#Machine Learning
25 posts tagged with "Machine Learning"
When 62 Days of Compute Becomes 3: Diffusion Models as Fast Surrogates for Agent-Based Biological Simulations
How generative diffusion models can serve as fast surrogates for expensive biological simulations, achieving 22x speedup while preserving the stochastic diversity that makes these models scientifically useful.
When the Algorithm Can't Explain Itself: ML Interpretability in Precision Oncology
Machine learning models now outperform FDA-approved biomarkers in predicting treatment response, but the best-performing models often resist explanation. Here's how precision oncology is navigating the trade-off between performance and interpretability.
Project Silicon: What If We Could Do Gradient Descent on Assembly Code?
A deep dive into Project Silicon's proposal to build differentiable CPU simulators, enabling gradient-based optimization of assembly code and opening a new frontier in neural algorithm synthesis.
Biological World Models: The Projects You're Not Building (But Should Be)
Why computational biologists should stop building embeddings and start building simulators, with three tractable project ideas you can implement today using flow matching, Neural ODEs, and cell fate trajectory modeling.
Benchmarks vs RL Environments: Why the Distinction Actually Matters
Understanding when you're working with an environment versus a benchmark changes how you design experiments, interpret results, and communicate findings. This guide covers the practical differences every RL practitioner should know.
DiscoRL: When Algorithms Learn to Design Algorithms
DeepMind's DiscoRL discovers reinforcement learning algorithms that outperform hand-designed methods like PPO and DQN. By treating algorithm design as a meta-learning problem, it found alternatives to value functions and bootstrapping through optimization alone.
Do LLMs Construct World Models? A Cognitive Science Investigation
Are large language models merely stochastic parrots, or do they develop genuine internal representations of the world? This investigation examines evidence from Othello-GPT, spatial encoding in LLMs, and the symbol grounding problem to explore what cognitive science reveals about AI understanding.
Tensor Logic: One Equation to Rule Them All
Pedro Domingos proposes that neural networks and symbolic AI are the same mathematical operation - a logical rule can be equivalently written as a tensor equation in Einstein summation notation. If true, we've been building separate tools for problems that share identical structure.
When Machines Design Their Own Learning Algorithms
A machine trained on simple grid worlds beat every hand-designed RL algorithm on Atari. DeepMind's DiscoRL discovers algorithms through meta-learning that outperform DQN, PPO, and A3C - methods humans spent decades developing.
Biology's Secret Weapon: Physics-Based Benchmarks for Training RL Agents
Why biological systems offer the ideal training ground for reinforcement learning: automated verification through physics, not human judgment. From protein design with AlphaFold to RNA folding with ViennaRNA, biology provides the verifiable inverse problems that RL needs at scale.
What Are World Models? The AI Architecture That Learns to Dream
World models enable AI agents to imagine futures and plan actions, achieving 10-100x better sample efficiency than traditional reinforcement learning. From DreamerV3 collecting diamonds in Minecraft to foundation models like Sora and Genie, world models represent AI's shift from pattern matching to simulating reality itself.
How an AI System Independently Discovered a New Bacterial Survival Strategy (And Got It Right)
An AI system at Google DeepMind discovered how bacteria share genes across species barriers using 7 days of computational reasoning. When tested, it matched unpublished experimental observations exactly.
Foundation Models Are Rewriting the Rules of Biology
Foundation models trained on biological data are transforming protein structure prediction, genomics, drug discovery, and pathology. Learn how machine learning benchmarks in 2024 are revealing biology's dark matter through RNA analysis and metagenomic discovery.