Ben Gutteridge

Ben Gutteridge

DPhil candidate researching machine learning at the University of Oxford

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books

Best Books of 2025

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2025 books pie chart Continuing the tradition from last year, here is the round-up of the 76 books I read in 2025 (one more than last year, just), what kinds of books they were, how I read them, and brief reviews of some of my favourites. The goal for next year: read my height (and read more women. <20% is quite poor).

Best Books of 2024

8 minute read

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2024 books pie chart I read 75 books in 2024 (please befriend me on Goodreads 🙏), by far my best-ever total, and I’m feeling smug, so I thought I’d do a quick review of my top 5 fiction and non-fiction books of the year.

daily blog

Best Books of 2025

9 minute read

Published:

2025 books pie chart Continuing the tradition from last year, here is the round-up of the 76 books I read in 2025 (one more than last year, just), what kinds of books they were, how I read them, and brief reviews of some of my favourites. The goal for next year: read my height (and read more women. <20% is quite poor).

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Yesterday

  • NOTHING!

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Last few days

  • Cleaning up LR project repo
  • Getting started on confirmation stuff

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Update

  • Spent the last two weeks grinding out a paper submission for ICML 2025. Watch this space…

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Yesterday

  • VOC partially implemented LR
  • Tonshoff VOC fix for Lyapunov

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Last week

  • Finished off VOC and PCQM PRs for Lyapunov project
  • Got back into LR project: re-read working doc, reviewed a load of PRs
  • LR meeting + X, concrete next steps decided

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Yesterday

  • Sorted VOC

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TODO

  • Other LRGB datasets PR for A

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TODO

  • Fix up LapPE for A, clean up repo, raise PR
    • Look at exps from before and run a select few with LapPE
  • LR:
    • Look at pre-Xmas notes, where we left off
    • Review PRs you haven’t looked at
    • Send a message to J and S

Best Books of 2024

8 minute read

Published:

2024 books pie chart I read 75 books in 2024 (please befriend me on Goodreads 🙏), by far my best-ever total, and I’m feeling smug, so I thought I’d do a quick review of my top 5 fiction and non-fiction books of the year.

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Pretty much off for Christmas and New Years.

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Yesterday

  • RT exps and digging

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TODO

  • RT investigation:
    • Can you reproduce the RT plot with the same params?
    • Plots for all weight sharing (and non-sharing) combinations
    • Study the differences between the GCN implementations

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Yesterday

  • Mostly admin/travel
  • RT param investigation

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Yesterday

  • NOTHING!

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Yesterday

  • Cleaned up JUDGE repo, sorted cache file with downloadable link
  • Started sorting stuff for A

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Yesterday

  • Finished edits to, and submitted, JUDGE workshop paper

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TODO

Final push and submission of JUDGE HTR paper.

  • Go through X’s comments on JUDGE paper draft and make edits and improvements
    • Make figures to explain method
  • Finish cleaning up repo and put link in paper
    • Clean up plot/fig generating notebooks
    • Check _minpages=02 was working right
    • Run codebase e2e including with fresh env to make sure it all works
    • Anonymize and check
  • Submit paper on CMT before EoD

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TODO

  • Morning meeting catching up w/ A
  • Then off to Rotterdam for a mini-break over the weekend

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29th-4th

  • Grinding out experiments and a paper draft for the DocUI@AAAI-25 document understanding workshop. Finally finished 😮‍💨

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Yesterday

  • Worked a little on Lyapunov but mostly cleaning up HTR code and notebooks all day
  • Messaged T

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Yesterday

  • Worked on Lyapunov, Jacobian for RT

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Yesterday

  • Meetings and fixing up some experiment code, both for LR and Lyapunov
  • LoG Oxford meetup

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Friday/weekend

  • Fixed LR exps, mostly, and cleaned up/merged/closed 4 open PRs

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Yesterday

  • AGM, PR for LR

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Yesterday

  • Getting RT working properly on brocluster

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Yesterday

  • HTR lit reviewing

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Yesterday

  • Meetings, LR exps

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TODO

  • LR bullets presentation in Geodudes meeting
  • Meeting with S and J

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Yesterday

  • Loads of meetings

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Yesterday

  • Collated/cleaned up HTR tables, multi-page results
  • Unsuccessful exp checking if rerarranging pages so page * is first fixes error
  • Unsuccessful exp with very challenging old German RPK docs

