Job Alert: Are you thinking of doing a PhD in ML, with a theoretical/algorithmic flavor? I'm hiring talented and passionate students to work with me on: ML theory; Neural scaling laws; Synthetic data (the good, the bad and the ugly); Explainable and trustworth AI (adversarial

We refused to cite the paper due to severe misconduct of the authors of that paper: plagiarism of our own prior work, predominantly AI-generated content (ya, the authors plugged our paper into an LLM and generated another paper), IRB violations, etc. Revealed during a long

Rylan Schaeffer Elvis Dohmatob

1) New preprint! arxiv.org/abs/2504.10754 Most of ML theory (i.e fine-grained analysis to explain / reveal interesting phenomenon) can be automated, e.g via free probability theory. In our recent work with Arjun Subramonian, we provide a small lightweight tool to do just this

I'll also be giving an invited talk at the associative memory workshop tomorrow Saturday at 9:30 nfam.vizhub.ai/schedule/, on provable scaling laws for a toy LLM mirrored around associative memories

Our work on beating scaling laws via deliberate practice, a modified synthetic data-generation scheme wherein harder / more entropic examples are favored, has been accepted at ICML Conference #ICML2025.

[Bored] I came across YT video where someone said the probability that a needle of length 1 unit, dropped on an infinitely wide piece of paper with parallel lines uniformly spaced 1 unit apart is 2/pi. Here is my quick and dirty proof. Unfortunately, it makes use of calculus :/

Superposition means that models represent more features than dimensions they have, which is true for LLMs since there are too many things to represent in language. We find that superposition leads to a power-law loss with width, leading to the observed neural scaling law. (1/n)

Stein's Lemma: E[f'(x)] = E[f(x)x] for x ~ N(0,1). Corollary (Gaussian integration by parts): E[g'(x)h(x)] = E[g(x)(xh(x) - h'(x))]. Proof. Take f(x):=g(x)*h(x) and observe that f'(x)=g(x)h'(x)+g'(x)h(x). We deduce: E[g(x)h'(x)+g'(x)h(x)]=E[g(x)h(x)x] and the result follows. QED

If you use "AI agents" (LLMs that call tools) you need to be aware of the Lethal Trifecta Any time you combine access to private data with exposure to untrusted content and the ability to externally communicate an attacker can trick the system into stealing your data!

#MlssSenegal2025 Full Schedule 🤓😎

Elvis Dohmatob explaining the math behind scaling laws #MlssSenegal2025

Back from MLSS Senegal 🇸🇳, where I had the honor of giving lectures on differentiable programming. Really grateful for all the amazing people I got to meet 🙏 My slides are here github.com/diffprog/slide…

Mathematical foundations of neural scaling laws: Here are slides for lectures I gave at the the recent MLSS 2025 summer school in Dakar. Every LLM theorist and practitioner should know these things! The summer school: mlss-senegal.github.io My slides: drive.google.com/drive/folders/…

Simple identities with deep consequences: (1) ReLU(x) - ReLU(-x) = x for all x in R. (2) sum_{i=1}^j i*(-1)^{j-i} = floor((j+1)/2). Using these, it can be shown that that k-sparse parity function is exactly representable by a 2-layer ReLU network of width k+3 = O(k).