Explainers

Short pieces on the ideas behind our research, most with an animation. They started as posts on LinkedIn and have been edited for the web.

  • Why a CNN beats a vision transformer on small data

    Every symmetry you build into an architecture is data you don’t have to collect.

  • What masked reconstruction teaches a model about shape

    Hide part of a shape, ask a model to rebuild it, and symmetry becomes a shortcut worth learning.

  • Noether’s theorem on a spring

    Emmy Noether proved that every symmetry comes with a quantity that never changes, and a mass on a spring makes the idea easy to see.

  • The 6-or-9 problem

    Why world models trained to compress what they see can learn the wrong thing about the world.

  • Gaussian, Dirichlet and Beta processes

    Three Bayesian models for when you have little data, and what they’re used for today.

  • No trade-off between energy and force accuracy

    Neural surrogates for chemistry are tuned as if energy and force accuracy compete. On MD17 ethanol and aspirin, they improved together across almost every weighting we tried.

  • Solomonoff’s case for simple explanations

    One of the first theories of machine learning was a theory of compression.