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Han Bao

@han-b.bsky.social
88 followers 46 following 176 posts

Associate Professor@The Institute of Statistical Mathematics, working in machine learning theory hermite.jp

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Reposted by Han Bao
arXiv @arxiv.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
arXiv has updated our policy on rate limiting for all submitters. This update was made to fairly distribute moderator time & support the arXiv community of staff, volunteers, readers & authors. Please read our announcement to learn more: blog.arxiv.org/2026/10/01/updated-r…
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Han Bao @han-b.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
Hier je suis revenu du workshop pour des jaunes chercheurs au Japon. J'étais invité comme un conférencier principal, mais j'avais un peu honte de raconter mon parcours et leur donner des conseils😅 De toute façon c'était un bon événement.
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Han Bao @han-b.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
Last week I introduced this work in a domestic workshop among mathematicians and physicists, and one astrophysicist gave me a new insight to interpret the self-stabilizing potential! This is a real virtue of having a workshop with people from the communities next to us.
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Han Bao @han-b.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
Yeah it is really a textbook example of Goodhart's law. Giving a solution to an unsolved problem is a "proxy" toward our community's understanding of the underlying mathematical structure. Solving problems is (maybe sometimes but) not often the ultimate goal. www.economist.com/science-and-...
economist.com
Top mathematicians are outraged by OpenAI’s methods
24 Fields Medal winners have written a letter of objection
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Reposted by Han Bao
muchonov @muchonov.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
それまで人件費として支払われていたコストがAIの労働代替によって海外の寡占的なテック企業にサービスフィーとして吸い上げられ、各国の企業が雇用を通じて社会に提供していた「消費者と需要を生み出す機能」が毀損されてゆくという問題について、もっと真剣に議論されるべきだと思います。 そっちのほうがLLMはAIかどうかなんて神学論争よりずっと重要。
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Han Bao @han-b.bsky.social · 06/09/2026
I spent the whole weekend to understand the crux of self-stabilization (arxiv.org/abs/2209.15594). To me, the most interesting part of this paper is how they model the edge of stability by ODE---because the stepsize is no longer infinitesimal at EoS and it is apparently not trivial to derive an ODE
arxiv.org
Self-Stabilization: The Implicit Bias of Gradient Descent at the Edge of Stability
Traditional analyses of gradient descent show that when the largest eigenvalue of the Hessian, also known as the sharpness $S(θ)$, is bounded by $2/η$, training is "stable" and the training loss decre...
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Han Bao @han-b.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
Pendant les vacances, j'ai regardé un film «Sirât» sans savoir qu'est-ce que ce film. Les paysage du désert avec des sons énormes sont magnifiques! Heureusement je pouvais le regarder à la dernière séance (il est fini au début d'août au Japon). www.imdb.com/title/tt3229...
imdb.com
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Han Bao @han-b.bsky.social · 07/08/2026
Can't agree more. Previously one guy told me that if you want your theory paper to get accepted, the best thing is to write 30+ pages appendix (to overwhelm!). That's insane. Unless truly "necessary" (I know it's debatable), we should compress/distill formal proofs. Then we get better intuition.
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Reposted by Han Bao
Aaron Roth @aaroth.bsky.social · 07/08/2026
People used to be able to impress and intimidate reviewers with complicated proofs. This will change. In the age of AI inscrutable proofs are cheap. It is understandable proofs that are valuable. Opaque complexity is now it is a sign of laziness or lack of insight.