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Yesterday

  • Shared HTR proj w/ X, got M on board
  • LR PR, cleaned up, refactored, no longer returning nan/inf (but not training properly by the look of it)

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Yesterday

  • Worked on HTR project all day; refactoring, different page counts

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TODO

  • HTR exps and notebook to point of sharing with XD; send to him
    • Further divide pre-processing and exps/results — should be able to run exps on either dataset with a single notebook
    • Exps for page selection on both into notebook
    • Exps for doc length variation
    • A messy paper roundup for initial lit review
  • Merge LR PR if J/S approve

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Yesterday

  • Morning LR call and plan for the next week, took rest of day off because of family visiting

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Yesterday

  • Post-election doomscrolling
  • Implemented chosen-page for HTR-ICL

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Yesterday

  • Worked on PR for RT in Lyapunov

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Yesterday

  • Made a start on PR in LR repo, almost got very rough func synthetic exp pipeline working
  • Chat w/ M about HTR

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Friday/weekend

  • First draft of HTR-ICL write-up and promising experiments for Bentham and IAM

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Yesterday

  • HTR-ICL all day, initial promising results

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Yesterday

  • Worked on HTR-ICL all day instead of LR stuff
  • Got a rudimentary exp pipeline for Bentham and sorted preproc for IAM

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Yesterday

  • Bit of progress on the HTR notebooks, not nearly enough

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Yesterday

  • Some stuff into LR Overleaf
  • Meetings with A, X, S+J+X

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Friday/weekend

  • DRew PR for A’s repo

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Yesterday

  • Read other O paper
  • Worked on DRew Lyapunov PR

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Yesterday

  • Reread some old F papers, helps w/ LR
  • Read one of O’s papers
  • Call w/ A and some setup stuff for that PR
  • Got IAM, OCR space, made a little progress on HTR-ICL

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Yesterday

  • Properly grokked the discrete vs continuous thing for Jacobian eigenvalues/stability
  • Somewhat made sense of notes from LR meeting yesterday, wrote up some stuff in the Overleaf

    TODO

  • Until noon:
    • Read F’s CT paper, read O’s papers
    • More notes into the LR Overleaf, clean up a little
  • Clean up piled up misc Obsidian notes
  • Afternoon:
    • Start on PR for A
    • If time, IAM and a little progress on HTR-ICL idea

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Yesterday

  • Group meeting, grokked A’s notes/code a bit, LR project meeting w/ S & J

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Friday

  • Read A-DGN
  • Call w/ A and follow-up dig into repo/Overleaf
  • Broke ground on HTR-ICL idea

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Yesterday

  • Read stack of graph/RNN VG papers (coRNN, GraphCON, gradient flossing, A-RNN)

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TODO

  • Read stack of papers related to project w/ A
  • Gather thoughts and Qs for meeting tomorrow

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Yesterday

  • A bunch of admin, replying to messages
  • Big think about DocAI ICL idea

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Yesterday

  • Paper notes writeups, grokking PRODIGY
  • Meeting(s) w/ O, A, S on LR
  • Meeting w/ A
  • Useful talk w/ M

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Friday

  • Read a load of papers (CARTE, TabMDA, LoCalPFN, GraphToken, Talk like a Graph, PRODIGY)
  • Chat with Y

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Yesterday

  • Went through DRew2/STMP stuff, made some notes, made an assessment
  • OxNSG group meeting, chat w/ J and S about LR
  • Read SPoT-Mamba
  • More wrapping head arounf J’s LR notes
  • Meeting with XD, talking about short- and long-term plans going forward

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Yesterday

  • More SSM/Mamba reading
  • BuNN/diffusion reading for LR proj
  • Some LR proj proposal writeup

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Yesterday

  • Dig into SSMs, S4, Mamba and graph Mamba

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Yesterday

  • Dive into long-range papers/datasets, notes for convo w/ Jacob, convo, first draft of potential project abstract

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TODO

  • Before group meeting:
    • Finish skimming graph mamba
    • Quick look at the reading list paper this week (is there one?)
    • Quick recap of long range papers/benchmarks
    • Quick compilation of notes about long-range thoughts for chat w/ Jacob
  • After:
    • Dig into mamba for STMP
    • Dust off half-written Overleafs from STMP and old experiments, make a plan to get into a nicely written form — springboard
    • Send message to arrange first post-internships supervisor meeting