Hi, I’m Hunter.

I’m an ML Research Scientist at Roots.ai. I train large language and vision models at production scale on DGX H100 clusters, and my research roots are in scientific computing for molecular dynamics at Harvard. I publish at venues like COLING, EMNLP, and AIES, and I build open-source tools and datasets. I’m exploring how foundation model training transfers to scientific domains: computational chemistry, materials science, and molecular generation. More about me →
Document Processing
GutenOCR Mascot

GutenOCR: A Grounded Vision-Language Front-End for Documents

GutenOCR is a family of vision-language models designed to serve as a ‘grounded OCR front-end’, providing high-quality text transcription and explicit geometric grounding.

Time Series Forecasting
Forecasting comparison of different neural architectures on the Multiscale Lorenz-96 system

Optimizing Sequence Models for Dynamical Systems

We systematically ablate core mechanisms of Transformers and RNNs, finding that attention-augmented Recurrent Highway Networks outperform standard Transformers on forecasting high-dimensional chaotic systems.

Machine Learning
Diagram showing block-recurrent transformer architecture with vertical and horizontal processing directions

Block-Recurrent Transformers for Long Sequences

A transformer architecture that applies a recurrent cell over blocks of tokens, achieving linear complexity in sequence length while outperforming Transformer-XL baselines on PG19, arXiv, and GitHub datasets.

Computational Chemistry
Diagram showing the Ewald decomposition of long-range interactions into short-range and Fourier-space components for molecular graph neural networks

Ewald Message Passing for Molecular Graphs

Proposes Ewald message passing, a Fourier-space scheme inspired by Ewald summation that captures long-range interactions in molecular graphs. The method is architecture-agnostic and improves energy MAEs by 10% on OC20 and 16% on OE62 across four baseline GNN models.

Machine Learning
Diagram showing the Lagrangian Neural Network pipeline from coordinates through a learned Lagrangian to energy-conserving dynamics

Lagrangian Neural Networks for Physics

Lagrangian Neural Networks (LNNs) use neural networks to parameterize arbitrary Lagrangians, enabling energy-conserving learned dynamics without canonical coordinates. Unlike Hamiltonian approaches, LNNs handle relativistic systems and extend to graphs via Lagrangian Graph Networks.

Machine Learning
Visualization of Liquid-S4 kernel decomposition showing input signal, S4 kernel, liquid kernel, and combined output

Liquid-S4: Input-Dependent State-Space Models

Liquid-S4 extends the S4 framework by incorporating a linearized liquid time-constant formulation that introduces input-dependent state transitions. This yields an additional convolutional kernel capturing input correlations, improving generalization across long-range sequence tasks.

Machine Learning
Diagram comparing RWKV inference complexity against Transformers and efficient variants

RWKV: Linear-Cost RNN with Transformer Training

RWKV is a novel sequence model that achieves transformer-level performance while maintaining linear time and constant memory complexity during inference, scaled up to 14 billion parameters.

Computational Chemistry
Caffeine molecular structure with its InChIKey identifier

InChI: The International Chemical Identifier

InChI (International Chemical Identifier) is an open standard from IUPAC that represents molecular structures as hierarchical, layered strings optimized for database interoperability, unique identification, and web search via its hashed InChIKey.

Computational Chemistry
Dual-encoder architecture diagram for MarkushGrapher-2 showing vision and VTL encoding pipelines

MarkushGrapher-2: End-to-End Markush Recognition

An 831M-parameter encoder-decoder model that jointly encodes image, OCR text, and layout information through a two-stage training strategy, achieving state-of-the-art multimodal Markush structure recognition while remaining competitive on standard molecular structure recognition.

Computational Chemistry
Overview of six categories of materials representations for machine learning

Materials Representations for ML Review

A comprehensive review of how solid-state materials can be numerically represented for machine learning, spanning structural features, graph neural networks, compositional descriptors, transfer learning, and generative models for inverse design.

Machine Learning
Diagram showing NaViT packing variable-resolution image patches into a single sequence

NaViT: Native Resolution Vision Transformer

NaViT applies sequence packing (Patch n’ Pack) to Vision Transformers, enabling training on images of arbitrary resolution and aspect ratio while improving training efficiency by up to 4x over standard ViT.

Computational Chemistry
BioT5 architecture showing SELFIES molecules, amino acid proteins, and scientific text feeding into a T5 encoder-decoder

BioT5: Cross-Modal Integration of Biology and Chemistry

BioT5 uses SELFIES representations and separate tokenization to pre-train a unified T5 model across molecules, proteins, and text, achieving state-of-the-art results on 10 of 15 downstream tasks.