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: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.
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: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. 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:2608.30778v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Physical learning lets a trainable material or network use its own physical response to carry error signals, reducing the need for a separately program...
arXiv:2602. 03846v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We develop a continual learning method for pretrained models that \emph{requires no access to old-task data}, addressing a practical barrier in foundation model adaptation where pretraining distributions are often unavailable.
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.
arXiv:2609.36375v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Continual learning is usually studied through mechanisms that preserve old knowledge. We develop Successional Learning Theory (SLT), a mesoscopic accou...
arXiv:2609.13197v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Algorithmic Information Dynamics (AID) studies systems by perturbing them and measuring changes in algorithmic complexity, but its usual estimator, the...
arXiv:2607. 06924v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On analog neuromorphic hardware, intrinsic device noise is normally an accuracy tax.
arXiv:2605.06240v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Forward-Forward (FF) training lets each layer learn from a local goodness criterion. In cumulative-goodness variants, later layers can inheri...
arXiv:2607. 18921v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Circuit extraction identifies a small set of model components whose presence preserves a target behavior under ablation, and the resulting circuit is often read as the mechanism behind that behavior.