finalcial culture but think I understand this one.. so it started taking off around covid time and went kinda up and up ever since..

Visual abstract: “we test hypotheses about floral diversity with community science data and an advanced computer vision model. Red/orange flowers have delayed flowering that matches hummingbird migratory patterns”

Hot off the presses and so so thrilled. Thanks to @inaturalist.bsky.social + computer vision we found something beautifully simple: Red and orange flowers bloom later than all the other colors in the eastern United States. Paper here: authors.elsevier.com/a/1kwzh3QW8S...

It's fascinating that generating accurate references is so difficult for LLMs, no matter how much better they become. You can clearly specify the source, instruct the model to search, and even watch it retrieve the correct paper--yet it may still produce a fictitious citation.

some chatbot says it's трудоёмкость, composed from "work/effort" + "capacity/amount", I guess stepping away from 1978 and into 2025 it'd change to "amount of compute" or something?