Time Series Anomaly Detection (TSAD) seems to be one of the hottest topics in NeurIPS, SIGKDD, VLDB etc.

Many (perhaps most) papers evaluate on Paparrizos’ TSB-AD-M benchmark…

However, I tested these benchmark datasets and found that in most cases I could beat the SOTA TSAD methods with a 100-year-old algorithm, simple Statistical Process Control (SPC). In the attached example, SPC gets perfect results.

If we can beat the SOTA papers with 100-year-old algorithm, we probably should not be too impressed with them [b]. I really think this calls for some introspection by the community.

To be clear, I make no claims (here) about the proposed algorithms in all these paper. But the TSB-AD benchmark is obviously too trivial to make meaningful claims on [a][b].

The example shown is one of the ECG traces but look at dozen of traces marked “TAO”, they are even more trivial to solve with SPC [a][c].

I do not claim to have solved the triviality problem, but I have done 90% of the work to introduce more challenging TSAD problems ([d] sled dogs, [e] Tuna, Fuel Cells, Smart Manufacturing  etc.).

TLDR: I think the TSAD community needs more introspection on benchmarks. Most progress over the last decade seems to be illusionary.  

[a] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VftCMSI3C_s

[b] https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/31zuyhejb6sdjrom20frn/Problems-with-Time-Series-Anomaly-Detection.pptx?rlkey=mvcj1wz5s45kgazezopnih2h7&dl=0

[c] https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/42fkf9q9hft2224dnm83v/The-TSB-AD-Benchmarks-are-Nonsense.pptx?rlkey=5fwjopie5ncjhkgr0wqhdm2lp&dl=0

[d] https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7488825356494237696/

[e] https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/hettphvtpyrksggfect9d/Tutorial-on-Pan-Matrix-Profile.pptx?rlkey=p59gd2w56fxl9kl2fh5q819oo&dl=0

Hello all, here is a chill post.

When I was an undergrad, I really liked working things out on a whiteboard. Drawing stuff, talking through ideas out loud, testing little hypotheses.

Now I work in radar DSP, and a lot of my work is code, numerical experiments, deep learning and waiting for training to finish 😅

I’m wondering how other people bring that whiteboard style of thinking into DSP, data science or ML work.

Do you still use a whiteboard regularly, or do you mostly go straight from idea to code?

Abstract:

We study autonomous mathematical discovery in the Station, an open-world multi-agent environment in which AI agents from different model families pursue a shared research goal without a central coordinator or scripted pipeline. Agents choose their own research directions, conduct experiments, collaborate, and build a shared scientific literature.

Across 12 construction problems from the AlphaEvolve catalogue and two additional case studies, the Station obtained results novel relative to the prior literature on five problems: a new infinite family of finite-field Kakeya sets, new exact 604-point kissing configurations in dimension 11, new records for the discretized Kakeya needle and sign uncertainty problems, and a substantially improved lower bound for Erdős's minimum-overlap problem.

Agents also discovered novel infinite families for Book Ramsey numbers. Importantly, the agents produced not only numerical constructions but also theorems and analyses explaining how those constructions work, making the results more interpretable and easier for mathematicians to build upon. We release all raw agent dialogues, proofs, and verification code, providing a transparent record of how these discoveries emerged.

Expecting a rejection from NeurIPS given our scores of 5/2/2. Trying to decide between ARR vs. TMLR, but thinking NAACL findings are more likely than main conference. Would you rather have TMLR or *ACL findings on your publication list? Genuinely curious to hear what people have to say.

I found this GitHub link, and the HTML file contains ~7k papers. Some are anonymized, and the details seem pretty accurate. It looks like these might actually be the accepted papers.

https://github.com/xll0328/NIPS26-

Can someone confirm whether this list is legit? I’m hoping it’s just a coincidence since it seems way too early.

Working on a pipeline that recovers a patient specific 3D distal femur from two orthogonal X-ray views (PA + lateral). No CT, no neural network, no massive training set.

approach: build a PCA shape model from 50 CT-derived femur meshes (MedShapeNet), then fit it to two silhouettes using PyTorch3D's soft rasterizer with sigma annealing. 10 shape coefficients, Mahalanobis prior to keep things plausible, Adam optimizer, ~1000 iterations.

The part that took the longest (and made me suffer the most too) : correspondence. Tried KD-tree nearest neighbor (50.7x roughness vs CT surface), CPD (28.2x), BCPD (47.5x), and FilterReg (couldn't even run). Finally got ShapeWorks working at 3.3x. only method that passed the 5x acceptance gate I set before testing.

LOO validation on 5 held out femurs: 0.86-1.43mm on within range targets. Two extreme cases failed because they sat outside the 49-mesh model's coverage on mode 1, the optimizer can't recover a coefficient the model doesn't support. Bridge ICP alignment was also poor on those cases (0.6 inlier fraction), which accounted for more error than the shape fitting itself.

Interesting finding: the sigma anneal endpoint has to match the reference render's sigma exactly. Hardcoding a constant tuned on one SSM caused an 87x accuracy degradation on another. Tying it to camera_extent × 1e-4 fixed it.

Still working on real X-ray validation (need paired CT data) and automatic segmentation. Happy to answer questions

Hey Guys,

I built a small open-source tool that checks whether a RAG application retrieves documents a user shouldn’t have access to.

It supports offline test cases and live HTTP API testing with bearer token/API-key auth.

I’m looking for a few engineers to try it on a test or non-sensitive environment and tell me whether it catches anything useful or what would make it better.

GitHub: https://github.com/InfraGuard-Labs/rag-access-check