Ava Pun

We introduce BrickGPT, the first approach for generating physically stable interconnecting brick assembly models from text prompts. To achieve this, we construct a large-scale, physically stable dataset of brick structures, along with their associated captions, and train an autoregressive large language model to predict the next brick to add via next-token prediction. To improve the stability of the resulting designs, we employ an efficient validity check and physics-aware rollback during autoregressive inference…

We use a novel decomposition to create succinct data structures - supporting a wide range of operations on static trees in constant time - for a variety of tree classes, extending results of Munro, Nicholson, Benkner, and Wild. Motivated by the class of AVL trees, we further derive asymptotics for the information-theoretic lower bound on the number of bits needed to store tree classes whose generating functions satisfy certain functional equations…

Different outdoor illumination conditions drastically alter the appearance of urban scenes, and can harm the performance of image-based robot perception systems if they have not been seen during training. Towards this goal, we propose LightSim, a neural lighting camera simulation system that enables diverse, realistic, and controllable data generation. LightSim automatically builds relightable digital twins at scale from collected raw sensor data…

As self-driving systems become better, simulating scenarios where the autonomy stack may fail becomes more important. Traditionally, those scenarios are generated for a few scenes with respect to the planning module that takes ground-truth actor states as input. This does not scale and cannot identify all possible autonomy failures, such as perception failures due to occlusion. In this paper, we propose AdvSim, an adversarial framework to generate safety-critical scenarios…

In this second instalment of Using Digital Art Programs for Unintended Purposes, I present you with a working computer programmed using Adobe Photoshop Actions. To be specific, this computer is a Turing machine—an abstract machine capable of running any computer algorithm. I’ll show you how to create this machine by using layer blend modes and the Invert command to perform logical computations.…

This is Conway’s Game of Life, implemented using the popular drawing software Clip Studio Paint (CSP). No, I’m not using the animation features in CSP, and I’m not drawing these pictures myself. Each frame is computed by Clip Studio Paint within the CSP file. The game advances every time you hit Save. How did I manage to squeeze this functionality out of a program that isn’t supposed to let you do anything more than edit images? Read on…

I have had the honour of serving as an artist (2020–21), writer (2021), director (2021), and upper-year advisor (2022–) for MathSoc Cartoons, a student-run comic series explaining undergraduate math and computer science concepts at the University of Waterloo. Here are some of the math comics I’ve written and/or illustrated over the years…

When the large language model-based chatbot ChatGPT came out last November, I (like many others) immediately used it to make pages upon pages of stupid stories. This is one of them…