Henry Smith (@smithhenryd) profile picture

Statistics PhD Student, Knight-Hennessy Scholar, and NSF Fellow @Stanford | Previously @Yale | he/him

Stanford, CA
Joined October 2025
Photo by Henry Smith (@smithhenryd)Photo by Henry Smith (@smithhenryd)Photo by Henry Smith (@smithhenryd)Photo by Henry Smith (@smithhenryd)Photo by Henry Smith (@smithhenryd)Photo by Henry Smith (@smithhenryd)
Coming to @NeurIPSConf 2026: Can you learn dynamics from noisy observations ๐˜„๐—ถ๐˜๐—ต๐—ผ๐˜‚๐˜ ๐—ป๐˜‚๐—บ๐—ฒ๐—ฟ๐—ถ๐—ฐ๐—ฎ๐—น ๐˜€๐—ถ๐—บ๐˜‚๐—น๐—ฎ๐˜๐—ถ๐—ผ๐—ป? Yes, and just as accurately as you can with simulation! Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2606.16138 Code: github.com/lindermanlab/helmโ€ฆ Thread๐Ÿงต
2
39
3
218
18,703
Amazing work by @nate_diamant and collaborators. Check out SMFNet!
1/4 One DNA sequence, many chromatin states. Excited to share SMFNet, a diffusion model predicting single-molecule chromatin accessibility. Explainer video below! With co-first author Till (his thread: bsky.app/profile/tschwammle.โ€ฆ), Yuliya, Roze, @anshulkundaje & Arnaud Krebs.
1
7
383
Henry Smith retweeted
1/5 Cryo-EM gives high-resolution RNA structures, but only when high Mgยฒโบ freezes out their motion. At physiological conditions, RNAs are dynamic and 3D reconstruction fails. Can we still learn their folding equilibria? New preprint: yes, straight from the raw particle images๐Ÿ‘‡
3
34
3
130
7,112
I'm excited to share this new work led by @smithhenryd! We develop Helmholtz-SDE, a faster and more accurate simulation-free inference algorithm for latent SDEs. The animation below speaks for itself!
Coming to @NeurIPSConf 2026: Can you learn dynamics from noisy observations ๐˜„๐—ถ๐˜๐—ต๐—ผ๐˜‚๐˜ ๐—ป๐˜‚๐—บ๐—ฒ๐—ฟ๐—ถ๐—ฐ๐—ฎ๐—น ๐˜€๐—ถ๐—บ๐˜‚๐—น๐—ฎ๐˜๐—ถ๐—ผ๐—ป? Yes, and just as accurately as you can with simulation! Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2606.16138 Code: github.com/lindermanlab/helmโ€ฆ Thread๐Ÿงต
9
8
85
3,652
Does this matter for real systems? On experimental predator-prey data (Blasius et al., 2020), Helmholtz-SDE recovers the cycle period and predator lag (6.9 / 1.7 days vs. empirical 6.7 / 1.7), while SDE Matchingโ€™s dynamics decay to a fixed point.
2
4
275
This work was done in collaboration with my wonderful advisors Brian Trippe @brianltrippe and Scott Linderman @scott_linderman. Interested in learning more about Helmholtz-SDE? Reach out via DM or visit our poster in Sydney on Wednesday, Dec 9 from 5-8 PM AEDT!
1
5
267
Same marginals. Different dynamics. Gaussian Flow Dynamics + Gauge Matching learn temporal structure beyond one-time marginals, enabling more flexible, simulation-free neural SDE learning in continuous physical time. arxiv.org/abs/2610.04390 #PhysicalTime #SDE #ML #GenAI
2
8
44
2,364
Thank you for the highlight @canaesseth! We are excited that simulation-free VI for latent SDEs can match the performance of simulation-based VI at a fraction of the runtime. ๐ŸŽ๏ธ๐Ÿ’จ
2
5
523
Henry Smith retweeted
Softmax attention is expressive, but its KV cache grows with sequence length. Linear attention keeps a fixed state size, but is less expressive. In our #COLM2026 paper, Switching Linear Attention (SwiLA) gets the best of both worlds by switching among multiple linear maps ๐Ÿงต
9
72
4
454
21,510
Henry Smith retweeted
How do we make quasi-Newton optimization methods practical for modern deep learning? New preprint with @jooko303 @tanyaisanumber @gowerrobert on SoftServe -- a quasi-Newton method that designed for non-convex objectives, while also scaling to very large neural networks.
3
18
2
96
6,528
Joining the NeurIPS celebration: our curse of ambiguity paper will be a spotlight ๐ŸŽ‰ We show that high entropy tokens need 1. More capacity to store 2. Larger embeddings to be represented 3. More training steps 4. More samples to reduce sampling noise Scaling laws study performance averaged over all tokens in the data; our work zooms in and sheds some light onto which tokens are harder to learn ๐Ÿ”ฌ
We often ask how hard a task is for an LLM to learn, but what about individual tokens? Our new paper w/ @scott_linderman @hyundongleee digs into that question and reveals a curse of ambiguity: contexts with multiple possible next tokens are harder for LLMs to learn.
2
13
2
105
6,390
Henry Smith retweeted
New @open_rss blog (rs-station.github.io/2026/08โ€ฆ) on a question weโ€™ve been thinking about a lot: what information about a molecular ensemble survives measurement and processing? @PilarCossio2 @EmilThomasen A fuzzy cryo-EM map is not itself an ensemble. But an averaged measurement is not limited to an average structure either. We use ensemble resolution to frame the better question: what differences between molecular distributions can the data actually distinguish?
2
8
3
41
8,560
We often ask how hard a task is for an LLM to learn, but what about individual tokens? Our new paper w/ @scott_linderman @hyundongleee digs into that question and reveals a curse of ambiguity: contexts with multiple possible next tokens are harder for LLMs to learn.
6
12
4
76
15,843