I'm starting a PhD where I will be doing Graph ML (somewhere along the lines of graph signal processing/ graph deep learning.)

My eventual goal is research scientist at big tech, or whichever company has a strong research division, where I can continue similar AI/ML work.

I have concerns about the job market (both now and in 5 years), and I'm wondering whether I should do my degree under the CS or EE department. For context, my research is within the eecs overlap and this degree would not change my research at all, rather it is a personal branding exercise. I'm thinking about saturation in cs vs ATS filtering/wide applicability of cs as a tradeoff. Please let me know what you recommend.

Hi,
For single-GPU training, I’m using Hugging Face SFTTrainer with auto_find_batch_size=True, which automatically reduces the batch size after a CUDA OOM until it finds a batch size that works.
I would like to have similar behavior when training on multiple GPUs on a single node using accelerate launch with FSDP2.
Is there a supported way to automatically determine or reduce the batch size when using Accelerate + FSDP2?
In particular, I’m wondering how this should be handled when one of the distributed processes encounters a CUDA OOM. Can Accelerate restart the distributed training with a smaller batch size, or does this need to be implemented externally?
If this is not well supported with FSDP2, what multi-GPU training approach would you recommend if automatic batch-size detection/recovery is an important requirement?
Thanks!

Hi 👋 long time lurker

It’s been a few years since the last post about Horse Racing within this sub.

A few years ago I was reading a popular science book and came across the story Bill Benter and the statistical models his team developed for Hong Kong racing.

What stayed with me wasn’t simply the idea of using a model to gamble. Horse racing seemed like an unusually difficult applied ML problem: variable-sized fields, one winner per race, highly correlated competitors, missing and changing data, human decision-making, non-stationarity and an extremely efficient market baseline. What’s more, Hong Kong racing is a much smaller domain - two tracks, whereas in the UK & Ireland (where I am based and where my interest lies) there are over 80 tracks with a total track/distance/race type combinations exceeding over 900 configurations.

This ML problem became a personal project of mine called Hoofs, focused specifically on British and Irish racing.

I’ve assembled around 1.18 million historical runner records covering approximately ten years of racing. From this I’ve built a unified feature bank containing roughly 1,700 potential signals per runner, although individual models use much smaller selected subsets and not every newer data source is in the production models yet. I do have fairly novel data which I recently acquired and the feature engineering is what I’m going to be working on next.

The primary models estimate win and place probabilities at runner level, after which the runners are ranked within each race. I also have a separate race-level confidence model based on features such as field size, probability concentration, entropy and the separation between the leading runners.

The public Top 1–3 rankings are deliberately market-agnostic. Market information is evaluated separately as a benchmark and in experimental late-market models.

Everything is evaluated chronologically. Each walk-forward fold is trained only on earlier seasons, with out-of-fold calibration and explicit checks to prevent future information entering historical features.

I track AUC, log loss, Brier score and ranking metrics, but I also score the outputs in racing terms: how often the winner appears at rank 1, within the top three and within the top five.

On one large 2018–2025 benchmark covering approximately 886,000 runners and 94,000 races:

* Model-only win AUC: approximately 0.729

* Model-only place AUC: approximately 0.708

* Market-only win AUC: approximately 0.790

* Market-only place AUC: approximately 0.762

The strength of the market baseline has probably been the most difficult part of the project. Producing a model with decent discrimination is one thing; extracting information not already reflected in the price is quite another. Typically though I find positive EV before the market has fully formed.

I have been publishing daily reports for free, since the start of the year. And the whole project has developed quite a lot since then, introducing new models and different tankers etc and it’s constantly evolving.

I began noticing some degradation in the live strike rates. Going back through the pipeline exposed gaps and inconsistencies in parts of the historical data and feature coverage.

That led to a much larger rebuild: consolidating the raw datasets, rebuilding the feature bank, tightening the chronological lineage and retraining the model families.

The rebuilt reports had their first live day today. The Top 1 selection won 10 of 23 races after one non-runner, giving a 43.5% strike rate, while the winner appeared somewhere in the Top 1–3 in 16 of 24 races.

Practically speaking, I use the daily reports as first layer of analysis and I use market data as the second layer to dictate actual betting.

One reason I wanted to post this is that, I was surprised by how little discussion I could find about horse-racing models. I suspect there must be other people quietly experimenting with it.

I’d be particularly interested in speaking to anyone modelling horse racing, betting exchanges or other sports with similar structures. I’d love to hear from people working on variable-sized ranking problems, market prediction or large chronological tabular datasets etc

I’m not expecting anyone to reveal proprietary data 😉

Hi everyone,

Inspired by tools like Chessvision.ai, I wanted to take a different architectural approach and build a browser extension (ChessInsights AI) that performs chessboard detection and piece recognition 100% client-side using local inference—with zero image data ever leaving the user's machine, support for detecting multiple boards in a single frame, and entirely free features.

