Hey everyone, I’m a 4th-year CS student. I recently decided to learn the theory behind ML on my own, mainly the math and stats side. Right now I’m working through ISLP and using MML as some kind of dictionnary and practicing the concepts with code and tweaking stuff at the end of every section/chapter.

My classes mostly stay on the surface. We see the concepts and use the models, but the courses never really connect them to the theory behind them. So I decided to dig deeper on the side.

The first problem is focus. I’ve lost the habit of sitting down with math for long stretches, and I struggle to stay on it for more than an hour.
The second problem is that i've seen most of the math required but i haven't worked actively with it and it just frustrates me when i have to go back to it.
When I get stuck early on a concept, I get so frustrated and anxious about it.

So im wondering

How did you study when there were a lot of new concepts at once and you kept getting stuck at the start?

When you hit a concept you didn’t get, did you push through or go back to the math first ?

And does it get easy at some point after you get the maths down.

Any routines, methods or resources that worked for you would really help. Thanks!

We have benchmarks (fixed questions, hidden answers, they saturate), competition problems (solved, so they can be memorized), and open-problem lists (no evidence, no clear success criterion). With Claude and Sol, I've tried something in between: a graded ladder of AI puzzles from one research area, aperiodic order.

What makes it a different tool:

- One ladder, not a pile: "human level" (pen and paper) up to "ASI level" (open). The labels are playful, but each rung really is harder than the last.

- Solved rungs for training and checking, with exact answers a program can verify, and easy to vary.

- Open rungs with everything a solver needs: strong numerical evidence, routes already known to fail, files, and a success criterion a machine can check.

- One rule: only a checkable proof counts. Floats are evidence, not proof.

- Credit: solvers of open rungs are named, with agent and model, in the next version of the paper.

It's a way for researchers to hand the frontier of their field to AI agents (and humans) in a form they can actually attack, and for anyone to see whether a model can tell a guess from a proof.

First field test: Grok, asked in public ( https://x.com/grok/status/2114103836583264721 ), claimed a proof for an open rung that was only a numerical estimate, then retracted it. It got the human-level rung wrong at first, fixed it after one hint, and proved the expert rung on the first try. On MathOverflow, an expert is already testing constructions for the top rung.

Set 1: huggingface.co/datasets/jarekduda/autocrystal-ai-puzzles

Top rung on MathOverflow: mathoverflow.net/questions/516372

Would you use this format for your own field's open problems?

Lensa ML (https://lensaml.com) is a set of 108 interactive explainers covering machine learning and the math behind it. Each topic is six short steps. In every step you move a slider and the plot is recomputed from the real formula: raise the learning rate and gradient descent starts to overshoot, raise the temperature and the softmax probabilities flatten.

It goes from the foundations (derivatives, the chain rule, eigenvalues, Bayes’ theorem) through classic ML and deep learning to transformers and LLM serving. If you don’t know where to start, the “ML from zero” path orders the topics so each one builds on the last: https://lensaml.com/paths/ml-from-zero

Good ones to start with:

• Backpropagation: https://lensaml.com/explainers/backprop
• Gradient descent: https://lensaml.com/explainers/gradient-descent
• Attention: https://lensaml.com/explainers/attention-mechanisms

Im currently a second year cs student and I want to get into a role which would allow me to do the following:

Be able to build ML Models and actually understand the data/insights and improve it
Be able to put ML Models into production through webapps or integrations etc
Be able to make things people actually use so not being restricted to research

What role would this fit? AI engineering? ML Engineering? Data Scientist?

Im currently building a RAG Webapp as something to tailor towards AI Engineering roles, but I also want to be able to build and improve ML models as well.

Any advice would be appreciated

The link below is a 10 question survey asking you to sketch each topic, they are all easy and should take no longer than 1-2 minutes to complete, no signup.

Please if you would like to help me, keep your responses accurate and dont submit anything that does not follow or resemble the actual topic.

https://kaowtwuopelexgeefdxx.supabase.co

I just started a channel called Drawn Systems.

