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Writing

Long-form notes on neuro-symbolic systems, evaluation, and building a company around a research thesis.

Most of these first appeared elsewhere — on the ExtensityAI blog, or on dinu.at — and are ported here, figures included.

  1. 5 min

    Cortex: a fixed-point theory of governed coding agents

    Treating an agent's validate-repair loop as a monotone operator on a lattice of requirements, so that 'the task is done' becomes a least fixed point you can prove it reaches.

  2. 6 min

    Ringdown bounds on UV-regularized black-hole cores

    Using the ringdown of merging black holes to bound the size of a non-singular quantum core, and the scaling-law regression framework that turns a whole catalogue of events into one test.

    Stylised render of a black hole: bright magenta and cyan accretion rings around a dark core, with a faint network graph overlaid on the star field.
  3. 6 min

    The inflection point — the story behind ExtensityAI

    Why I wrote The Inflection Point, and how the neuro-symbolic architecture it argues for became a working product with story.one.

    Cover of the book The Inflection Point.
  4. 4 min

    Recap of the 2nd International RL Bootcamp

    A look back at the RL Bootcamp 2025 in Salzburg: highlights, speakers, and the recordings, slides and community links the organizers published.

    Group photo of roughly one hundred RL Bootcamp 2025 participants on a lawn at Universität Salzburg.
  5. 7 min

    A dialogue on AI, market power and a sustainable future

    Notes on a cross-disciplinary collaboration with Indian legal scholars and the resulting joint report on AI market power and India in a multipolar world.

    Cover of the joint infographic report "Artificial Intelligence, Market Power and India in a Multipolar World", credited to Sankalp Srivastava, Abhivardhan and Marius-Constantin Dinu, published by Indic Pacific Legal Research.
  6. 5 min

    HyDRA: contracts as the control mechanism for knowledge-graph construction

    Design-by-Contract applied to LLM-driven ontology and knowledge-graph generation, and an honest negative result about the benchmark used to measure it.

  7. 13 min

    Entering the three-body problem

    Inspired by sci-fi's The Three-Body Problem, this post explores chaos, system dynamics, and how AI research automation can master complexity.

    Illustration of three suns in a chaotic orbital dance, the premise of Liu Cixin's novel.
  8. 5 min

    Primality testing via circulant matrix eigenvalue structure

    A prime is exactly an integer whose circulant matrix has a minimal polynomial with two irreducible factors over the rationals. A clean characterisation, and a slow algorithm.

  9. 5 min

    Empowering research innovation

    How the neuro-symbolic stack behind SymbolicAI became a research automation platform, and what happened when we pointed it at an open question in primality testing.

    Abstract render of overlapping cyclotomic circles annotated with prime numbers, a minimal polynomial factorisation and a matrix of eigenvalues.
  10. 15 min

    The benchmark illusion

    AI models ace benchmarks yet fail real-world tests — a critical assessment in evaluations and why we need better frameworks to measure intelligence.

    Illustration of a cracked scoreboard, used as the lead image for an essay on benchmark inflation.
  11. 8 min

    PyFlow.ts: bridging ML research with production

    How PyFlow.ts exposes Python ML code to TypeScript with one decorator, removing the API, typing and client boilerplate of the last-mile deployment step.

    Illustration of a bridge between a Python and a TypeScript environment.
  12. 11 min

    Year one in review

    Recap of ExtensityAI's first year: origins as a neuro-symbolic research framework, the team, milestones, publications, and plans for 2025.

    The ExtensityAI team gathered in a meeting room in front of a slide reading "Our mission: AI Research Automation".
  13. 5 min

    Parameter choice and neuro-symbolic approaches for deep domain-invariant learning

    My doctoral thesis at JKU Linz: how to pick hyperparameters for domain adaptation when the target has no labels, and what to do when you cannot train at all.

  14. 5 min

    Large language models can self-improve at web agent tasks

    Harvesting an agent's own WebArena trajectories, filtering them without labels, and fine-tuning on the result — plus two metrics for what a benchmark score hides.

  15. 4 min

    SymbolicAI: industry recognition and community impact

    Recognition that the SymbolicAI framework and its research paper received from AI researchers, industry figures, media outlets, and the community.

    Illustration of a glowing brain behind a rising green trend arrow, over a dark field of data points.
  16. 2 min

    Announcing the SymbolicAI paper

    The research paper behind SymbolicAI: a modular framework for logic-based approaches that compose generative models with solvers, plus a benchmark for evaluating LLMs in AI-centric workflows.

    Screenshot of the announcement post on X, linking the arXiv paper "SymbolicAI: A framework for logic-based approaches combining generative models and solvers".
  17. 1 min

    A neuro-symbolic perspective on large language models

    The Symbolic API: using LLMs as the core of a neuro-symbolic stack, decomposing hard tasks into simple zero-shot operations and recombining them.

