Hi, I’m Hunter.

I’m an AI Research Scientist & Engineer at Roots.ai, bridging abstract ML research and production deployment. I specialize in Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision-Language Models (VLMs) for document processing, and conduct research in physics-informed AI for scientific simulation. I take ideas from papers to working code, building open-source tools and real-world systems. 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.

Scientific Computing
Before and after visualization of point-set alignment using the Kabsch algorithm

Kabsch-Horn Cookbook: Differentiable Alignment

A differentiable point-set alignment library implementing N-dimensional Kabsch, Horn quaternion, and Umeyama scaling algorithms with per-point weights, batch dimensions, and custom autograd across NumPy, PyTorch, JAX, TensorFlow, and MLX.

Computational Chemistry
MolGen overview showing two-stage pre-training (molecular language syntax learning and domain-agnostic prefix tuning) and chemical feedback paradigm

MolGen: Molecular Generation with Chemical Feedback

MolGen pre-trains on 100M+ SELFIES molecules, introduces domain-agnostic prefix tuning for cross-domain transfer, and applies a chemical feedback paradigm to reduce molecular hallucinations.

Computational Chemistry
Molecular Transformer architecture showing atom-wise tokenized SMILES input through encoder-decoder with multi-head attention to predict reaction products

Molecular Transformer: Calibrated Reaction Prediction

The Molecular Transformer applies the Transformer architecture to forward reaction prediction, treating it as SMILES-to-SMILES machine translation. It achieves 90.4% top-1 accuracy on USPTO_MIT, outperforms quantum-chemistry baselines on regioselectivity, and provides calibrated uncertainty scores (0.89 AUC-ROC) for ranking synthesis pathways.

Computational Biology
Three-panel diagram showing input point sets, SVD factorization of the cross-covariance matrix, and the aligned result

Arun et al.: SVD-Based Least-Squares Fitting of 3D Points

Presents a concise SVD-based algorithm for finding the optimal rotation and translation between two 3D point sets, with analysis of the degenerate reflection case that Umeyama later corrected.

Computational Chemistry
Activity cliffs benchmark showing method rankings by RMSE on cliff compounds, with SVM plus ECFP outperforming deep learning approaches

Exposing Limitations of Molecular ML with Activity Cliffs

This paper benchmarks 24 machine and deep learning methods on activity cliff compounds (structurally similar molecules with large potency differences) across 30 macromolecular targets. Traditional ML with molecular fingerprints consistently outperforms graph neural networks and SMILES-based transformers on these challenging cases, especially in low-data regimes.

Computational Biology
Diagram showing the polar decomposition of the cross-covariance matrix M into orthonormal factor U and positive semidefinite square root

Horn et al.: Absolute Orientation Using Orthonormal Matrices

The matrix-based companion to Horn’s 1987 quaternion method, deriving the optimal rotation as the orthonormal factor in the polar decomposition of the cross-covariance matrix via eigendecomposition of a 3x3 symmetric matrix.

Computational Chemistry
MoLFormer-XL architecture diagram showing SMILES tokens flowing through a linear attention transformer to MoleculeNet benchmark results and attention-structure correlation

MoLFormer: Large-Scale Chemical Language Representations

MoLFormer is a transformer encoder with linear attention and rotary positional embeddings, pretrained via masked language modeling on 1.1 billion molecules from PubChem and ZINC. MoLFormer-XL outperforms GNN baselines on most MoleculeNet classification and regression tasks, and attention analysis reveals that the model learns interatomic spatial relationships directly from SMILES strings.

Computational Chemistry
SELFormer architecture diagram showing SELFIES token input flowing through a RoBERTa transformer encoder to molecular property predictions

SELFormer: A SELFIES-Based Molecular Language Model

SELFormer is a transformer-based chemical language model that uses SELFIES instead of SMILES as input. Pretrained on 2M ChEMBL compounds via masked language modeling, it achieves strong classification performance on MoleculeNet tasks, outperforming ChemBERTa-2 by ~12% on average across BACE, BBBP, and HIV.

Computational Biology
Side-by-side comparison showing naive SVD producing a reflected alignment versus Umeyama's corrected proper rotation

Umeyama's Method: Corrected SVD for Point Alignment

Corrects a flaw in prior SVD-based alignment methods (Arun et al., Horn et al.) that could produce reflections instead of rotations under noisy data, and provides a complete closed-form solution for similarity transformations in arbitrary dimensions.

Computational Chemistry
AdaptMol domain adaptation pipeline showing encoder-decoder with MMD alignment between labeled source and unlabeled target domain images

AdaptMol: Domain Adaptation for Molecular OCSR (2026)

AdaptMol combines an end-to-end graph reconstruction model with unsupervised domain adaptation via class-conditional MMD on bond features and SMILES-validated self-training. Achieves 82.6% accuracy on hand-drawn molecules (10.7 points above prior best) while maintaining state-of-the-art results on four literature benchmarks, using only 4,080 real hand-drawn images for adaptation.