roam/thesis.org

thesis

• thesis
  • Architecture
  • Conventions
  • Mentor Direction (2026-08-17)
  • Baselines (all in impl/src/roll.py + impl/experiments/keel/_base.py)
  • Chapter Structure
  • Gotchas
  • Key Files
  • Subnodes
• todo
  • Basic structure - take it into account
  • Import and make sense of all references
  • Continue to auto-summarize references continuously

thesis

BGU MSc thesis on the ROLL method (Rate Optimized Likelihood Loss). See impl for the implementation project this thesis documents.

Architecture

• main.tex — root document; defines all title/author/supervisor commands, includes all chapters
• Main_pages/ — cover_page, title_page, abstract, acknowledgements, abstract_heb, cover_heb
• content/<chapter>/ — one folder per chapter with its own .tex file
• content/images/ — shared image path (set via \graphicspath)
• bibliography/thesis.bib — references
• bibliography/unsrtnat_adjusted_for_bgu_thesis.bst — custom BGU bibliography style (do not edit)

Conventions

• Thesis metadata (title, author, supervisor, month, year) defined as commands at top of main.tex
• Hebrew title/author/supervisor have he suffix commands (\thesistitlehe, etc.)
• Both English and Hebrew ToC, abstract, and cover pages are required by BGU
• Chapters added via \input{content/<chapter>/<chapter>} with a matching \addtocontents{tocheb} line
• Build engine: pdflatex (uses \usepackage[utf8x]{inputenc}, not xelatex)
• Math notation: data points are bold (\mathbf{x}_i); batches are \mathcal{B}_0 / \mathcal{B}_1
• KDE background (general technique) in Ch. 2 (sec:kde-background); Ch. 3 back-references it
• sec:imbalanced-tpr-fpr and sec:neyman-pearson live in Ch. 2; Ch. 3 sec:problem-formulation \Cref's them — do not rename

Mentor Direction (2026-08-17)

Primary narrative focus agreed with mentor:

• Main story: noise resistance and AUC optimization — this is the thesis core
• Hero method: roll-aoc (AUC variant) — primary contribution
• Primary competitor: libauc-auroc (Yuan et al. AUCMLoss + PESG) — already implemented
• Single-point optimization (roll-tpr90): touch on briefly as secondary result
• Pacing: get to the differentiating, strong results quickly — don't bury the lede

Baselines (all in impl/src/roll.py + impl/experiments/keel/_base.py)

Experiment name	Class	What it is
bce-weighted	BCE + pos_weight	Standard imbalance fix
libauc-auroc	libauc_auc_loss + PESG	Yuan et al. 2021 compositional AUC — primary AUC competitor
gce-0.7	gce_loss	Generalized Cross-Entropy (noise-robust)
mae	mae_loss	MAE loss (noise-robust)
focal-loss	focal_loss	Focal Loss
roll-aoc	kernelized_roll_aoc	ROLL AUC variant — hero method
roll-tpr90	kernelized_roll_tpr	ROLL TPR@FPR variant — secondary result

Note: libauc-auroc requires PESG optimizer (not Adam) — already wired up in impl.

Chapter Structure

See subnodes for per-chapter guidelines and section details.

Ch.	Title	File	Target
1	Introduction	content/introduction/introduction.tex	4–6 pp
2	Background / Related Work	content/related_work/related_work.tex	15–20 pp
3	Method	content/method/method.tex	~30 pp
4	Experiments	content/experiments/experiments.tex	15–20 pp
5–6	Discussion + Conclusion	content/discussion_and_conclusions/	8–12 pp

Gotchas

• Template uses utf8x inputenc, which requires the ucs nix/texlive package
• Hebrew rendering via babel-hebrew (pdflatex approach, not fontspec/xelatex)
• Example images in content/related_work/images/ are from the template — safe to delete
• flake.nix uses rec on the derivation so buildInputs is in scope for PATH export
• nix develop devShell includes python3+sympy — use it to verify math claims, never check mentally
• KDE backward pass uses inverse-function-theorem approach deliberately (user must explain it verbally)
• Correct gradient of threshold w.r.t. negative-class score: σ'(τ−x_i) / Σ_j σ'(τ−x_j) — sympy-verified
• (NIX BUILD) New .tex files must be git add'ed before nix build. Nix flakes use git to enumerate source files; untracked files are invisible to the build. Symptom: silent LaTeX failure — TOC, LoF, and LoT all appear empty in the output PDF. Fix: git add <new-file>, then rebuild.

Key Files

• flake.nix — Nix build; nix build produces result/main.pdf; nix develop for dev shell
• flake.lock — pinned to nixpkgs-unstable as of 2026-06-16
• main.tex — fill in \thesistitle, \thesisauthorname, \thesissupervisername, \thesismonth, \thesisyear

Subnodes

• thesis/introduction — Ch. 1 guidelines: structure, length, what to include
• thesis/related-work — Ch. 2 section structure, placement markers, label conventions
• thesis/method — Ch. 3 section status table, derivation gotchas
• thesis/experiments — Ch. 4 data sources, key results, section status
• thesis/discussion — Ch. 5–6 guidelines: failure modes, future work
• thesis/todos — project TODOs
• thesis/citations — sources justifying implementation choices (architectures, baselines)
• thesis/work-history/recent — session work log

todo

TODO Basic structure - take it into account

TODO Import and make sense of all references

TODO Continue to auto-summarize references continuously