Chronological feed of everything captured from Nat Friedman.
paper / nat-friedman / Jun 6
This paper demonstrates a working antiferromagnetic (AFM) magnetic memory scheme using patterned iron-rhodium (FeRh) thin films, imaged under ambient conditions via quantum diamond microscopes (QDMs). The key mechanistic finding is that pinned uncompensated magnetic moments (UMMs) in the FeRh structure create a deterministic coupling between the ferromagnetic (FM) magnetization vector and the antiferromagnetic Néel vector, meaning magnetic orientation is preserved as the material cycles between phases. This provides the foundational mechanism for practical HAMR-compatible AFM memory, with FeRh's sharper phase transition and lower write temperature offering engineering advantages over competing materials.
magnetic-memoryiron-rhodiumantiferromagneticquantum-sensingmaterials-sciencephase-transitionthin-film
“The FM magnetization orientation in FeRh uniquely determines the Néel vector direction in the AFM phase due to pinned uncompensated magnetic moments (UMMs).”
paper / nat-friedman / Jun 6
A group of 49 mathematicians created a curated benchmark of 100 research-level math problems with known answers, evaluated across three stages of LLM testing. A single-attempt pass left 41 problems unsolved; repeated sampling (20 runs/model) reduced that to 16; and "heavy-thinking" models in a final stage left only 2 unsolved. The results suggest that with sufficient sampling budget and advanced reasoning models, frontier LLMs are approaching near-complete coverage of research-grade mathematical benchmarks, raising questions about benchmark saturation in this domain.
ai-evalsllm-benchmarksmathematical-reasoningllm-capabilitiesmath-researchbenchmark-dataset
“After a single attempt by five state-of-the-art LLMs, 41 out of 100 research-level math questions remained completely unsolved.”
paper / nat-friedman / May 31
A Mn₃₊ₓSn₁₋ₓ/Bi₀.₈₅Sb₀.₁₅ heterostructure demonstrates that a hybridized topological state at the WSM/TI interface can restore Weyl node magnetotransport suppressed by ferromagnetic defect phases in the WSM layer. Ferromagnetic disorder in Mn₃₊ₓSn₁₋ₓ films eliminates the anomalous Hall effect signature of topological Weyl node conduction, but deposition of a Bi₀.₈₅Sb₀.₁₅ topological insulator overlayer recovers this signal — an effect not replicated by non-topological heavy metal overlayers. This interface-specific recovery is attributed to hybridization between the WSM Fermi arc states and TI surface states, offering a materials pathway to engineer robust topological transport in polycrystalline, sputter-grown systems.
topological-materialsweyl-semimetaltopological-insulatormagnetotransportheterostructurescondensed-matter-physicsanomalous-hall-effect
“Polycrystalline Mn₃₊ₓSn₁₋ₓ films grown by HiTUS exhibit a negative coefficient anomalous Hall effect (AHE) indicative of topological Weyl node transport.”
paper / nat-friedman / May 31
This paper presents a dynamic programming algorithm for the r-edge interdiction covering problem (REIC) — removing up to r edges to maximally disconnect customers from facilities — achieving O(nr²) time on trees, a dramatic improvement over the prior O(n⁷r) algorithm by Fröhlich and Ruzika. The algorithm extends to graphs of bounded treewidth with the same O(nr²) runtime. The authors also introduce RFIC (r-facility interdiction), prove it NP-complete via reduction to the minimum p-union problem, and give an O(nr²) tree algorithm for it, yielding an O(n³) algorithm for the small set bipartite vertex expansion (SSBVE) problem on trees. Empirical benchmarks against Gurobi and the Fröhlich-Ruzika baseline confirm the new algorithm is significantly faster and less sensitive to network topology and size.
graph-algorithmsdynamic-programmingnetwork-interdictiontreewidthcombinatorial-optimizationcomputational-complexitydata-structures
“The proposed dynamic programming algorithm solves REIC on trees in O(nr²) time, compared to the prior best of O(n⁷r).”
paper / nat-friedman / May 31
Late-interaction models like ColBERT and ColPali compute relevance via the MaxSim operator, which naively requires materializing a full query-token × document-token similarity tensor — reaching 21 GB in FP16 for just 10K ColPali documents, exhausting GPU memory. Flash-MaxSim resolves this by fusing the similarity computation and row-maximum reduction into a single tiled SRAM-resident pass, never writing the intermediate tensor to HBM. The approach extends to the backward pass, INT8 quantization, and variable-length (padding-free) scoring, yielding up to 4.7× speedup and ~28× training memory reduction with exact ranking preservation.
information-retrievalgpu-optimizationcolbertlate-interactionkernel-engineeringllm-infrastructurevector-search
“The naive MaxSim implementation for ColPali at 10K documents requires 21 GB of GPU memory in FP16 solely for the intermediate similarity tensor.”
paper / nat-friedman / May 10 / failed
paper / nat-friedman / May 10 / failed
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tweet / @natfriedman / May 8 / failed
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tweet / @natfriedman / May 8 / failed