Research Readings

A curated list of research papers I’m reading or have read, organized by topic. Each entry includes links, brief notes. And I plan to port summaries from my ipad in the near future.

Mechanistic Interpretability

Title	Authors	Year	Notes
A Mathematical Framework for Transformer Circuits	Olah et al.	2021
Toy Models of Superposition	Elhage et al.	2022
Scaling and Evaluating Sparse Autoencoders	Gao et al.	2024

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(Causal)Representation Learning

Title	Authors	Year	Notes
Beta-VAE: Learning Basic Visual Concepts	Higgins et al.	2017	KL Divergence Penalty term to a standard VAE loss func

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Streaming / Encoding

Title	Authors	Org	Year	Notes
Complexity-Based Consistent-Quality Encoding In The Cloud	De Cock et al.	Netflix	2016	Tradeoffs between per title encoding vs per chunk encoding; bitrate ladder per title
Fast algorithm for HDR video pre-processing	Andrey Norkin.	Netflix	2016	Better performance over iterative method; Root Cause: non linear transfer func in HDR10 in low luminance ranges; Still computes pixel to pixel (ig pre DL)
Film Grain Synthesis for AV1 Video Codec	Andrey Norkin.	Netflix	2018	Autoregressive Model for modelling film grain. Properties of grain: non temporal, spatial correlations, only on smooth regions. Color Componenets unclear. Is it slow because of autoregressive nature? Potential for DL?

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