The paper investigates the thermodynamic cost of inference and learning in physical neural networks. It shows that quasi‑static inference requires no work, while finite‑speed inference incurs work bounded by the Wasserstein‑2 distance between thermal states, roughly $k_B T$ per dimension of the widest layer. Learning, however, has an irreducible cost of a few $k_B T$ per parameter, independent of speed, indicating that memory dominates the thermodynamic price.
By Alexei V. Tkachenko
Extending the neural-operator element method from individually trained, fixed-geometry neural elements to a library of reusable, geometry-parameterized element types fails structurally: a field-predicting operator trained by value regression induces an energy whose assembled Hessian is indefinite, and Newton converges to spurious minima (247% error) even with 1%-accurate field predictions. We introduce convex neural energy elements: each element exports a scalar energy E(g,U), architecturally convex in its boundary degrees of freedom U and smoothly parameterized by its geometry g, realized as a hypernetwork-generated positive-semidefinite quadratic form (an input-convex correction is reserved for non-quadratic physics).
arXiv:2606. 28573v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern machine learning models are trained by optimizing high-dimensional non-convex empirical risk functions.
By Andrea Montanari, Kangjie Zhou
arXiv:2501. 18530v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We consider a teacher-student model of supervised learning with a fully-trained two-layer neural network whose width $k$ and input dimension $d$ are large and proportional.
By Jean Barbier, Francesco Camilli, Minh-Toan Nguyen, Mauro Pastore, Rudy Skerk
arXiv:2608. 02036v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Extending the neural-operator element method from individually trained, fixed-geometry neural elements to a library of reusable, geometry-parameterized element types fails structurally: a field-predicting operator trained by value regression induces an energy whose assembled Hessian is indefinite, and Newton converges to spurious minima (247% error) even with 1%-accurate field predictions.
By Hongyue Jiang, Jianjiang Zhan, Chenzhuo Zhang, Fan Wang
arXiv:2607. 15702v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We prove a finite-sample formulation gap for physics-informed learning of nonlinear multiscale elliptic equations.
By Ronald Katende