Loved these posts and they inspired a lot of my research and directions during my PhDs.
For anyone interested in these may I also suggest learning about normalizing flows? (They are the broader class to flow matching) They are learnable networks that learn coordinate changes. So the connection to geometry/topology is much more obvious. Of course the down side of flows is you're stuck with a constant dimension (well... sorta) but I still think they can help you understand a lot more of what's going on because you are working in a more interpretable environment
For anyone interested in these may I also suggest learning about normalizing flows? (They are the broader class to flow matching) They are learnable networks that learn coordinate changes. So the connection to geometry/topology is much more obvious. Of course the down side of flows is you're stuck with a constant dimension (well... sorta) but I still think they can help you understand a lot more of what's going on because you are working in a more interpretable environment