Benno Krojer
bennokrojer.bsky.social
Benno Krojer
@bennokrojer.bsky.social
AI PhDing at Mila/McGill (prev FAIR intern). Happily residing in Montreal 🥯❄️

Academic: language grounding, vision+language, interp, rigorous & creative evals, cogsci

Other: many sports, urban explorations, puzzles/quizzes

bennokrojer.com
Pinned
Restarting an old routine "Daily Dose of Good Papers" together w @vaibhavadlakha.bsky.social

Sharing my notes and thoughts here 🧵
Couldn't have wished for a better place to do my PhD, come apply!
Mila's annual supervision request process is now open to receive MSc and PhD applications for Fall 2026 admission! For more information, visit mila.quebec/en/prospecti...
October 15, 2025 at 1:27 PM
I'll be at COLM!

Excited to chat about about anything vision+language, interpretability, cogsci/psych, embedding spaces, visual reasoning, video/world models
October 7, 2025 at 2:59 AM
Devoured this book in 18 hours, usually not a big fan of audio books!

It covered lots from crowdworker rights, the ideologies (doomers, EA, ...) and the silicon valley startup world to the many big egos and company-internal battles

Great work by @karenhao.bsky.social
September 22, 2025 at 2:34 AM
Lmao
September 12, 2025 at 1:56 AM
Reposted by Benno Krojer
Congratulations @bennokrojer.bsky.social on passing your PhD proposal exam! A great presentation and exciting work!
August 21, 2025 at 2:17 AM
very happy to see the trend of a Behind the Scenes section catching on! transparent & honest science 👌

love the detailed montreal spots mentioned

consider including such a section in your next appendix!

(paper by @a-krishnan.bsky.social arxiv.org/pdf/2504.050...)
August 13, 2025 at 12:19 PM
Super cool work on quantifying with NLP how language evolves through generations

In linguistics, the "apparent time hypothesis" famously discusses this but never empirically tests it
Our new paper in #PNAS (bit.ly/4fcWfma) presents a surprising finding—when words change meaning, older speakers rapidly adopt the new usage; inter-generational differences are often minor.

w/ Michelle Yang, ‪@sivareddyg.bsky.social‬ , @msonderegger.bsky.social‬ and @dallascard.bsky.social‬👇(1/12)
July 29, 2025 at 4:02 PM
Reposted by Benno Krojer
I miss Edinburgh and its wonderful people already!! Thanks to @tallinzen.bsky.social and @edoardo-ponti.bsky.social for inspiring discussions during the viva! I'm now exchanging Arthur's Seat for Mont Royal to join @sivareddyg.bsky.social's wonderful lab @mila-quebec.bsky.social 🤩
Huge congratulations to Dr. @vernadankers.bsky.social for passing her viva today! 🥳🎓

It's truly been an honour sharing the PhD journey with you. I wasn’t ready for the void your sudden departure left (in the office and in my life!).
Your new colleagues are lucky to have you! 🥺🥰
July 1, 2025 at 9:33 PM
Started a new podcast with @tomvergara.bsky.social !

Behind the Research of AI:
We look behind the scenes, beyond the polished papers 🧐🧪

If this sounds fun, check out our first "official" episode with the awesome Gauthier Gidel
from @mila-quebec.bsky.social :

open.spotify.com/episode/7oTc...
02 | Gauthier Gidel: Bridging Theory and Deep Learning, Vibes at Mila, and the Effects of AI on Art
Behind the Research of AI · Episode
open.spotify.com
June 25, 2025 at 3:54 PM
Turns out condensing your research into 3min is very hard but also teaches you a lot

Finally the video from Mila's speed science competition is on YouTube!

From a soup of raw pixels to abstract meaning

t.co/RDpu1kR7jM
June 20, 2025 at 3:54 PM
Excited to share the results of my recent internship!

We ask 🤔
What subtle shortcuts are VideoLLMs taking on spatio-temporal questions?

And how can we instead curate shortcut-robust examples at a large-scale?

We release: MVPBench

Details 👇🔬
June 13, 2025 at 2:47 PM
Top 99% in Boston 💪

Love these interactive maps
May 30, 2025 at 3:32 PM
When you forget your leftover rice in the fridge for 3 weeks
May 29, 2025 at 1:09 AM
Maybe it's just that I'm now paying more attention to the good parts again but since this post bluesky seems more fun again. Still not many paper discussions going on but saw some fun general posts
It was tough just logging back into my retired twitter account and to see a timeline that is so much fuller with interesting research discourse...

And yes I've tried to customizing my feeds and whatnot but no feed can fix a lack of posts
May 27, 2025 at 11:11 PM
It was tough just logging back into my retired twitter account and to see a timeline that is so much fuller with interesting research discourse...

And yes I've tried to customizing my feeds and whatnot but no feed can fix a lack of posts
May 27, 2025 at 5:16 PM
I finish my work day with the conclusion that code assistants are maybe net negative for my short-term progress and most likely negative for my long-term progress and learning

Also sycophancy is annoying af
May 22, 2025 at 9:57 PM
Attend my AI 2025 bootcamp
May 19, 2025 at 8:17 PM
Reposted by Benno Krojer
This pattern is going to repeat in one domain after another, and gradually force us to admit that 60% of every job is networking, knowing who to trust, and doing poorly justified risk/benefit assessment.
The “AI Scientist” work, while interesting, sort of mischaracterizes the process of science as generating hypotheses and running experiments. The actual thing is so much more interesting: interpreting unclear evidence, reasoning about unsteady foundations, etc.
May 12, 2025 at 2:01 PM
with great responsibility comes a great amount of reimbursements to file
May 9, 2025 at 1:46 AM
are there any analysis/interp papers on image editing? papers that are more insights than performance
May 6, 2025 at 9:10 PM
Day 13:
(the original mega-thread has become too long and nested so reposting now as a new strategy)

Patchscopes: A Unifying Framework for Inspecting
Hidden Representations of Language Models

A few notes below 👇 I took less digital notes this time as i was sitting outside in the sun reading 🌞
May 5, 2025 at 9:40 PM
Reposted by Benno Krojer
This is one of the most-shared posts on Bluesky in the past day and it's just completely false. You might think ChatGPT is a *bad* search engine, or prefer another search engine. But it has had integrated web search since last year.
May 1, 2025 at 5:26 PM
A must-read for anyone in NLP right now
May 1, 2025 at 4:00 PM
Great work from labmates on LLMs vs humans regarding linguistic preferences: You know when a sentence kind of feels off e.g. "I met at the park the man". So in what ways do LLMs follow these human intuitions?
Congratulations to Mila members @adadtur.bsky.social , Gaurav Kamath and @sivareddyg.bsky.social for their SAC award at NAACL! Check out Ada's talk in Session I: Oral/Poster 6. Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2502.05670
May 1, 2025 at 3:04 PM
I would only use if it there were direct verbatim quotes from sources mentioned as the primary answer. Otherwise same, scroll past it
When I use Google now I just automatically scroll past the AI summaries like they’re banner ads
This is really important. Do NOT use the AI summaries at the top of google searches. Ignore them. This is especially important if you don't have any prior knowledge about the topic, but also a good general rule.

Search sources, scrutinize them carefully and double-check with other sources.
April 27, 2025 at 1:36 PM