Aug 19, 2026

PhylaFlow: Hybrid flow matching in phylogenetic tree space

PhylaFlow is a hybrid flow-matching framework that navigates Billera–Holmes–Vogtmann (BHV) tree space to accelerate Bayesian phylogenetic inference. By learning geodesic paths from random trees to posterior samples, PhylaFlow efficiently initializes MCMC chains, drastically reducing the "burn-in" time. A PhylaFlow-MCMC variant, which guides MrBayes move acceptance, significantly outperforms traditional methods and even existing machine learning baselines for posterior sampling, achieving better results within the same computational budget. The work also explores conditioning on sequence embeddings, aiming for a future phylogenetics foundation model capable of zero-shot inference.

Jul 19, 2026

From Tokens to Cells: Foundation Models for Single-Cell Biology - Akram Baharlouei, Altos Labs

Akram Baharlouei from Altos Labs discusses the engineering hurdles in developing foundation models for single-cell biology. The talk covers the importance of single-cell analysis for cellular rejuvenation and drug discovery, the complexities and challenges of single-cell data (particularly RNA-seq), and a comparative analysis of current foundation model approaches, highlighting the limitations of transformer-based models and the potential of flow matching techniques like PrimeFlow.

May 26, 2026

Q-learning with Flow-Matching Policies

This talk explores methods for optimizing expressive, multi-modal policies, such as those based on flow-matching, with off-policy reinforcement learning. The speaker presents two novel algorithms, FQ-RL and CAM, designed to overcome the instability of backpropagation through multi-step generative models, enabling effective online self-improvement and adaptation for robotic manipulation tasks.

May 26, 2026

Wavefunction Flows: Efficient Quantum Simulation of Continuous Flow Models

Continuous flow models map naturally to a Schrödinger equation, the fundamental equation of quantum mechanics. This discovery proves that a trained generative model can be efficiently simulated on a future quantum computer, enabling a new, more powerful type of access to its learned distribution for tasks like Monte Carlo estimation and structure discovery.

Mar 30, 2026

Mistral: Voxtral TTS, Forge, Leanstral, & Mistral 4 — w/ Pavan Kumar Reddy & Guillaume Lample

Mistral's Pavan (Voxtral lead) and Guillaume (Chief Scientist) discuss the new Voxtral TTS model, its novel architecture using flow matching for efficient, high-quality speech generation. They elaborate on Mistral's strategy of delivering specialized, open-weight models and the Mistral Forge platform, which empowers enterprises to leverage their proprietary data through fine-tuning for privacy, cost-effectiveness, and superior performance. The conversation also covers Mistral Small, the future of AI for science, and the company's commitment to open-source and foundational research, including formal proving as a proxy for long-horizon reasoning.

Jan 22, 2026

The ML Technique Every Founder Should Know

YC Visiting Partner Francois Chaubard and YC General Partner Ankit Gupta break down diffusion, the machine learning framework behind generative AI models like Sora and Midjourney. They discuss its core principles, trace its evolution from complex KL-divergence methods to the elegant simplicity of flow matching, and explore its vast applications beyond images, from protein folding to robotics, arguing it's a key component for future AI systems.