Abel Jansma is a scientist studying emergence, higher-order interactions, information theory, and complex systems across biology and artificial intelligence.
A diagonal attack for LLM truth probes shows why no probe on a language model’s embedding space can pin down truth. A linear dream Modern LLMs famously encode input texts as vectors in some embedding space. One of the most satisfying discoveries about LLMs is that many natural concepts, like gender, emotions, capital cities, correspond to directions in this space. The extent to which a certain…
A rabbi asked the wise spider Oza: “Tell me, why is there something rather than nothing?” Oza: “you are confused—both are: the something in that it is, and the nothing in that it isn’t.” Both caught in the same web.
Have a look at these three rings: Why are they connected? If you only consider two of the rings and ignore the third, then any pair can be smoothly separated. The triplet is connected and cannot be taken apart, but any description purely in terms of pairwise relationships would miss the fact that the three rings are connected. While the three rings above—known as the Borromean rings —are…
In a recent paper , I proposed to study complex systems through a mereological lens by applying the Möbius inversion theorem. I also covered this in a recent blogpost . Here, I will collect some of the most important applications of Möbius transformations in the sciences. I will update this table as I find more applications. If you have suggestions, please send me an email, or leave a comment…
In a previous post , I proposed to study complex systems through a mereological lens by applying the Möbius inversion theorem. This has become my favourite theorem by now, because I think it allows you to do integration and differentiation on observables in complex systems where this was not possible before. It was originally proved by Möbius for integer numbers ordered by division, but…
UPDATE: I have now found an explicit formula for the Möbius function on the redundancy lattice. This will appear in a preprint soon.
In my PhD thesis, I developed a method and software package to infer interactions and cell states from gene expression data. Both the software and the research are now published!
I was completely mesmerised by the swallows in Portugal, and while playing around with some origami paper, I came up with this simple design for an origami swallow. It is based on the famous ‘crane base’ (steps 1-7), and implements many folds used in the standard Orizuru crane (inside-reverse folds for the wings, narrowing the bottom two flaps, etc).
Generative models, in particular energy-based models, are often used to sample from conditional distributions–a process known as inpainting. One of the most fundamental kinds of generative energy-based models is called a restricted Boltzmann machine (RBM), which is essentially a bipartite, glassy Ising model. Inpainting with RBMs is usually done by sampling from the visible layer while fixing the…
(This is an update on my Ethereum Protocol Fellowship. More updates can be found here ).