Episode Details

We are running an end of year listener survey! Please let us know any feedback you have, what episodes resonated with you, and guest requests for 2024! Survey link here.

NeurIPS 2023 took place from Dec 10–16 in New Orleans. The Latent Space crew was onsite for as many of the talks and workshops as we could attend (and more importantly, hosted cocktails and parties after hours)!

Picking from the 3586 papers accepted to the conference (available online, full schedule here) is an impossible task, but we did our best to present an audio guide with brief commentary on each. We also recommend MLContests.com NeurIPS recap and Seb Ruder’s NeurIPS primer and Jerry Liu’s paper picks. We also found the VizHub guide useful for a t-SNE clustering of papers. Lots also happened in the arxiv publishing world outside NeurIPS, as highlighted by Karpathy, especially DeepMind’s Beyond Human Data: Scaling Self-Training for Problem-Solving with Language Models.

Jan 2024 update: we also strongly recommend Sebastian Raschka, PhD ‘s pick of the year’s 10 best papers, including Pythia.

We’ll start with the NeurIPS Best Paper Awards, and then go to a selection of non-awarded but highly influential papers, and then arbitrary personal picks to round out the selection. Where we were able to do a poster session interview, please scroll to the relevant show notes for images of their poster for discussion. We give Chris Ré the last word due to the Mamba and StripedHyena state space models drawing particular excitement but still being too early to assess impact.

Timestamps

* [0:01:19] Word2Vec (Jeff Dean, Greg Corrado)

* [0:15:28] Emergence Mirage (Rylan Schaeffer)

* [0:28:48] DPO (Rafael Rafailov)

* [0:41:36] DPO Poster Session (Archit Sharma)

* [0:52:03] Datablations (Niklas Muennighoff)

* [1:00:50] QLoRA (Tim Dettmers)

* [1:12:23] DataComp (Samir Gadre)

* [1:25:38] DataComp Poster Session (Samir Gadre, Alex Dimakis)

* [1:35:25] LLaVA (Haotian Liu)

* [1:47:21] LLaVA Poster Session (Haotian Liu)

* [1:59:19] Tree of Thought (Shunyu Yao)

* [2:11:27] Tree of Thou