🏔️📍🇩🇪 @ELLISforEurope 🇪🇺 PhD Student @cvml_mpiinf at MPI-INF & IST-A 物の哀れ ✨

Saarbrücken, Germany
Joined July 2017
🚨 Checkout our new work on learning self-supervised visual part representations: "DisParQ: Self-Supervised Part Concepts for Interpretable Vision Foundation Models". Very proud and happy with this work. Tremendous effort by all involved! 🤗 🚀 1/10 📄 arxiv.org/abs/2610.09802
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At 37 Patrick Collison listed the reason not to start a company in every decade since the 80s. Japan will win everything, Microsoft will dominate, the dotcom crash, Google, then Facebook, now the AI labs: Every single time it was empirically a great time to start a company. He arrived in Silicon Valley in 2010 and people were already saying the funding was drying up. For more than a generation, betting on entrepreneurship has been a durable bet. Save this.
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Hi all, I have a new result I'm excited to share. It turns out that *all existing implementations* of softmax and cross-entropy (that's JAX, PyTorch, textbooks, etc) have a subtle bug --- two bugs, actually. A simple rewrite fixes both, and eliminates "slingshots" when grokking:
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How should we approach research, when the very field we work on is going through rapid and potentially fundamental changes? I recently gave a talk at the Stanford Vision Seminar, reflecting on my PhD journey and how AI is changing the way I think about research. I adapted part of it into a new blog post, organized around three questions: 1. What should we work on? 2. How should we work with AI? 3. What is a PhD for? I hope some of my reflections are helpful. The talk ended with an open discussion, and I’d love to continue it here; curious how others are thinking about these questions. Personally -- as much as there's FOMO, I also think life is very long, and we have time. toruowo.github.io/blog/posts…
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Life update: I recently graduated from CMU RI, and last year I went through the academic faculty job market in robot learning. I was fortunate to receive a lot of help and support from many people throughout the process. Compared to industry job applications, there are relatively few resources available online about the faculty application process. So I decided to open-source all of my application materials from last year here: docs.google.com/document/d/1… I hope these materials can be helpful to others who are considering pursuing an academic career!
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I’d like to recommend this piece by Sartre. I guess we all think we write because we want to know that we mean something in this world. That we spotted something that had eluded us and gave it expression. Sartre removes that from us. We uncover things about our world we didn’t++
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This is a great opportunity to show-case your art work @NeurIPSConf 2026. Do checkout Tom's (@dribnet 's ) art work if you haven't yet - it's very cool! 💥
NeurIPS Creative Track 2026 is seeking sponsors to help fill high-visibility public areas of the NeurIPS convention center with art. If you or your company would like to help make this happen, please DM me this week!
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A short video on how to make sense of which features JEPA keeps in its latent. Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2610.27364
1/ JEPA selects which features its world model keeps. But how? Will it keep a feature it can't predict, like a traffic light? Judging each feature alone, earlier work says no. We show evidence that this is wrong and introduce a new characterization that explains why. 👇🧵
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Underrated life advice: Keep a list of the people who believed in you early. The teacher who pushed you. The boss who took a chance. The friend who told you to go for it. Every now and then, reach out. Update them. And tell them just how much you appreciate what they did for you.
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If you’ve never read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, it’ll change you
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Time for the heavy hitters and some caffeine … Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Dumas 📚 ☕️
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The beauty in the mundane ... the little things 🪭
The everyday moments
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btw I also had a recent post on a neat trick for computing gradients without indices I pray for everyone that they'll never need to do entrywise derivatives ever again
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how much can models remember? there’s a neat perspective on neural networks that deserves to be more widely known here’s how you could have invented every layer of the transformer from memory (1/n) from my new blog post!
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Very nice and timely! ⏳
My new lecture - Who will become a professor? And why? Three PhD students with three dramatic stories, each with a different career path hoping to stay in academia. If you want to become a PI, you may face challenges you never anticipated. It’s easy to make mistakes and be misguided by someone’s advice. It’s easy to get stuck on ‘infinite postdoc’ or hit a wall as a dual-career academic couple. In this talk, I show how unpredictable your academic career can be. I also explain how PhD students often miss out on opportunities. What should students do to significantly improve their chances? How to compete for academic positions? Lecture: “The Real Cost of Following Your Academic Dream” youtu.be/IM6Qp3yXNro (I recently gave this talk at the PhD / postdoc symposium in Swiss Alps)
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Gorgeous scents that the world has to offer - books 📚 and freshly brewed coffee ☕️
Ray Bradbury, one of life's gifts
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C.S. Lewis, our desires are far too weak
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My posts on research careers, professional practice beyond academia, and AI's impact on work seem to resonate here, so I've compiled about a hundred entries: cs.princeton.edu/~arvindn/ad… I hope it is helpful to read it as a collection, because it reflects a coherent underlying philosophy and approach to careers that I've adopted in my own work. There's a lot of career advice online. Two things are distinct about this collection: - Grounded optimism. I'm candid about the structural challenges, twisted incentives, and other limitations of the institutions we inhabit. I share ideas on how we can adapt and thrive in these flawed systems, and how and when we should challenge them. - Connecting research and practice. Much of my research is on AI agent evaluation and AI's effects on the economy and labor, which lets me share insights into how we can effectively adapt and integrate it into our work. Let me know what you think and what else I should write about!
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Arthur Schopenhauer, the most common trap of all
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