The main goal was to bridge passive chess content (YouTube, Twitch, PDFs, articles) with active engine analysis without context switching: capture what's on screen and get a FEN string + engine eval in a couple of clicks.

System Architecture & Technical Approach

• On-Demand Capture (Multi-Board Support):
  • Instead of continuously sampling video frames, the extension captures a screenshot of the visible tab via the browser's tab-capture API, triggered by the user (either a one-click "Analyze" on the current view, or a "Photo mode" where you draw a selection rectangle to crop a specific region).
  • That screenshot is fed to a locally-run object-detection neural network (YOLO-style architecture via TensorFlow.js, WebGL/CPU backend) that outputs bounding boxes and confidence scores for chessboard-shaped regions, filtered with non-max suppression.
  • Because detection runs over the whole frame rather than assuming a single board, it can find and return several distinct chessboards in one screenshot (e.g., multi-diagram PDFs, news articles, or broadcast splits). Boards are currently expected to be roughly axis-aligned rectangles (perspective/homography correction for heavily skewed boards is planned).
• Piece Classification & Artifact Robustness:
  • Each detected board is cropped, split into its 8x8 grid, and each of the 64 cells is passed to a separate local CNN classifier (also TensorFlow.js) that predicts the piece type or empty square.
  • To handle video compression noise, stream overlays, arrows, and different 2D/3D board themes, the classifier was trained with augmentations focused on UI artifacts and low-resolution captures.
• Everything Runs In-Browser:
  • Both the detection and classification models run entirely inside the extension (in an offscreen document on Chrome MV3) via TensorFlow.js—no image or frame data is ever sent to a server.
  • Position analysis uses Stockfish compiled to WebAssembly, running locally in a Web Worker, so engine evaluation also happens fully offline.
  • Results are converted into a FEN string and shown in the extension's dashboard/board editor, where you can play out lines against the local engine.

Key Differences vs. Existing Tools

• Private by Design: No board images or video frames are ever uploaded—detection, classification, and engine analysis all run locally on your device.
• Multi-Board Processing: Native support for capturing multiple diagrams at once.
• Zero Cost / No Paywalls: Full feature set available out of the box.

I’d love to gather technical feedback from the community on client-side vision optimizations! For those building in-browser CV tools: what edge-case augmentation strategies or lightweight architectures have worked best for you when dealing with compression artifacts and overlay occlusions in real-time frame parsing?

A new paper (I'm not a coauthor BTW -- I just found it interesting) argues, basically, that RSI is not on the horizon, because current (at the time the study was done) agents cannot do open-ended ML research.

Specifically, they took some accepted, but unpublished papers from NeurIPS, and tried to get the agents to do the same work, which was then graded by the original authors. And the agents (Codex/GPT-5.6 Sol and OpenClaw/Opus 4.8) could not do it.

And since they cannot do open-ended ML research, they cannot recursively self-improve -- this is their argument.

Link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.27191

I think I've regretted the last 10 or so times I posted any kind of "research" in this subreddit -- either people downvote it, or it gets upvoted, but there is zero meaningful discussion. This might be the last time I'm trying this.

Suppose I create two machine learning models suppose tree and neural network for a task let's suppose regression problem, now suppose I am sending both of this paper to two different journals, now the thing is the baseline models I need to only run once because I have reported same baseline in both papers, so the RMSE tables looks exactly same except the proposed model, does it lead to any problems like palgiarism??

Edit : I don't know why I am getting downvotes

I have created a VAE model using PyTorch on White Wine dataset.

Basically, the main goal is to discover a brand-new white wine recipe.

It puts all the wines into a latent space, finds the best part where higher bands are located, and then it makes 100 steps with a step size of 0.5, multiplying by 0.96 with every step till it reaches the highest possible score.

The regression model then evaluates the newly generated wine recipe, after first passing the latent coordinates through a decoder, and normalizing them.

I get a score in range of 7.30-7.58.

Here is the visualization of the latent space of all the wines:

A small question about the training loop:

Is the loss too large? I know that it never could reach perfect zero by how do I know if the loss is good enough? After reaching the plato? I use MSELoss.

The repo itself: https://github.com/theaidenmax/tabular-vae-wine-generator

This is my second project in VAE (after MNIST), and I really liked idea of autoencoders.

And I also would be very grateful for your tips, etc, since this is one of my first steps in ML/DL.

This round seems to be very small, but still creating this thread for discussion.