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Leonardo Cotta

@cottascience.bsky.social
1K followers 280 following 71 posts

floptimistic from BH🔺🇧🇷 cottascience.github.io

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Leonardo Cotta @cottascience.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
maybe it's a skill issue of mine, but I still really really hate LLMs for long-form writing. I've tried many different ways: asking for a v0 and fixing myself. Writing a v0 and asking to improve, doing it piece by piece, one-shot, skills md file. everything still feels like garbage and no taste.
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Leonardo Cotta @cottascience.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
scaling laws appeared as "learning curve models" long ago in the literature (90's), and finally people are going back to it. I love the chinchilla paper but that's not the whole story/method arxiv.org/abs/2509.19189
arxiv.org
Functional Scaling Laws in Kernel Regression: Loss Dynamics and Learning Rate Schedules
Scaling laws have emerged as a unifying lens for understanding and guiding the training of large language models (LLMs). However, existing studies predominantly focus on the final-step loss, leaving o...
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Leonardo Cotta @cottascience.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
In the same way that mathematicians argue that their field has never been about the answers, but about the questions and their proofs, computer scientists should repeat Leslie Lamport's mantra: coding is not programming.
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Leonardo Cotta @cottascience.bsky.social · 05/04/2026
I'm trying to write about the history of scaling laws, and my go-to reference in the ML community is [1]. If anyone has good suggestions in asymptotic stats, I'm curious to read and help make the connections. [1] proceedings.neurips.cc/paper_files/...
proceedings.neurips.cc
Learning Curves: Asymptotic Values and Rate of Convergence
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Leonardo Cotta @cottascience.bsky.social · 04/04/2026
I've finally deleted my twitter account, but as much as I love bksy's idea, it doesn't seem to be a good replacement. In terms of keeping up with science, linkedin and reddit have unbelievably proven more effective for me. Is there anything I'm missing here? A feed to follow, a better way to use it?
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Leonardo Cotta @cottascience.bsky.social · 16/11/2025
I can only imagine how crazy it must be to be a PhD student submitting to ML conferences now. The process has always been noisy, but at this point it's selecting for either obfuscation or shallow ideas. You either intimidate the reviewer, or you write a blog post in latex.
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The Matter Lab @thematterlab.bsky.social · 21/08/2025
We're excited to present our latest article in Nature Machine Intelligence - Boosting the predictive power of protein representations with a corpus of text annotations. Link: www.nature.com/articles/s42... [1/4]
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Leonardo Cotta @cottascience.bsky.social · 09/08/2025
the goat of brazilian music w/ the best of (current) american music www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFUh...
youtube.com
Milton Nascimento & esperanza spalding: Tiny Desk (Home) Concert
YouTube video by NPR Music
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Leonardo Cotta @cottascience.bsky.social · 26/07/2025
I loved this new preprint by Lourie/Hu/ @kyunghyuncho.bsky.social . If you really wanna convince someone youre training a foundation model, or proposing better methodology, loss scaling laws aren't enough. It has to be tied w/ downstream performance. it shouldn't be vibes arxiv.org/abs/2507.00885
arxiv.org
Scaling Laws Are Unreliable for Downstream Tasks: A Reality Check
Downstream scaling laws aim to predict task performance at larger scales from pretraining losses at smaller scales. Whether this prediction should be possible is unclear: some works demonstrate that t...
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Leonardo Cotta @cottascience.bsky.social · 16/07/2025
I'm very excited about our new work: SciGym. How can we scale scientific agents' evaluation? TLDR; Systems biologists have spent decades encoding biochemical networks (metabolic pathways, gene regulation, etc.) into machine-runnable systems. We can use these as "dry labs" to test AI agents!
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Leonardo Cotta @cottascience.bsky.social · 29/06/2025
I wish we had an ML equivalent of SOSA (Symposium On Simplicity in Algorithms). "simpler algorithms manifest a better understanding of the problem at hand; they are more likely to be implemented and trusted by practitioners; they are more easily taught" www.siam.org/conferences-....
