The BAIR Blog
Figure 1: CUDA-to-MLX optimization translation map. CUDA optimization knowledge can be translated into architecture-native MLX strategies rather than copied instruction-for-instruction. We face a new epoch in computing. Hardware is changing rapidly — not just faster GPUs, but a growing range of chips from different vendors, each with its own architecture and often tailored to specific AI…
Overview of ABBEL compared to traditional recursive summarization. Beliefs replace the full interaction history as the agent’s working context, and belief grading improves performance by supervising the contents of each belief state.. As task horizons grow, LLM contexts can’t scale forever. Self-summarization enables concise, interpretable contexts, but at a significant performance cost,…
... government of the people, by the people, for the people ... — Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address (1863) The cost of AI is dropping rapidly. GPT-4-class capabilities cost roughly $30 per million tokens in early 2023; today the same runs under $1 , and some providers are pushing costs below $0.10 . Across benchmarks, inference prices have fallen between 9x and 900x per year , with a…
Congratulations to the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research (BAIR) Lab class of 2026! This year, BAIR celebrates another remarkable group of Ph.D. graduates whose curiosity, creativity, and perseverance have pushed the frontiers of artificial intelligence and machine learning. Their work spans the breadth of modern AI — robotics and embodied intelligence, large language models and reasoning,…
Overview of adaptive parallel reasoning. What if a reasoning model could decide for itself when to decompose and parallelize independent subtasks, how many concurrent threads to spawn, and how to coordinate them based on the problem at hand? We provide a detailed analysis of recent progress in the field of parallel reasoning, especially Adaptive Parallel Reasoning. Disclosure: this post is part…
GRASP is a new gradient-based planner for learned dynamics (a “world model”) that makes long-horizon planning practical by (1) lifting the trajectory into virtual states so optimization is parallel across time, (2) adding stochasticity directly to the state iterates for exploration, and (3) reshaping gradients so actions get clean signals while we avoid brittle “state-input” gradients through…
--> Understanding the behavior of complex machine learning systems, particularly Large Language Models (LLMs), is a critical challenge in modern artificial intelligence. Interpretability research aims to make the decision-making process more transparent to model builders and impacted humans, a step toward safer and more trustworthy AI. To gain a comprehensive understanding, we can analyze these…
An encoder (optical system) maps objects to noiseless images, which noise corrupts into measurements. Our information estimator uses only these noisy measurements and a noise model to quantify how well measurements distinguish objects. Many imaging systems produce measurements that humans never see or cannot interpret directly. Your smartphone processes raw sensor data through algorithms before…
In this post, I’ll introduce a reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm based on an “alternative” paradigm: divide and conquer . Unlike traditional methods, this algorithm is not based on temporal difference (TD) learning (which has scalability challenges ), and scales well to long-horizon tasks. We can do Reinforcement Learning (RL) based on divide and conquer, instead of temporal difference (TD)…
What exactly does word2vec learn, and how? Answering this question amounts to understanding representation learning in a minimal yet interesting language modeling task. Despite the fact that word2vec is a well-known precursor to modern language models, for many years, researchers lacked a quantitative and predictive theory describing its learning process. In our new paper , we finally provide such…