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Han Bao @han-b.bsky.social · 06/08/2026
GD is known to have max-margin bias, but its convergence rate is extremely slow. However, we can observe fairly decent convergence behaviors in practice as seen in the figure. I have been thinking this for a while and figured out early-stage weak convergence is possible! arxiv.org/abs/2608.04382
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Han Bao @han-b.bsky.social · 02/08/2026
And the new initial meta review system is also stressful than I expected. I supposed it'd reduce rebuttal workload for both author and reviewer sides, but actually just gave us an extra burden. Very few ppl care the initial meta review and ppl do endlessly long rebuttals until the reviewers gave up🤦‍♂️
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Han Bao @han-b.bsky.social · 02/08/2026
Really stressful to see AI-driven discussions during the review period this year... as an AC, I really don't have an idea how to facilitate discussion among AI-ish paper's authors and AI-ish reviewers (and the worst thing is that we cannot suppose they are truly AI even if it's very likely)
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Han Bao @han-b.bsky.social · 24/07/2026
This VSCode plugin really changes my life recently! For some reason the default Claude plug-in shows LaTeX only in texts. marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemNa...
marketplace.visualstudio.com
Claude Code LaTeX - Visual Studio Marketplace
Extension for Visual Studio Code - Adds LaTeX math rendering to Claude Code chat — inline $...$, display $$...$$, and \(...\) / \[...\]
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Reposted by Han Bao
Pierre Alquier @pierrealquier.bsky.social · 18/07/2026
AI is an interesting mechanism: it leads some scientists to reveal what they would not admit willingly, that is, that they actually don't care at all about scientific rigour. AI is not the problem here, it just makes the problem visible...
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Han Bao @han-b.bsky.social · 18/07/2026
way too rapid proliferation of 100% AI-generated reviews🤦‍♂️
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Han Bao @han-b.bsky.social · 10/07/2026
While LLM/diffusion are extremely popular, we still can find classical topics in the poster session. This paper proposes convexified heterogeneous OT (unlike nonconvex Gromow-Wasserstein). In essence, | E[d(x,X)|y] - E[d(y,Y)|x] | is regarded as the base cost for OT. arxiv.org/abs/2606.02047
arxiv.org
Convex Distance Operator Transport: A Convex and Geometry-Preserving Formulation
We introduce Convex Distance Operator Transport (CDOT), the first convex optimal transport framework that aligns distributions across heterogeneous domains by jointly preserving feature correspondence...
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Han Bao @han-b.bsky.social · 05/07/2026
I'll arrive at Seoul at Monday noon. Would love to see old friends and connect with new people there!
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Reposted by Han Bao
Aaron Roth @aaroth.bsky.social · 03/07/2026
On Monday @ncollina.bsky.social @iraglobusharris.bsky.social and I are giving a tutorial at ICML on (multi)calibration and its applications. You can find slides and an annotated bibliography on the website: calibration-tutorial.github.io as well as an interactive demo of online calibration algs.
calibration-tutorial.github.io
Calibration, Decisions, and Collaboration in Learning | ICML 2026
An ICML 2026 tutorial on making probabilistic predictions trustworthy for downstream decision-making and collaboration.
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Reposted by Han Bao
Transactions on Machine Learning Research @tmlrorg.bsky.social · 22/06/2026
TMLR has been facing an significant uptick in the number of submissions since the start of 2026. This is placing an extreme burden on our amazing team of reviewers & action editors. To ease this burden, TMLR will be implementing submission quotas, effective July 1. 1/n medium.com/@TmlrOrg/ann...
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Han Bao @han-b.bsky.social · 21/06/2026
I participated a workshop among ML vs. PL (programming lang) people. For a long time I have zero understanding of CPS transform (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continu...), but a PL person told me it's essentially the dual transform from a convex set to a support function (!) Convex analysis everywhere...
en.wikipedia.org
Continuation-passing style - Wikipedia
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Han Bao @han-b.bsky.social · 11/06/2026
It is always fantastic to read old strong papers! I read this by Koltchinskii (30 years ago) today. In this paper, he gave a convex-analytic view of the quantile function (quantile = convex conjugate supremum!), and extend it elegantly to multivariate rvs. projecteuclid.org/journals/ann...
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Han Bao @han-b.bsky.social · 03/06/2026
My first PhD student Xianliang worked hard out this: In Muon, polar decomposition should always precede momentum, which significantly improves signal recovery. I'm excited to share this since few theory has been working on the benefit of momentum in Muon! arxiv.org/abs/2606.03899
arxiv.org
Denoise First, Orthogonalize Later: Understanding Momentum in Muon via Spectral Filtering
Muon has recently demonstrated strong empirical performance in large language model training, but the theoretical role of momentum in Muon remains unclear. Existing analyses of Muon either remove mome...
