Leonardo Cotta

Leonardo Cotta

@cottascience.bsky.social

floptimistic from BH🔺🇧🇷 http://cottascience.github.io

1K followers280 following71 posts

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.

disclaimer: I'm no luddite. I feel like I can generate beautiful images and code with enough guidance, or an specific workflow. for writing? nothing seems to work. maybe the turing test should've been writing a book with good taste.

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.

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?

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.

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!

Leonardo Cotta reposted

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.orgDamage and Misrepair Signatures: Compact Representations of Pan-cancer Mutational ProcessesMutational signatures of single-base substitutions (SBSs) characterize somatic mutation processes which contribute to cancer development and progression. However, current mutational signatures do not ...

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".

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

if you're feeling uninspired and getting nan's everywhere, you can give your codebase, describe the problem and ask for suggestions to try or debug. I think of it more as a debugger assistant than a code generator.

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.

Leonardo Cotta reposted

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 💥

uai2026@auai.org

The 41st Conference on #Uncertainty in #AI will be held in Rio de Janeiro 🇧🇷, July 21-25! The CfP is out 👉 www.auai.org/uai2025/call... 🚨 Feb 10: Paper submission 🗣️ Apr 3-10: rebuttal period 🎉/💀 May 6: Author notification #UAI2025 #ML #stats #learning #reasoning #uncertainty

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 ;)

Leonardo Cotta reposted

Presenting our poster at NeurIPS! Please come chat about estimating causal effects from user/patient-reported experiences: Thursday, 11AM, West Ballroom A-D #5110.

Rahul G. Krishnan@rahulgk.bsky.social

@nikitadhawan.bsky.social developed NATURAL (www.cs.toronto.edu/~nikita/natu...) with @cottascience.bsky.social , Karen & @cmaddis.bsky.social. Its an end-to-end pipeline that starts from raw-text data and ends with a causal (**) effect associated with an intervention. (**) conditions apply 🧵(6/7)

If you're interested in {causality, language, healthcare}, stop by! Thursday 11am - 2pm West Ballroom A-D #5110

Rahul G. Krishnan@rahulgk.bsky.social

@nikitadhawan.bsky.social developed NATURAL (www.cs.toronto.edu/~nikita/natu...) with @cottascience.bsky.social , Karen & @cmaddis.bsky.social. Its an end-to-end pipeline that starts from raw-text data and ends with a causal (**) effect associated with an intervention. (**) conditions apply 🧵(6/7)

Leonardo Cotta reposted

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...

Leonardo Cotta reposted

Replying to @rahulgk.bsky.social

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)

Leonardo Cotta reposted

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. 🧵

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.

ICLR Conference@iclr-conf.bsky.social

✍️ Reminder to reviewers: Check author responses to your reviews, and ask follow up questions if needed. 50% of papers have discussion - let’s bring this number up!

If a paper got zero interactions from AC/reviewers in a 15-day period, it's obvious to me that SACs and PC have to take a look at the rebuttal themselves. Otherwise, rebuttal becomes just another variable introducing bias in the process.

Leonardo Cotta reposted

Leonardo Cotta reposted

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