arXiv:2608. 00097v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Physical learning rules such as equilibrium propagation (EP), coupled learning (CL), and adjoint coupled learning (AL) train resistive networks through local measurements.
The paper demonstrates that learned simulators can fail in two distinct ways when conditions change: long‑horizon drift due to accumulated errors and incorrect responses to interventions on physical parameters. By adding a symplectic integrator to preserve conservative dynamics, rollouts remain stable for up to 100× the training horizon, while encoding physical coupling via explicit linear factorization allows the model to generalize to unseen signs of that coupling. The study shows that stability and counterfactual generalization arise from separate structural choices, enabling designers to impose each property independently.
The paper investigates how two independent inductive biases—one from the circuit’s invariance under conductance rescaling and one from the learning rule’s conservation of a mass quantity—affect what a physical learning system remembers. By separating these effects, the authors show that when every element is trainable, the initialization scale has negligible influence on the learned function, whereas a single untrainable element can cause the function to shift significantly with initialization. They further demonstrate that the conservation law does not protect memory but instead influences solution quality, with adjoint coupled learning (AL) generally performing worse than equilibrium propagation (EP) and coupled learning (CL) in small circuits. whyItMatters":"The study clarifies that only the circuit’s structural bias, not the rule’s conservation property, determines memory retention in physical learning systems."
arXiv:2606. 15444v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this paper we show that the physical learning methods known as coupled learning (CL) and equilibrium propagation (EP) conserve a mass-like quantity in the trainable parameters in the continuous-time, small-nudging limit.
arXiv:2606. 04476v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this paper, we study the gradient descent dynamics for jointly training both layers of a one-hidden-layer ReLU network to fit a linear target function.
arXiv:2602. 03670v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Equilibrium Propagation (EP) is a physics-inspired learning algorithm that uses stationary states of a dynamical system both for inference and learning.
arXiv:2606. 08602v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present an online reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm for fine-tuning flow-matching policies in continuous-control problems.
arXiv:2606. 15443v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Physical learning methods train physical networks to perform computational tasks using only local update rules, exploiting the physics of the system to handle the global transfer of information.
arXiv:2609.05808v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In situ adjoint training extracts parameter gradients directly from measurement, but has so far been limited to reciprocal or restricted systems. Her...
arXiv:2606. 09929v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Physical reservoir computing harnesses nonlinear mechanical dynamics but, by convention, freezes the substrate and trains only a linear readout, presuming the substrate is not usefully trainable.
arXiv:2606. 05219v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent analyses of multi-pathway Deep Linear Networks use Gradient Flow to predict a "winner-takes-all" specialization in which path symmetry breaks and each feature concentrates in a single pathway.
arXiv:2606. 31700v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Biological neural circuits obey Dale's principle: each neuron's synapses are uniformly excitatory or inhibitory.