arXiv Machine Learning
Reciprocity Separates Gradient Flow from Rotation in Conservative Physical Learning
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arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 4
Conservation laws determine what physical learning remembers
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 Machine Learning
Sep 18
Conservation Buys Stability and Factoring Buys Counterfactuals in Physical World Models
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 AI
Aug 20
Untrainable elements determine what physical learning remembers
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 Machine Learning
Jun 16
A Conservation Law for Equilibrium Propagation and Coupled Learning
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 Machine Learning
Jun 4
When Both Layers Learn: Training Dynamics of Representing Linear Models via ReLU Networks
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 AI
Jun 2
Equilibrium Propagation for Non-Conservative Systems
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.