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Han Bao @han-b.bsky.social · 06/05/2026
#AISTATS2026 It was extremely great to first see someone whose paper I have closely read, those with whom I collaborated recently without having met in-person, got invited to a next workshop, etc. Even though the time is quite challenging before the deadline😅, I really enjoyed the conference!
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Reposted by Han Bao
Gautam Kamath @gautamkamath.com · 29/04/2026
My new policy: if someone asks me to read something, I ask them how they used AI in creating it, and what validation/processing they applied to the AI outputs. (I disclose the same.) Been burned by giving too much attention to (undisclosed) slop folks have sent me...
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Han Bao @han-b.bsky.social · 30/04/2026
D'ailleurs, j'ai pu profiter de mon séjour à Paris cette fois-ci pendant l'escale avant d'aller au Maroc. J'ai vu quelques endroits que j'aime là-bas---surtout le Centre de Pompidou, même s'il est en rénovation---aprés 7 ans! Maintenant, c'est le moment de se concentrer intensément sur le travail...
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Han Bao @han-b.bsky.social · 30/04/2026
Me: I highly look forward to exploring Morocco🤩 Reality: NeurIPS😅
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Han Bao @han-b.bsky.social · 14/04/2026
Half a year ago I got a quotation for a GPU server, and I redid it this month, and noticed that the server price almost doubled🤯
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Reposted by Han Bao
G. Wolfer @gwolfer.bsky.social · 13/04/2026
If you meet the eligibility requirements for the LOTUS Program and are interested in working with me, feel free to reach out. www.jst.go.jp/program/indi...
jst.go.jp
Open call for applications | LOTUS Programme
This page provides the information regarding the open call for applications for FY2025. Applications only be accepted from Japanese organizations.
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Han Bao @han-b.bsky.social · 13/04/2026
Tomorrow is the very first class of my lecture at ISM (I'm gonna introduce learning theory and convex analysis). It's extremely useful for myself as well to review bunch of facts and proofs, but I need to rush because I've prepared for only half a semester😅
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Han Bao @han-b.bsky.social · 06/04/2026
Sad to see more and more people rely on LLMs to generate reviews... (for some reasons, it is very easy to find at a glance; and senior people tend to rely, tho I don't intend to generalize this)
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Han Bao @han-b.bsky.social · 18/03/2026
We made this public now: arxiv.org/abs/2603.10452 Hope it inspires OT enthusiasts!
arxiv.org
Brenier Isotonic Regression
Isotonic regression (IR) is shape-constrained regression to maintain a univariate fitting curve non-decreasing, which has numerous applications including single-index models and probability calibratio...
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Han Bao @han-b.bsky.social · 16/03/2026
J’ai pris une semaine de congés et bien je suis venu en Azerbaijan. Je ne connaissais présque rien parce que c’est très loin du Japon, mais j’ai trouvé que Baku est très bien organisé avec le mélange entre la vielle ville et des architectures modernes.
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Han Bao @han-b.bsky.social · 04/03/2026
J’ai rencontré deux français ce matin au café à Tokyo et après j’ai soudainement parlé avec eux, on a decidé de avoir le dîner la semaine prochaine à Kyoto! Quel chance 😂
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Reposted by Han Bao
Gautam Kamath @gautamkamath.com · 24/02/2026
Fantastic post by Colin Raffel, "We Are Over-Indexing on Paper Acceptance," drafted in May 2021 (!) but only posted now. The more things change.. Last sentence: "If you want to judge a researcher’s quality, the only meaningful way is to read their papers and judge for yourself."
