In 2021 a benchmark of 18 retrieval datasets found that a scoring function from 1994 still beat most neural retrievers outside their training domain. BM25 is not a heuristic that got lucky. It is a deliberate approximation of a p…
The dream of automating office work is older than the personal computer. Tracing the line from VisiCalc through RPA to LLM agents reveals a recurring lesson: the tools that record steps break, and the tools that pursue goals are …
For five years, normalising flows bent every layer around one number: the log-determinant of a Jacobian. Flow matching kept the invertible transport map, stopped computing that number during training, and ended up inside Stable D…
In the fall of 1960 Rudolf Kalman presented a paper at NASA Ames that engineers found hard to grasp; by early 1961 it was navigating simulated spacecraft around the Moon. The same recursion now computes the exact likelihood of ev…