iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Bastian Grossenbacher-Rieck @pseudomanifold.topology.rocks · 13/09/2026

For a vibe-coded universe, the sunsets are pretty marvelous, I'll grant you that.

Bastian Grossenbacher-Rieck @pseudomanifold.topology.rocks · 01/09/2026

The Road goes ever on and on Down from the door where it began. Now far ahead the Road has gone, And I must follow, if I can, Pursuing it with eager feet, Until it joins some larger way Where many paths and errands meet. And whither then? I cannot say. #Switzerland

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Bastian Grossenbacher-Rieck @pseudomanifold.topology.rocks · 26/05/2026

Some respite before the heat starts again. Good morning, everyone!

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Bastian Grossenbacher-Rieck @pseudomanifold.topology.rocks · 19/05/2026

The Boston TAG Party (August 18–20) is open for submissions! openreview.net/group?id=TAG... Submit your work in topology, algebra, and geometry.

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Bastian Grossenbacher-Rieck @pseudomanifold.topology.rocks · 30/04/2026

Walking to the office always gives me Lord of the Rings vibes. #Fribourg #Freiburg

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Bastian Grossenbacher-Rieck @pseudomanifold.topology.rocks · 11/11/2025

And it just works! Our pooling methods perform well across tasks and… 🏆 …reach top classification and regression performance. 🔥 …retain this robust performance across pooling ratios. ✨ …preserve graph structure and spectral properties 🧵4/n

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Bastian Grossenbacher-Rieck @pseudomanifold.topology.rocks · 11/11/2025

But…how? 🔍 We contract the most redundant edges that are least relevant for the graph’s structural diversity as measured by the magnitude or spread of a graph. 🧵3/n

A brief explanation of how we perform pooling.

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Bastian Grossenbacher-Rieck @pseudomanifold.topology.rocks · 11/11/2025

Why do we need structure-aware pooling, anyway? 🔮Our methods, MagEdgePool and SpreadEdgePool, faithfully preserve the original graphs’ geometry. Alternative pooling layers destroy graph structure to varying extents. 🧵2/n

We are pretty good at preserving structure in graph datasets!

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Bastian Grossenbacher-Rieck @pseudomanifold.topology.rocks · 11/11/2025

Big graph, little compute? In our #NeurIPS2025 paper we propose geometry-aware edge-contraction-based pooling methods for GNNs. Our methods preserve graph structure, make interpretable pooling choices, and ensure robust performance at downstream tasks. 🧵1/n

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Bastian Grossenbacher-Rieck @pseudomanifold.topology.rocks · 03/11/2025

As a rule of thumb, we observe that when the mean LID drops and stabilizes, performance is typically improving. By contrast, when the mean LID drops and rises again, this is a warning for overfitting. 🧵3/n

Training performance increases when LID remains stable.

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Bastian Grossenbacher-Rieck @pseudomanifold.topology.rocks · 03/11/2025

It's epoch 50. Do you know whether your LLM is grokking? In our #NeurIPS2025 paper "Less is More: Local Intrinsic Dimensions of Contextual Language Models," we study how the local intrinsic dimension (LID) of embeddings changes during training and fine-tuning. #research 🧵1/n

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Bastian Grossenbacher-Rieck @pseudomanifold.topology.rocks · 29/10/2025

It's amazingly fast (< 𝟏𝐡 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐟𝐮𝐥𝐥 𝐩𝐢𝐩𝐞𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐞, 𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐝 𝐨𝐧 𝐚 𝐠𝐚𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐥𝐚𝐩𝐭𝐨𝐩) and high-quality. Another Topological Deep Learning success story, coming soon to #NeurIPS2025! 🖥️ github.com/aidos-lab/in... 📜 arxiv.org/pdf/2410.18987 4/n

Look at the numbers! They are great! Good numbers, bold numbers, we have the best numbers!

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Bastian Grossenbacher-Rieck @pseudomanifold.topology.rocks · 29/10/2025

What we gain is a 𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐛𝐥𝐞 and 𝐞𝐱𝐩𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐬𝐢𝐯𝐞 latent space that permits simple interpolation. 3/n

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Bastian Grossenbacher-Rieck @pseudomanifold.topology.rocks · 29/10/2025

Want to generate point clouds? Our (w/ Ernst Röell) #NeurIPS2025 paper shows a topology-driven method that is fast, simple, and high-quality. 🔥 1/n

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Bastian Grossenbacher-Rieck @pseudomanifold.topology.rocks · 24/08/2025

New blog post: Consciousness Is Overrated Anyway (for AI) In which I, somewhat coherently, try to contribute to the whole "Is AI Conscious" debate. 🔗 bastian.rieck.me/blog/2025/co... #AI #MachineLearning

To briefly summarize my argument (cf. Orwell): When you are being stomped on by a boot, it does not matter whether the wearer is a conscious entity and capable of reflection. It just hurts.