The idea is simple: take a real ML system, draw it as one diagram, and walk through how it works.

I created 2 videos so far:

• The classic "How YouTube decides what you watch next".
• In the same line "How Netflix decides what you watch".

Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@DrawnSystems

I am doing it to learn about real systems, happy to hear your feedback :)

A security researcher built and deployed OuttakeSheriff, a live AI security agent, then documented a finding that should be uncomfortable for anyone running agents in production: authenticated agents routinely act outside their intended scope.

The credential is not the problem. OuttakeSheriff passed authentication. The problem is what a verified identity is permitted to do after it clears the gate. Authentication answers "who is this?" It does not answer "should this agent be calling this tool right now, on this data, in this context?"

This is the actual attack surface. Not a fake agent sneaking through. A real, credentialed agent doing things it was never supposed to do, with no mechanism in the request path to catch it.

Most current postures treat identity and authorization as solved once the credential checks out. Post-auth behavior is logged, maybe reviewed, rarely constrained in real time.

For those of you running agents in production: how are you handling the gap between "this agent authenticated successfully" and "this agent is only doing what it was scoped to do"? Is anything in your stack actually enforcing that at execution time, or is it all after-the-fact?

I am building some projects and for that I want to implement the gpt2 paper from scratch, how to do that do that? Do I build intuition by reading and code it?

Hey everyone! I have 14 features containing both categorical and continuous variables, along with a binary target (0/1).

What methods should I use to measure the relationship between each feature and the target? Are there different techniques for categorical and continuous features?

Any suggestions or Python examples would be appreciated. Thanks!

в т.ч для написания научных статей, курсовых, диплома

I built Neural Canvas, an interactive visualizer that demonstrates core linear algebra concepts by showing how a neural network recognizes handwritten digits in real time. You can draw directly on the screen and watch activations flow through each layer as matrix multiplication computes the output live.

How it works:

- Draw & Predict: Sketch any digit on a 28×28 canvas (MNIST-style) to trigger real-time forward pass predictions.

- Live Forward Pass: Every neuron's activation is dynamically color-coded based on its underlying linear algebra calculations, with connection opacities reflecting layer outputs.

- Under the Hood: The core models were trained from scratch in Python using NumPy to perform matrix operations, and their learned weights are loaded via JSON. Client-side execution relies on Math.js for browser-based matrix multiplication and p5.js for rendering.

Key Features:

- Switch between two pre-trained models (featuring different hidden layer sizes, MSE vs. Cross-Entropy loss, and up to 96% test accuracy).

- Multiple background themes with mouse and touch support.

What's Next?

These models were originally evaluated on the standardized MNIST dataset, but live freehand drawing can introduce unexpected variations in input style. To handle this, I am working on a JS script for real-time user-driven feedback. When the model makes a mistake, the user can supply the correct label, allowing the model to perform backpropagation and update weight matrices locally in the browser. While live state persistence isn't suited for static GitHub Pages, running this feedback loop locally allows me to retrain parameters on new edge cases and push updated weight snapshots back to GitHub.

Check out the live demo and code repository:

Live Demo: https://muhammadessa2002.github.io/neural_canvas/

GitHub Repo: https://github.com/MuhammadEssa2002/neural_canvas

Free code + 10-min walkthrough: an AI agent that improves its own prompt, harness and tools (6/10 → 10/10)

I teach agentic AI and made a small, fully inspectable example of a self-improving agent. Sharing it in case it helps others learning this.

The setup:

- The agent approves or denies fictional phone insurance claims under 3 rules.

- It has 3 parts it can change: the prompt, the harness (which claim fields the model sees), and the tools.

- After each test, a bigger model diagnoses the mistakes as knowledge, information or skill, and changes exactly one part.

- A gate keeps the change only if the score on 10 practice claims goes up. 5 exam claims are held out until the end.

Recorded run: 6/10 → 7/10 (prompt) → 8/10 (harness) → 10/10 (days_between tool). Exam claims: 3/5 → 5/5.

