Julia Balla

I am a third-year PhD student at MIT EECS co-advised by Professors Tess Smidt and Tommi Jaakkola. I am interested in ML methods that capture and exploit geometric structure, particularly in the context of generative modeling and AI for scientific discovery. My research is funded by the NDSEG Fellowship.

Previously, I completed my M.S. in Computer Science at the University of Oxford as a DeepMind scholar and my B.S. in Mathematics with Computer Science at MIT.

Publications

Implicit Augmentation from Distributional Symmetry in Turbulence Super-Resolution

Julia Balla^*, Jeremiah Bailey^*, Ali Backour, Elyssa Hofgard, Tommi Jaakkola, Tess Smidt^†, Ryley McConkey^†
NeurIPS ML4PS Workshop 2025
[paper] [code]

AI-Assisted Discovery of Quantitative and Formal Models in Social Science

Julia Balla, Sihao Huang, Owen Dugan, Rumen R. Dangovski, Marin Soljacic
Nature Humanities & Social Sciences Communications 2025
[paper] [code]

A Cosmic-Scale Benchmark for Symmetry-Preserving Data Processing

Julia Balla, Siddharth Mishra-Sharma, Carolina Cuesta-Lazaro, Tommi Jaakkola, Tess Smidt
LoG 2024 (Extended Abstract) — Spotlight Oral
NeurIPS NeurReps Workshop 2024 (Proceedings Track)
[paper] [poster] [code]

CodonMPNN for Organism Specific and Codon Optimal Inverse Folding

Hannes Stark*, Umesh Padia*, Julia Balla, Cameron Diao
ICML ML4LMS Workshop 2024 — Most Commercially Exciting Research Award
ICML AI4Science Workshop 2024
[paper] [poster] [code]

Over-Squashing in Riemannian Graph Neural Networks

Julia Balla
LoG 2023 (Extended Abstract)
[paper] [poster]

PrivateMail: Supervised Manifold Learning of Deep Features With Differential Privacy for Image Retrieval

Praneeth Vepakomma, Julia Balla, Ramesh Raskar
AAAI 2022 — Spotlight Oral
[paper] [code]

Teaching

C15061: The Mathematics of Multi-Agent Systems

I co-taught a lecture series on reinforcement learning, behavioral economics, and complex systems to high schoolers at MIT HSSP
[website]

C14311: Minecraft Fires, Social Networks, and Quantum Complexity

I co-taught a class on graph theory and complex systems science to high schoolers at MIT Splash.
[slides]

Miscellaneous projects

Benchmarking Graph Rewiring Techniques for Graph Attention Networks

Mini-project for the Graph Representation Learning course at Oxford.
[paper] [code]

Over-squashing in Graph Neural Networks

Final blog post for MIT 6.S898: Deep Learning.
[post]

Ramsey Theory

Final paper for MIT 18.204: Seminar in Discrete Mathematics.
[paper]