    The SymbolicAI project logo.
  18. 5 min

    InfODist: online distillation with informative rewards

    Why curriculum-learning agents generalise badly to the next task, and why the culprit is the states they explore rather than the non-stationarity they endure.

  19. 2 min

    Addressing parameter choice issues in unsupervised domain adaptation by aggregation

    Extending weighted least squares to vector-valued functions, with a target error asymptotically no worse than twice the unknown optimal aggregation.

    Comparison of aggregation methods against DEV and IWV across seven benchmark datasets.
  20. 2 min

    A dataset perspective on offline reinforcement learning

    Two measures — SACo for exploration, TQ for exploitation — that characterise a behavioural policy's dataset and predict which offline RL algorithms will work on it.

    Offline RL algorithm performance plotted against the SACo and TQ dataset measures.
  21. 1 min

    Reactive exploration to cope with non-stationarity in lifelong reinforcement learning

    Tracking continual domain shifts as they happen: why policy-gradient methods adapt faster than Q-learning when the environment keeps moving.

    Schematic of the Reactive Exploration loop tracking continual domain shifts and updating the policy.
  22. 1 min

    Align-RUDDER: learning from few demonstrations by reward redistribution

    Replacing RUDDER's LSTM with a profile model from multiple sequence alignment, so reward redistribution works from a handful of demonstrations.

    Video still: Align-RUDDER: Learning From Few Demonstrations by Reward Redistribution
  23. 1 min

    The balancing principle for parameter choice in distance-regularized domain adaptation

    Borrowing the balancing principle from ill-posed inverse problems to justify the regularization parameter when the target domain has no labels.

    Plot of the target error bound balancing learning error against domain distance to select the regularization parameter.
  24. 1 min

    Lighter: dependency injection for PyTorch

    Python borrowed little from the aspect-oriented practices that matured in Java and C#. Lighter brings dependency injection to PyTorch projects.

    A Lighter configuration wiring modules together through dependency injection instead of nested kwargs.
  25. 1 min

    JKU AI overview video

    A short overview of what AI makes possible, produced at Johannes Kepler University Linz.

    Video still: JKU AI Overview Video
  26. 2 min

    XAI and strategy extraction via reward redistribution

    Using Align-RUDDER as an interpretability method: multiple sequence alignment surfaces the key events an agent relies on, and those events are usually human-readable sub-tasks.

  27. 2 min

    Align-RUDDER: reward redistribution from few demonstrations

    The first write-up of Align-RUDDER: two modifications to RUDDER that let profile models built from as few as two demonstrations carry the reward redistribution.

    Video still: Align-RUDDER: Learning from Few Demonstrations by Reward Redistribution
  28. 1 min

    Overcoming catastrophic forgetting with context-dependent activations

    Master's thesis: context-based gating that switches pathways through a network, cutting destructive interference on long task sequences.

  29. 1 min

    Imagine Kara

    A thank-you to the team behind Imagine Kara as the project wound down.

  30. 1 min

    Seamlessly entering the crypto world with Apollon

    A short pointer to a longer write-up on the Apollon project and getting started with masternodes.

    Concept sketch of the Apollon web wallet interface.
  31. 1 min

    Earning almost one Bitcoin with masternodes in three weeks

    How hosting Apollon masternodes worked out over three weeks in 2018, and how the project's search interest compared to the top ten coins.

    Google Trends comparison of Apollon against EOS, NEO and Cardano.
  32. 1 min

    Uni Swift project

    A university iOS app for managing photos, built around actually finding the right image again.

    Mockup of the image-management app's browse screen.
  33. 1 min

    Deep Learning Script

    A DSL for Caffe that cuts the line count of prototyping a network architecture, with a VS Code extension that transpiles to Caffe Script.

    Structure of the Deep Learning Script DSL and its transpilation to Caffe.
  34. 1 min

    Deep learning: where to start and how to dig deeper

    Two reference notes from 2016 — an overview of the field, and a practical guide to running deep learning on Ubuntu with Docker.

  35. 1 min

    Operation Phrike

    A VR combat-simulation study: Oculus Rift plus Unreal Engine, with sensors reading the test subject's stress level.

  36. 1 min

    Internship report: handwritten character recognition

    A Xamarin app that classifies handwritten characters with a neural network, compared against a support vector machine. Written at Siemens Corporate Technology.

  37. 1 min

    Bachelor thesis: cross-language integration for the CLR

    Compiling JavaScript to .NET IL by pairing a Coco/R-generated parser with Roslyn's syntax trees.

    A "keep calm and write bachelor thesis" poster.

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