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Quaid Morris @quaidmorris.bsky.social · 03/06/2025
Please check out our new approach to modeling somatic mutation signatures. DAMUTA has independent Damage and Misrepair signatures whose activities are more interpretable and more predictive of DNA repair defects, than COSMIC SBS signatures 🧬🖥️🧪 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
biorxiv.org
Damage and Misrepair Signatures: Compact Representations of Pan-cancer Mutational Processes
Mutational signatures of single-base substitutions (SBSs) characterize somatic mutation processes which contribute to cancer development and progression. However, current mutational signatures do not ...
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Leonardo Cotta @cottascience.bsky.social · 13/04/2025
I haven't been up to date with the model collapse literature, but it's crazy the amount of papers that consider the case where people only reuse data from the model distribution. This never happens, there's always some human curation or conditioning that yields some type of "real-world, new, data".
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Leonardo Cotta @cottascience.bsky.social · 24/03/2025
This is my favourite "graph paper" of the last 1 or 2 years. We also need to start including non-NN baselines, e.g. fingerprints+catboost ---if the goal is real-world impact and not getting it published asap. I also recommend following @wpwalters.bsky.social's blog. arxiv.org/abs/2502.14546
arxiv.org
Position: Graph Learning Will Lose Relevance Due To Poor Benchmarks
While machine learning on graphs has demonstrated promise in drug design and molecular property prediction, significant benchmarking challenges hinder its further progress and relevance. Current bench...
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Derek Thompson @dkthomp.bsky.social · 27/02/2025
Unbelievable news. Pancreatic is one of the deadliest cancers. New paper shows personalized mRNA vaccines can induce durable T cells that attack pancreatic cancer, with 75% of patients cancer free at three years—far, far better than standard of care. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
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Thomas Wolf @thomwolf.bsky.social · 19/02/2025
After 6+ months in the making and over a year of GPU compute, we're excited to release the "Ultra-Scale Playbook": hf.co/spaces/nanot... A book to learn all about 5D parallelism, ZeRO, CUDA kernels, how/why overlap compute & coms with theory, motivation, interactive plots and 4000+ experiments!
hf.co
The Ultra-Scale Playbook - a Hugging Face Space by nanotron
The ultimate guide to training LLM on large GPU Clusters
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Leonardo Cotta @cottascience.bsky.social · 19/02/2025
I've always hated the "reasoning models" for code assistance since I think the most useful application of LLMs is really writing the boring helper functions and letting us focus on the hard work. However, I found o3 to be particularly useful when debugging ML code, e.g., 1/2
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Leonardo Cotta @cottascience.bsky.social · 25/01/2025
The whole DeepSeek-R1 thing just highlights computer science's main feature: you can do A LOT with a small team and some (limited) resources. This is how we've been able to scale innovation and why free software is important.
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Leonardo Cotta @cottascience.bsky.social · 24/01/2025
This is an amazing resource (of resources) for machine learners
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Sara Magliacane hiring PhDs in Saarland @smaglia.bsky.social · 23/01/2025
Sad after #AISTATS2025 and #ICLR2025 notifications? As we say in Italy, when a door closes, a bigger one opens ;) If you have a fantastic paper on #uncertainty #AI #ML #causality #statML #probabilisticmodels #reasoning #impreciseprobabilities etc, consider submitting to #UAI2025 🇧🇷 deadline 10 Feb 💥
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Bruno Ribeiro (at #NeurIPS2024) @brunofmr.bsky.social · 09/01/2025
Slides of my presentation "Mathematical Foundations of Graph Foundation Models" yesterday at the AMS Session of the #JMM2025. The accompanying paper is coming soon. www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/ribeir...
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Leonardo Cotta @cottascience.bsky.social · 30/12/2024
Learning Rust ~properly~ during my break and wow -- absolutely worth it! While we're all chasing GPU optimization, there's something magical about crafting efficient CPU-based apps. Clean and fast data processing can change our lives ;)
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Eugene Vinitsky 🍒 @eugenevinitsky.bsky.social · 23/12/2024
My model is that these things are extremely helpful above some skill bar and extremely harmful below some skill bar
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Leonardo Cotta @cottascience.bsky.social · 22/12/2024
very cool observations about using smiles/graphs vs fingerprints. TDLR; fingerprints only capture certain properties marginally, and their combinations can often give rise to something new/different. www.deepmedchem.com/articles/wha...
deepmedchem.com
What Can Neural Network Embeddings Do That Fingerprints Can’t?
