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lmcinnes

> alignment tooling is fascinating, as we increasingly want to re-fit->embed over time as our envs change and compare, eg, day-over-day analysis. This area is not well-defined yet common for anyone operational so seems ripe for innovation

It is probably not all the things you want, but AlignedUMAP can do some of this right now: https://umap-learn.readthedocs.io/en/latest/aligned_umap_bas...

If you want to do better than that, I would suggest that the quite new landmarked parametric UMAP options are actually very good this: https://umap-learn.readthedocs.io/en/latest/transform_landma...

Training the parametric UMAP is a little more expensive, but the new landmarked based updating really does allow you to steadily update with new data and have new clusters appear as required. Happy to chat as always, so reach out if you haven't already looked at this and it seems interesting.

Re:If nothing is curated, how do we find things on Saturday May 17, 2025 @02:05PM (#44015948)
> And algorithms can only predict content that you've seen before. It'll never surprise you with something different. It keeps you in a little bubble.

This is not true at all, algorithms can predict things you haven't seen before, and can take you well outside your bubble. A lot of the existing recommendation algorithms on social media etc. do keep you in a bubble, but that's a very specific choice 'cause apparently that's where the money is at. There's enough work in multi-armed-bandit explore/exploit systems that we definitely could have excellent algorithms that do exactly the kind of curation the author would like. The issue is not algorithms, but rather incentives on media recommendation and consumption. People say they would like something new, but they keep going back to the places that feed them more of the comfortable same.

Re:Embeddings Are Underrated on Saturday November 02, 2024 @10:10PM (#42030725)
Assuming you have a dimension-reduction or manifold learning tool of choice (UMAP,PacMAP,t-SNE,PyMDE,etc.) then DataMapPlot (https://datamapplot.readthedocs.io/en/latest/) is a library specifically designed to make visualizations of the outputs of your dimension reduction.
If you just want in-memory then PyNNDescent (https://github.com/lmcinnes/pynndescent) can work pretty well. It should install easily with pip, works well at the scales you mention, and supports a large number of metrics, including cosine.

Show HN: Exploring five million Hacker News posts

https://lmcinnes.github.io/datamapplot_examples/hackernews/

This is a data map providing a view of all Hacker News stories with a score of at least 2 (to remove most of the spam). Stories are close together in the map if they have semantically similar titles. In the bottom left is a histogram of stories over time. Hovering on a bar will select stories from that year, and dragging a selection allows selecting multiple years. A keyword based text search...

( Read More... | no comments | 2 points | on HN )

Show HN: An interactive explorable map of 5M Hacker News stories

https://lmcinnes.github.io/datamapplot_examples/hackernews/

This is a data map providing a view of all HackerNews stories with a score of at least 2 (to remove most of the spam). Stories are close together in the map if they have semantically similar titles. In the bottom left is a histogram of stories over time. Hovering on a bar will select stories from that year, and dragging a selection allows selecting multiple years. A keyword based text search is...

( Read More... | no comments | 3 points | on HN )
For suitable specialized cases thins can be quite efficient. For persistent H_0 of VR-complexes in low-dimensional space there is an O(N log(N)) algorithm for N data points; that's decently fast. If you want H_1 I believe (but cannot prove) that there exists an O(N^2 log(N)) algorithm. Beyond H_1 things get painful. Since most PH software is written for general cases they don't tend to avail themselves of these special case shortcuts. Given that H_0 and H_1 of VR-complexes of low dimensional data covers a vast amount of the use cases I think specialized code for this would be worthwhile.
Re:How UMAP Works on Sunday July 04, 2021 @10:37AM (#27729927)
It is really not that much slower for training (see the paper), and if you are interested in pipelines the difference is not so great considering you are looking at a one off training time vs. lots of inference.
Re:How UMAP Works on Saturday July 03, 2021 @06:17PM (#27725396)
If this is a thing you want to be able to do efficiently then ParametricUMAP (see [docs](https://umap-learn.readthedocs.io/en/latest/parametric_umap....) and [the paper](https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.12981)) will be very effective. It uses a neural network to learn a mapping directly from data to embedding space using a UMAP loss. Pushing new data through is only slightly more expensive than PCA, so being part of an inference pipeline is fine.
Density based clustering with high dimensional data will tend to struggle. This is because, in high enough dimensions, you need a lot of samples to see any density. Also distances start to look very similar (from the curse of dimensionality). To get any traction on such things you need some form of dimension reduction. For something like this non-linear techniques are going to be better. If you want a pipeline of standard parts then something like:

Pretrained-CNN --> UMAP --> HDBSCAN

can turn out relatively reasonable results, especially if the UMAP you use for the clustering is to more than 2 or 3 dimensions (often 5 to 20 is good, depending on the data). You can, of course, still use a 2D UMAP to visualize the results. If you want such a pipeline packaged up then consider the PixPlot package, designed for exactly this use case, from the Yale Digital Humanities Lab: https://github.com/YaleDHLab/pix-plot

* Disclaimer: I am highly biased, as an author of both HDBSCAN and UMAP implementations.

Re:GPT-2 and the Nature of Intelligence on Sunday January 26, 2020 @05:22AM (#22151392)
I suspect that this is because GPT-2 doesn't have any overarching narrative that it is piecing together. Ultimately it is like a super-powerful Markov based text generator -- predicting what comes next from what has come before. It has longer "memory" than a Markov model, and a lot more complexity, but where a person often formulates a plan for the next few sentences and the direction they should go, GPT-2 doesn't really work that way. And hence it sounds like dream logic because in dreams your brain is just throwing together "what comes next" without an overall plan. Of course your brain is also back-patching and retconning all sorts of stuff in dreams too, but that's a different matter.

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