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Bastian Grossenbacher-Rieck @pseudomanifold.topology.rocks · 07/08/2025

Geometry and topology help us see structure and shape, providing a principled way to imbue models with such concepts… …and it's not a niche perspective, thanks to a lot of great work by the community! 🧵3/5

The duality between geometry and topology

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Bastian Grossenbacher-Rieck @pseudomanifold.topology.rocks · 07/08/2025

We all know the dogma: "Given enough data, the model will learn everything." But as LLMs hit diminishing returns (bough with even more GPUs!), this belief is being challenged. I'm not the only one who posits that inductive biases remain important. 🧵2/5

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Bastian Grossenbacher-Rieck @pseudomanifold.topology.rocks · 07/08/2025

🎥 Shapes, Spaces, Simplices, and Structure: Geometry, Topology & Machine Learning "What if the answer to some problems in graph learning is not more, but better structure?" This is the central premise of my talk @logml.bsky.social and @unireps.bsky.social. 🧵1/5

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Bastian Grossenbacher-Rieck @pseudomanifold.topology.rocks · 06/08/2025

"SAFE TY FIRST" Kerning. Once you know about it, your enjoyment of public signage will be ruined forever. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerning

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Bastian Grossenbacher-Rieck @pseudomanifold.topology.rocks · 01/08/2025

🇨🇭 Happy #SwissNationalDay! It's already a year since I started my new position @unifr.bsky.social and I'v had the good fortune to be living here since 2018. Thanks for everything, Switzerland! 🙏 Here's to the future! 🚀

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Bastian Grossenbacher-Rieck @pseudomanifold.topology.rocks · 22/07/2025

#MachineLearning loves data. #Topology loves shape. Let's bring them together! 👉The Euler Characteristic Transform (ECT) bridges both worlds, as I outline in a recent article in the Notices of the @amermathsoc.bsky.social Engage! 🧵1/n

An overview of the Euler Characteristic Transform, illustrated for a single Euler Characteristic Curve, i.e., the calculation of Euler characteristics along a single direction.

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Bastian Grossenbacher-Rieck @pseudomanifold.topology.rocks · 10/04/2025

A candidate for the most audacious correction ever. Replacing a large chunk of the bibliography with "relevant" citations, plus an example of "vegetative electron microscopy." What's going on here? #AcademicSky Source: www.mdpi.com/1996-1944/17...

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Bastian Grossenbacher-Rieck @pseudomanifold.topology.rocks · 01/03/2025

Our AIDOS Lab website has been fully revamped, thanks to a massive team effort as part of a very fun retreat in #Bern: aidos.group Check out our research directions and some of the things we have been up to these days! #Academia #MachineLearning

A subset of the AIDOS Lab standing in front of a panoramic view of Bern

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Bastian Grossenbacher-Rieck @pseudomanifold.topology.rocks · 24/02/2025

📣 ATMCS 11 will be in beautiful Bozeman, MT. We are still soliciting 3-page extended abstracts (with subsequent full-paper proceedings in La Matematica). Still open for submissions about applied #topology (broadly interpreted)! Check out the CfP here: 👉 comptag.github.io/atmcs11/call... 👈

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Bastian Grossenbacher-Rieck @pseudomanifold.topology.rocks · 07/02/2025

🔥 Friends, I finally collected them all. As of last week, I am finally tenured. 🔥 Thanks to everyone who supported me, in particular my great team (aidos.group), my equally great collaborators, and everyone else who brought their offerings to the fickle fates of academia! #Academia #Tenure

After all these years, finally, I have them all: Tenure, an excellent research group, and the best haircut.

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Bastian Grossenbacher-Rieck @pseudomanifold.topology.rocks · 13/01/2025

Back from my first JMM (@jointmath.bsky.social). I enjoyed so many interesting talks and discussions. One highlight was a working (!) Enigma exhibit. Plus: Seattle is a beaut!

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Bastian Grossenbacher-Rieck @pseudomanifold.topology.rocks · 03/01/2025

Happy New Year, everyone! There's always a nice #bluesky above the clouds!

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Bastian Grossenbacher-Rieck @pseudomanifold.topology.rocks · 29/12/2024

This is what my OpenReview notifications look like as an AC. (I read through all the e-mails of course but have to acknowledge them in the web interface as well). Happy Holidays and best of luck for your papers! @iclr-conf.bsky.social

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Bastian Grossenbacher-Rieck @pseudomanifold.topology.rocks · 20/11/2024

Hey friends! I am interested in #geometry, #topology, and #MachineLearning. Silent lurker for some time, but now with the recent influx, I'd love to engage more. If you followed me from the 'other place' but I did not follow you back, let me know! The notifications here are sometimes a bit much...

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Bastian Grossenbacher-Rieck @pseudomanifold.topology.rocks · 08/09/2023

My dog is silently judging me while I'm writing bad code.

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Bastian Grossenbacher-Rieck @pseudomanifold.topology.rocks · 05/09/2023

A bad habit I try to get rid of when writing papers is the overuse of the word 'intuitively.'

A meme on my overuse of the word "intuitively" when writing mathematics.

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