Lester Mackey
@lestermackey.bsky.social
150 followers 17 following 13 posts
Machine learning researcher at Microsoft Research. Adjunct professor at Stanford.
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lestermackey.bsky.social
Why permute when you can cheaply permute?
Reposted by Lester Mackey
djfoster.bsky.social
Microsoft Research New York City (www.microsoft.com/en-us/resear...) is seeking applicants for multiple Postdoctoral Researcher positions in ML/AI!

These are positions for up to 2 years, starting in July 2026.

Application deadline: October 22, 2025
Microsoft Research Lab - New York City - Microsoft Research
Apply for a research position at Microsoft Research New York & collaborate with academia to advance economics research, prediction markets & ML.
www.microsoft.com
Reposted by Lester Mackey
arcampbell.bsky.social
Very excited to share our preprint: Self-Speculative Masked Diffusions

We speed up sampling of masked diffusion models by ~2x by using speculative sampling and a hybrid non-causal / causal transformer

arxiv.org/abs/2510.03929

w/ @vdebortoli.bsky.social, Jiaxin Shi, @arnauddoucet.bsky.social
lestermackey.bsky.social
Could this be our future? (Sound on)
Reposted by Lester Mackey
msftresearch.bsky.social
The Microsoft Research Undergraduate Internship Program offers 12-week internships in our Redmond, NYC, or New England labs for rising juniors and seniors who are passionate about technology. Apply by October 6: msft.it/6015scgSJ
lestermackey.bsky.social
If you're an undergraduate interested in interning with me or one of my amazing colleagues at Microsoft Research New England this summer, please apply here: msft.it/6015scgSJ
Reposted by Lester Mackey
rociomer.bsky.social
Tomorrow we're excited to host @sarahalamdari.bsky.social at Chalmers for the AI4Science seminar and hear about generative models for protein design! Talk at 3pm CEST. 🤩

For more info, including details on how to join virtually, please see psolsson.github.io/AI4ScienceSe...

@smnlssn.bsky.social
Reposted by Lester Mackey
nancybaym.bsky.social
We may have the chance to hire an outstanding researcher 3+ years post PhD to join Tarleton Gillespie, Mary Gray and me in Cambridge MA bringing critical sociotechnical perspectives to bear on new technologies.

jobs.careers.microsoft.com/global/en/jo...
Search Jobs | Microsoft Careers
https://jobs.careers.microsoft.com/global/en/job/1849026/Principal-Researcher-–-Sociotechnical-Systems-–-Microsoft-Research
Reposted by Lester Mackey
kevinkaichuang.bsky.social
In 1965, Margaret Dayhoff published the Atlas of Protein Sequence and Structure, which collated the 65 proteins whose amino acid sequences were then known.

Inspired by that Atlas, today we are releasing the Dayhoff Atlas of protein sequence data and protein language models.
Reposted by Lester Mackey
ab-carrell.bsky.social
So you want to skip our thinning proofs—but you’d still like our out-of-the-box attention speedups? I’ll be presenting the Thinformer at two ICML workshop posters tomorrow!

Catch me at Es-FoMo (1-2:30, East hall A) and at LCFM (10:45-11:30 & 3:30-4:30, West 202-204)
ab-carrell.bsky.social
Your data is low-rank, so stop wasting compute! In our new paper on low-rank thinning, we share one weird trick to speed up Transformer inference, SGD training, and hypothesis testing at scale. Come by ICML poster W-1012 Tuesday at 4:30!
lestermackey.bsky.social
New guarantees for approximating attention, accelerating SGD, and testing sample quality in near-linear time
Reposted by Lester Mackey
statml-bot.bsky.social
Jikai Jin, Lester Mackey, Vasilis Syrgkanis: It's Hard to Be Normal: The Impact of Noise on Structure-agnostic Estimation https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.02275 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.02275 https://arxiv.org/html/2507.02275
Reposted by Lester Mackey
Reposted by Lester Mackey
ab-carrell.bsky.social
Your data is low-rank, so stop wasting compute! In our new paper on low-rank thinning, we share one weird trick to speed up Transformer inference, SGD training, and hypothesis testing at scale. Come by ICML poster W-1012 Tuesday at 4:30!
lestermackey.bsky.social
New guarantees for approximating attention, accelerating SGD, and testing sample quality in near-linear time
https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.12063
Reposted by Lester Mackey
arxiv-stat-ml.bsky.social
Jikai Jin, Lester Mackey, Vasilis Syrgkanis
It's Hard to Be Normal: The Impact of Noise on Structure-agnostic Estimation
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.02275
Reposted by Lester Mackey
neuripsconf.bsky.social
NeurIPS is seeking additional ethics reviewers this year. If you are able and willing to participate in the review process, please sign up at the form in the link:
neurips.cc/Conferences/...
Please share this call with your colleagues!
2025 Call For Ethics Reviewers
If you are able and willing to participate in the review process, please sign up at this form. Feel free to share this call with your colleagues.
neurips.cc
lestermackey.bsky.social
If you’d like to expand your analysis to support equal weighted kernel thinning coresets, have a look at Low-Rank Thinning (arxiv.org/pdf/2502.12063); that bounds kernel thinning MMD directly in terms of eigenvalue decay
arxiv.org
Reposted by Lester Mackey
🏆 I'm delighted to share that I've won a 2025 COPSS Emerging Leader Award! 😃 And congratulations to my fellow winners! 🙌🏽

Check out how each of us is improving and advancing the profession of #statistics and #datascience here: tinyurl.com/copss-emerging-leader-award
Reposted by Lester Mackey
tyk314.net
Congratulations to the 2025 #COPSS Awardees, @ericjdaza.com, @lucystats.bsky.social, @lestermackey.bsky.social, and all of you. I hope to congratulate you at #JSM2025 in Nashville with @amstatnews.bsky.social. God I hope to go. #rstats #statssky
🏆 I'm delighted to share that I've won a 2025 COPSS Emerging Leader Award! 😃 And congratulations to my fellow winners! 🙌🏽

Check out how each of us is improving and advancing the profession of #statistics and #datascience here: tinyurl.com/copss-emerging-leader-award
Reposted by Lester Mackey
neuripsconf.bsky.social
NeurIPS 2025 is soliciting self-nominations for reviewers and ACs. Please read our blog post for details on eligibility criteria, and process to self-nominate:
Self-nomination for reviewing at NeurIPS 2025 – NeurIPS Blog
Communications Chairs 2025 2025 Conference
blog.neurips.cc