Jennifer I-Hsiu Li

James Boyko, Joseph Cohen, Nathan Fox et al.

In this paper, we describe the capabilities and constraints of Large Language Models (LLMs) within disparate academic disciplines, aiming to delineate their strengths and limitations with precision. We examine how LLMs augment scientific inquiry, offering concrete examples such as accelerating literature review by summarizing vast numbers of publications, enhancing code development through automated syntax correction, and refining the scientific writing process. Simultaneously, we articulate the challenges LLMs face, including their reliance on extensive and sometimes biased datasets, and the potential ethical dilemmas stemming from their use. Our critical discussion extends to the varying impacts of LLMs across fields, from the natural sciences, where they help model complex biological sequences, to the social sciences, where they can parse large-scale qualitative data. We conclude by offering a nuanced perspective on how LLMs can be both a boon and a boundary to scientific progress.

Jiezhong Wu, Jack O'Brien, Jennifer Li et al.

The discovery rate of optical transients will explode to 10 million public alerts per night once the Vera C. Rubin Observatory's Legacy Survey of Space and Time comes online, overwhelming the traditional physics-based inference pipelines. A continuous-time forecasting AI model is of interest because it can deliver millisecond-scale inference for thousands of objects per day, whereas legacy MCMC codes need hours per object. In this paper, we propose SELDON, a new continuous-time variational autoencoder for panels of sparse and irregularly time-sampled (gappy) astrophysical light curves that are nonstationary, heteroscedastic, and inherently dependent. SELDON combines a masked GRU-ODE encoder with a latent neural ODE propagator and an interpretable Gaussian-basis decoder. The encoder learns to summarize panels of imbalanced and correlated data even when only a handful of points are observed. The neural ODE then integrates this hidden state forward in continuous time, extrapolating to future unseen epochs. This extrapolated time series is further encoded by deep sets to a latent distribution that is decoded to a weighted sum of Gaussian basis functions, the parameters of which are physically meaningful. Such parameters (e.g., rise time, decay rate, peak flux) directly drive downstream prioritization of spectroscopic follow-up for astrophysical surveys. Beyond astronomy, the architecture of SELDON offers a generic recipe for interpretable and continuous-time sequence modeling in any time domain where data are multivariate, sparse, heteroscedastic, and irregularly spaced.