utsab

21 | EECE @iitkgp | a bit of this, a bit of that

[Lossfunk @lossfunk]

📢 New Research

Denoising models internally represent visual illusions.

We study 9 denoising models across 3 architecture families (pixel-space DDPMs, latent diffusion U-Nets, diffusion transformers) and find they all develop internal representations that discriminate visual illusions from physically identical control regions.

More details below 👇

[utsab @festive_helix]

6 months of Obsidian

[Basudev Biswal @ProfBasudev]

PhD students in India, more than anything else, deserve better physical environments for work.

PhD students in most places around the world struggle with many issues, including low salaries. But students in India face the additional challenge of poor work environments. I did not realize this until I went abroad (Italy) for my PhD.

A comfortable chair and a desk, proper lighting, and a good place for meeting with colleagues can elevate the mood of students significantly and motivate them to make the best possible efforts. We have to keep in mind that students often work continuously for 8+ hours.

This is not about any particular institution. This is a summary of my observations across institutions.

Also, it is not about resource constraints. In most cases, the money required to improve the workplace is a very small fraction of the total scholarship paid to the student. There will not be much hesitation in buying expensive equipment from abroad if it is deemed important.

Also, it is not like the system is against PhD students. Indians, in general, give little importance to macroergonomics. PhD students are generally affected more than others, as they are expected to adjust. However, 4-5 years is a significant part of one's prime lifetime.

The mindset is the problem. I was once given the explanation that students in old India studied under trees for raising the issue. If Indians in old times had the same mindset, we would not be seeing such beautiful architectural marvels.

[Bitchat Community @BitchatMe_]

Official notice from the Indian government to GitHub regarding the removal and disabling of bitchat.

Governments that fear people talking without permission will always go after the tools that make it possible.

[utsab @festive_helix]

@elliotarledge Bruh how?? Insane!

[Aryamman Bhatia @aryamman_bhatia]

Vikram-1, In Silicon
A tribute to @SkyrootA
Thanks for inspiring us all

- @hackerfabindia

[Open Letter @openletteryt]

I have said this before, and I will say it again: this government has become extremely arrogant. This time, it went too far.

The way students were handled was unacceptable. Yes, political protests can have political motives. Yes, different groups may try to benefit from them. But the students are ordinary people. They were asking a simple question: after so many paper leak controversies, why should the Education Minister not be held accountable? Even if the government believes resignation is not the answer, the least it could do is engage with them, answer their questions, and acknowledge public concerns.

Instead, students were met with force. That is where the government crossed a line.

At the same time, I have almost no sympathy for the leaders of this protest. I support the demand. I do not support the people leading it.

In my view, they called people to the protest but did not stand with them when it mattered most. While students faced the consequences on the ground, the leadership appeared absent. Some were busy with meetings, others were away from the protest site, and some publicly argued that continuing the protest was not their responsibility. If you ask people to join a movement, leadership also means sharing the risks. You cannot disappear when the situation becomes difficult and then claim no accountability.

That is why I have consistently said I support the demand but not the leadership behind it. I do not trust them. I believe many are using this movement as a political launchpad rather than genuinely representing students.

But none of that excuses the government’s response.

The BJP increasingly looks disconnected from the concerns of ordinary people. Whether it is chori in ram mandir, paper leaks, caste issues, ethanol policy, UGC controversies, or the lack of accountability, the pattern is the same: deny, deflect, or remain silent. Even acknowledging mistakes seems too much to ask.

And when students protesting these issues are met with force instead of dialogue, it sends a dangerous message.

Power has a way of creating arrogance. Elections have a way of correcting it. My guess is that the next Uttar Pradesh election will show what happens when governments stop listening to people. For any political party, nothing matters more than elections. Lose that, and arrogance disappears very quickly.

As I have said before, Modi 3.0 is increasingly reminding me of UPA 2.0. Different governments, different circumstances, but a similar sense of complacency and a growing belief that public anger can simply be ignored. We all know how that one ended.

[utsab @festive_helix]

@prof_kamilov Any advice for undegrads applying for internship/research experience? I usually read one of their good recent works and mention that. Does that help? I usually don't get replies though.

[utsab @festive_helix]

Didn't age well

[dilemma @actuallyimthe]

Argentina just beat Spain at the 2026 World Cup final, 3-2.

[utsab @festive_helix]

@reboplim I was also revising and re-learning probability theory. Will check it out

[Raj Dabre @prajdabre]

If youre going to fail then might as well fail properly so you can learn from it better.

[utsab @festive_helix]

@v_ashish29 Congrats!

[Arjun Virk @virkvarjun]

I just spent weeks handwriting a 200+ page guide on the entirety of Robotics foundations from scratch.

Featuring:
- Kinematics (Forward, Inverse Kin, Jacobians, DoF)
- Controls (PID, Force/Impedance Control, Feedforward)
- SLAM (Bayes Filters, Kalman, Particle Filters, Mapping)
- Motion Planning (Dijkstra, A*, RRT, RRT*)
- RL (MDP, Policy Gradients, PPO, Sim2Real, Value Func)
- VLA (Q/K/V, ViT, SigLIP, Diffusion/Flow-Matching)
- ACT, Diffusion Policy, UMI, LeRobot tooling
- World Model (Dreamer, VideoGen, Gaussian Splatting)

Everything to get started, for free.

[Sarvam @SarvamAI]

Sarvam Epoch | Chapter 1

Join us for the first edition of Sarvam Epoch, our flagship AI conference, in Bengaluru.

Across the two days, we will share new model updates, launch new products, present our latest research, and host hands-on technical workshops.

Builder Edition, 30 July | Enterprise Edition, 31 July

Register here: https://t.co/WD4z1oovEC

[Vaibhav Bodana @VaibhavSpace]

Meet Maitrai Maka, who graduated as batch topper in Ocean Engineering and Naval Architecture from IIT Kharagpur in 2017, and started building autonomous ships and submarines before he'd even left campus behind.

He founded Rekise Marine that same year out of Bengaluru, alongside Rear Admiral Shekhar Mital (Retd), betting that future maritime power would run on low cost autonomous systems instead of massive manned fleets. No hype cycle backed him. Defence tech in India barely had a seed-stage playbook back then ye he built anyway.

Rekise designed the vessel, its sensors, and its software as one integrated system rather than bolting pieces together later, working in-house with shipyards like Goa Shipyard Limited and GRSE Limited. Two vessels, Jaldoot and Swadheen, were already delivered and had completed fully autonomous open sea trials.

In June 2026, 9 years into building, that groundwork pulled in $9.7 million in seed funding, co-led by Accel and Nikhil Kamath's NKSquared. The capital now funds Jalkapi, an 11-metre, 20-tonne autonomous submarine built for missions lasting up to 45 days.

Reliable autonomy at sea starts with refusing to separate the hardware from the intelligence.

[Fei-Fei Li @drfeifei]

I’m very excited by this test time training work for robotic learning! It’s an awesome collaboration between @StanfordSVL and @NVIDIARobotics !

[utsab @festive_helix]

@shikhargupta02 https://t.co/5K5qGtoiYY
Check out this recent work. Changing the dataset to have the skills(in this case the k-hop operations for reasoning) from uniform to a power distribution leads to a lot faster learning. Might be cool to experiment with.

[utsab @festive_helix]

Revisiting Linear Algebra with Gilbert Strang. Anything else I should take a look at?

[utsab @festive_helix]

@TanayLohia1 Epic initiative. Love seeing AI being engineered for good science. It does not look like you guys are looking for interns right now. Would have loved to apply!