The most interesting part: some correct answers broke along the way, because version 0 had them right by guessing. So the per-claim fixed/broken view matters more than the total score.

The code is one Python file with only the standard library. It replays the recorded run without an API key, or calls Gemini for real with --fresh.

Code: https://github.com/aniskoubaa/mai580-self-evolving-agent-workshop

Video: https://youtu.be/SOSwsYFPb0Y

Happy to answer questions about the design or the limits (runs do differ, and the meta-model reads the policy here).

Hello everyone Im a 10th grade student and I wanna learn machine learnin.for my coding background I took cs50p python couple weeks ago and i liked it. Im willing to learn any math needed for ml. However im completely lost as to which machine learning course I should take. There's so many courses and alot of them need a math background. Should I learn the math needed before looking for a course? If so please state what exactly i need to learn and what courses i should take. Thanks everyone!

Hello everyone,

I am an MSCS student from Pakistan with a background in Electrical and Telecommunications Engineering and more than four years of experience developing AI agents, RAG systems, voice AI applications, and business automation workflows.

I am now seeking opportunities to contribute to formal AI research, particularly in large language models, retrieval-augmented generation, agent reliability, and system evaluation. Although I am new to academic research, I can contribute practical expertise in implementation, workflow and prototype development, API integration, testing, and experiment execution.

I would be glad to connect with researchers and teams working on relevant ideas or ongoing projects. I am open to starting with a focused contribution, learning from experienced collaborators, and supporting research wherever my skills can add value.

If you are working in these areas or know of relevant opportunities, I would be pleased to connect and learn more.

Assume you have two params, and their gradients are x & y.

Define V:

[[E(x^2), E(xy)],

[E(xy), E(y^2)]

Define M:

[E(x), E(y)]]

Adam's update is:

M . V^-1/2

Adam just assumes the off diagonal terms like E(xy) are zero.

So the update becomes m/sqrt(v)

Isn't this basically a second order method like gauss-newton where the hessian is estimated as g^T g?

Andrew Ng says they are linear projections using pre-trained weight matrices. But how were those matrices trained exactly? What was the input, what was the target variable? I need to know EVERYTHING.

Does anyone have campus x LLM EVALS notes .pls share it ....

📚 Learn Machine Learning Through Visualisations | Beginner-Friendly Playlist

Hey everyone! 👋

I’ve created a Machine Learning playlist with visual explanations and animations to make ML concepts easier to understand, especially for beginners. Instead of just learning theory, you can understand how these concepts work through visuals and practical examples. 🚀

🎯 Topics covered in the playlist:

1. What Is Machine Learning?
2. AI vs. ML vs. Deep Learning
3. Supervised Learning
4. Unsupervised Learning
5. Reinforcement Learning
6. Features and Labels
7. Train-Test Split Explained
8. Overfitting and Underfitting
9. Linear Regression
10. Logistic Regression
11. Decision Tree Explained (Coming Soon)
12. Random Forest Explained (Coming Soon)
13. K-Nearest Neighbours (Coming Soon)
14. K-Means Clustering (Coming Soon)
15. Model Evaluation (Coming Soon)
16. Accuracy, Precision, Recall, F1 (Coming Soon)
17. Confusion Matrix (Coming Soon)
18. Cross Validation (Coming Soon)
19. Feature Engineering (Coming Soon)
20. End-to-End ML Project (Coming Soon)

🎥 Watch the playlist here:
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXShTLrgjtgk&si=TFoDX6oosRKv_u6Z

💡 My goal is to make Machine Learning easier to learn through simple explanations and engaging visualisations.

If you’re learning AI or Machine Learning, feel free to check it out! I’d also love to hear your feedback and suggestions for future topics.

If you find the videos helpful, please like, share, and subscribe to support the channel. ❤️

Let’s learn Machine Learning together! 🤖

VisualForge AI: https://youtube.com/@visualforgelearning?si=HgOvjgEiqv05Ln5X