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Nikita Dhawan @nikitadhawan.bsky.social · 11/12/2024
Presenting our poster at NeurIPS! Please come chat about estimating causal effects from user/patient-reported experiences: Thursday, 11AM, West Ballroom A-D #5110.
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Leonardo Cotta @cottascience.bsky.social · 11/12/2024
If you're interested in {causality, language, healthcare}, stop by! Thursday 11am - 2pm West Ballroom A-D #5110
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Bruno Ribeiro (at #NeurIPS2024) @brunofmr.bsky.social · 11/12/2024
I'm told this is a more intellectual version of ML Twitter :). I have a question... What papers have made good *theoretical* advances towards graph foundation models? Jan 8th 1-2pm I am giving a talk at the Joint Mathematics Meeting on the topic meetings.ams.org/math/jmm2025...
meetings.ams.org
<p>Mathematical Foundations of Knowledge Graph Foundation Models</p>
One potential definition of a knowledge graph foundation model is one where a g...
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Rahul G. Krishnan @rahulgk.bsky.social · 11/12/2024
b] ~Billions of dollars each year are spent on trials to assess interventions. Can we use crowdsourced data to know which intervention is likely to work ahead of time? Doing so requires answering a causal question! But the data to answer this question is locked in unstructured text. 🧵(5/7)
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Polaris @polarishub.io · 09/12/2024
What are the most interesting datasets and benchmark-related work for ML in drug discovery at NeurIPS? We’ll be at the conference doing short interviews with researchers and handing out some Polaris merch! Here’s who we have on the shortlist. 🧵
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Andrei Manolache @amanolache.bsky.social · 07/12/2024
1/6 We're excited to share our #NeurIPS2024 paper: Probabilistic Graph Rewiring via Virtual Nodes! It addresses key challenges in GNNs, such as over-squashing and under-reaching, while reducing reliance on heuristic rewiring. w/ Chendi Qian, @christophermorris.bsky.social @mniepert.bsky.social 🧵
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Leonardo Cotta @cottascience.bsky.social · 03/12/2024
Dropping into #NeurIPS2024 in Raincouver 🌧️ next week (Dec 9-15)! Hit me up if you wanna catch up, talk about {AI, science, causality} or whatever fun thing you're building ;)
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Leonardo Cotta @cottascience.bsky.social · 28/11/2024
Unless we hold reviewers and ACs accountable, especially ACs in this case, the acceptance of a paper will be determined by whether your paper got active or inactive reviewers/ac. This is even worse and more frustrating than the usual reviewer quality lottery.
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Leonardo Cotta @cottascience.bsky.social · 18/11/2024
I can’t believe we can just open an app and see arxiv links, cat pictures, and people being civilized. The future has arrived 🌈🦄
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David Nemer @davidnemer.com · 09/09/2024
Great piece by @yasmincurzi.com for @theconversation.bsky.social about the clash between Brazil's Supreme Court and Elon Musk- and the possible implications for platform regulation in the country. theconversation.com/elon-musks-f...
theconversation.com
Elon Musk’s feud with Brazilian judge is much more than a personal spat − it’s about national sovereignty, freedom of speech and the rule of law
Brazil’s attempt to strike a balance between free speech and regulation of online platforms has become politicized – complicating future legislation.
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Yasmin Curzi @yasmincurzi.com · 09/09/2024
escrevi para o The Conversation US sobre o embate entre STF e Elon Musk, destacando suas possíveis implicações para a regulação de plataformas no país. theconversation.com/elon-musks-f...
theconversation.com
Elon Musk’s feud with Brazilian judge is much more than a personal spat − it’s about national sovereignty, freedom of speech and the rule of law
Brazil’s attempt to strike a balance between free speech and regulation of online platforms has become politicized – complicating future legislation.
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Sherri Rose @sherrirose.bsky.social · 03/09/2024
bsky is growing, hi! Some areas I work in: Causal ML drsherrirose.org/targeted-learning-book Generalizability onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... Ethical ML www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1... Plan payment www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/... CKD proceedings.mlr.press/v248/cusick24a.html
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