Building more things @Arda_Industries. Previously generative modeling/AI for science @MITEECS.

Cambridge, MA
Joined November 2011
Julia Balla retweeted
Thrilled to partner with @bobmcgrewai ! Arda is on a BIG mission to speed up American manufacturing. I’ve had the good fortune of knowing Bob, P Woody, Lucas, Grace, Tim, Paul and several friends at Arda for over a dozen years. Can certify that this crew does not make any small plans! :) It's early innings. If you’re an engineer or researcher looking for a big mission, please reach out!
We started Arda in 2025 to speed up American manufacturing. We have spent the last year building with Anduril as our design partner. Today we are launching the company publicly on CNBC and announcing our Series A: $160M at a $1.5B valuation. Our platform helps manufacturers design and operate manual assembly lines, putting designs into production faster now. Next we'll build automated lines that can be reconfigured as quickly as human workers, letting America make products that now require armies of workers in Asia.
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Julia Balla retweeted
Finally get to share what I’ve been working on since finishing my PhD at @MIT_CSAIL . At @Arda_Industries, we’re developing AI that can figure out how to build things. From understanding a product design to planning its assembly, and eventually getting robots to carry it out. I get to work on some of the most challenging problems, alongside some of the smartest and kindest people I’ve ever worked with. Arda’s mission hit close to home for me: ensuring the strategic safety of the US and its allies for years to come. We’re having a blast and are hiring rapidly!
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Julia Balla retweeted
Replying to @Arda_Industries
@Arda_Industries We're building AI for American manufacturing. We're helping manufacturers produce faster and build flexible, automated assembly lines.
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Julia Balla retweeted
I'm super excited to share what I've been working on this year at @Arda_Industries. This team is incredible and I know we will achieve amazing things together 🚀
We started Arda in 2025 to speed up American manufacturing. We have spent the last year building with Anduril as our design partner. Today we are launching the company publicly on CNBC and announcing our Series A: $160M at a $1.5B valuation. Our platform helps manufacturers design and operate manual assembly lines, putting designs into production faster now. Next we'll build automated lines that can be reconfigured as quickly as human workers, letting America make products that now require armies of workers in Asia.
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Julia Balla retweeted
At @Arda_Industries, we’re putting AI to work in the physical world to speed up American manufacturing. Proud to work alongside the incredible people at Arda who share this mission. Build more things! 🇺🇸🚀
We started Arda in 2025 to speed up American manufacturing. We have spent the last year building with Anduril as our design partner. Today we are launching the company publicly on CNBC and announcing our Series A: $160M at a $1.5B valuation. Our platform helps manufacturers design and operate manual assembly lines, putting designs into production faster now. Next we'll build automated lines that can be reconfigured as quickly as human workers, letting America make products that now require armies of workers in Asia.
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Julia Balla retweeted
We started a new company: Arda. Arda helps other companies rapidly manufacture new, complex products at scale, and then change those products quickly as the world changes. We do this by building AI that understands the manufacturing process from start to finish and then using that AI to help design and operate factories. In the future, this AI will control reconfigurable robot assembly lines that will produce a huge number of products much more cheaply. We’re actively hiring people to work on AI + Robotics as well as for other roles. Please get in touch if that interests you.
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Julia Balla retweeted
We have launched @Arda_Industries. Pumped to be a part of this team pioneering the future of manufacturing. Build more things!
We started Arda in 2025 to speed up American manufacturing. We have spent the last year building with Anduril as our design partner. Today we are launching the company publicly on CNBC and announcing our Series A: $160M at a $1.5B valuation. Our platform helps manufacturers design and operate manual assembly lines, putting designs into production faster now. Next we'll build automated lines that can be reconfigured as quickly as human workers, letting America make products that now require armies of workers in Asia.
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Thrilled to share that I’ve recently joined the incredible team at @Arda_Industries! We’re working to make manufacturing move at the speed of innovation with AI. And we’re hiring! Come build more things with us 🚀
We started Arda in 2025 to speed up American manufacturing. We have spent the last year building with Anduril as our design partner. Today we are launching the company publicly on CNBC and announcing our Series A: $160M at a $1.5B valuation. Our platform helps manufacturers design and operate manual assembly lines, putting designs into production faster now. Next we'll build automated lines that can be reconfigured as quickly as human workers, letting America make products that now require armies of workers in Asia.
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Julia Balla retweeted
I've been getting a lot of DMs about Jev and how it relates to our RLCR (RL with Calibration Rewards) paper. Whatever the connection, anyone who's talked research with me in the last year knows I can go on and on about calibration as one of the most overlooked parts of post-training, so I'm really happy to see it finally getting attention. If we want models that are actually useful in the real world, in healthcare, law, or scientific discovery, they need to know what they don't know. That's why I've spent so long thinking about better paradigms for uncertainty-aware decision making. There's still so much to do: training more calibrated models, building systems that interact well with users in uncertain settings (life🙂), and figuring out how to evaluate all of it in a way that reflects real workflows instead of completion based rewards. DMs open if you want to chat! (congrats to @CompleteSkeptic on the launch, and thanks to @rasbt for the great writeup!) 📄 arxiv.org/pdf/2507.16806
Took a while, but here it is, a mega write-up on language models for text classification and, of course, Jev. It's basically a visual guide to RNNs, CNNs, transformers, and calibration, with hands-on experiments on accuracy and efficiency.
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Julia Balla retweeted
new preprint: language models are “insecure” reporters. researchers and engineers have become increasingly reliant on LLM-written reports---second-hand accounts of code and experiments---to understand agent-generated work. in this study, we ask: “how transparent are these LLM-generated reports?” 🔍
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Julia Balla retweeted
It's never made sense to me that RL collapses all reward signals to a single scalar. Today, we fix that! Introducing Vector Policy Optimization: we train models to inherently optimize for the varied nature of a reward vector, creating diverse sets of answers ideal for test time search. Website and code coming soon!
Your RL post-training may be sabotaging your LLM’s test-time scaling! Conventional RL pretends that you can collapse all reward signals *upfront* into a single *scalar reward*. We introduce Vector Policy Optimization (VPO), which natively maximizes *vector-valued* rewards, boosting test time search performance, even on the original scalar.
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Julia Balla retweeted
recently, i’ve been thinking about ways to design ai systems to be more compatible with slow thinking 🐌. you can check out the full blogpost here 🤗: jennyhuang19.github.io/slow-…
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New blogpost on tokenizing non-sequential data! Language has sequential structure, which gave rise to the next-token prediction paradigm of LLMs. But we increasingly use LLMs for data without inherent order (e.g. images, molecules, sets). What does “next token” mean here? (1/7)
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As we push LLM-style methods to non-sequential data, e.g. in scientific domains, we need to rethink what the notion of “next token” means when no canonical order (or even discretization) exists, and adjust either the tokenization or modeling strategy accordingly. (6/7)
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Check out the full post here: iclr-blogposts.github.io/202… Huge thanks to my co-author @HLawrenceCS, who will be presenting it at ICLR as part of the blog post track! (7/7)
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Julia Balla retweeted
TL;DR: poster today at 3:15pm, P3-#1109! Have you ever benchmarked your method on QM9, MD17, OC20, or ModelNet? It turns out that the 3D orientations of point clouds in commonly used datasets are highly non-random. How did we prove this and why should you care? 🧵
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