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Han Bao @han-b.bsky.social · 17/02/2026
To all convex analysis freaks: here's new perspective of flow matching🔭 The denoising operator from the corrupted to the target data is indeed a proximal operator of the Brenier potential! This viewpoint leads to Lyapunov analysis: FM identifies target support. arxiv.org/abs/2602.12683
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Han Bao @han-b.bsky.social · 14/02/2026
While haven't verified carefully, it is surprising that the swap regret and the calibration error is equivalent, which can be shown with only the basic properties of the Bregman divergence arxiv.org/abs/2505.21460
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Han Bao @han-b.bsky.social · 08/02/2026
Franchement j'était désespéré par le résultat des élections législatives au Japon cette fois-ci, mais je ne peux rien y faire parce que je n'ai pas le droit de vote...
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Han Bao @han-b.bsky.social · 05/02/2026
Je ne sais pas guider les étudiants pour qu'ils réussissent leurs recherches… C'est bien que je ne fais que mes propres recherches, mais c'est tellement difficile d'amener les étudiants à réussir leur premier projet.
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Reposted by Han Bao
Jonathan Scarlett @jmscarlett.bsky.social · 04/02/2026
3rd "Mathematics of Data" Summer School is being held in Singapore in June. Applications for attendance (with accommodation for most & no registration fee for all) are open throughout February and possibly longer: ims.nus.edu.sg/events/ma_da...
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Han Bao @han-b.bsky.social · 02/02/2026
🚨Muon can smash anisotropy of inputs! Our new work investigates learning dynamics of phase retrieval (f(x)=xᵀMx) on the spiked covariance (I+λvvᵀ), for which spectral GD (≒muon) is less affected by the spike direction v than standard GD. arxiv.org/pdf/2601.22652
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Han Bao @han-b.bsky.social · 30/01/2026
(A bit long; nothing special here) I think I’m on the relatively optimistic side to embrace academic writing with LLMs, including survey and math proofs—they enable me to new research which I shall never be able to do alone. As a researcher, it’s so much exciting.
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Reposted by Han Bao
Raphael Wimmer @raphaelwimmer.bsky.social · 27/01/2026
I really wish #OpenAI would stop releasing free stochastic parrots in every community they can think of. They sure look pretty but they are shitting all over the place and you can't have a decent conversation between humans anymore.
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Han Bao @han-b.bsky.social · 22/01/2026
Delighted to have our "Brenier isotonic regression" accepted at #AISTATS2026! We extend isotonic regression to *multiclass* setup based on Brenier optimal transport, which can be used for multiclass calibration, improving the calibration map nicely over binning etc.
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Han Bao @han-b.bsky.social · 12/01/2026
Excited to see people will organize a workshop on calibration in the upcoming AISTATS calibration-workshop.github.io
calibration-workshop.github.io
Calibration workshop
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Han Bao @han-b.bsky.social · 11/01/2026
Weekend reads: Rudin et al. (2004) "The Dynamics of AdaBoost: Cyclic Behavior and Convergence of Margins" www.jmlr.org/papers/v5/ru... Highly illuminating to demonstrate AdaBoost can yield stable limit cycles under some configurations of weak classifiers, and moreover, this dates back to 2004!
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Han Bao @han-b.bsky.social · 22/12/2025
Recently I'm getting more and more unsure about how many research projects I'm actively involved in, and it turns out to be 10 in total after writing down! All of them highly excite me equally but the only thing is the limited time 🤯
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Reposted by Han Bao
Clément Canonne @ccanonne.github.io · 21/12/2025
The list of accepted papers at the Algorithmic Learning Theory Conference, a.k.a. #ALT2026, is out! h/t @thejonullman.bsky.social (PC chair). algorithmiclearningtheory.org/alt2026/acce... "ALT: topics so hot, it has to be held in Canada in February"
algorithmiclearningtheory.org
Accepted Papers | ALT 2026
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Han Bao @han-b.bsky.social · 16/12/2025
J'ai réussi A2🥳
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Rémi Flamary @rflamary.bsky.social · 12/12/2025
Openreview opened the door to continuous and major revisions that nobody has time to check properly. I think that we should come back to short one pdf page replies to reviews. It would mean having decisions quicker so that we actually have time to work on papers before resubmitting them.
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