arXiv Machine Learning By Kareem M. Gameel, Ihor Neporozhnii, Sjoerd Hoogland, Oleksandr Voznyy

The Mechanics of Delta Learning: Target Design for Generalizable Scientific Machine Learning

Read the original on arXiv Machine Learning →

The paper investigates the effectiveness of Δ-learning in scientific machine learning, showing that simply reducing residual error magnitude does not guarantee easier learning. By testing molecular graph neural networks on total energy predictions, the authors find that complex local descriptor baselines can produce small residuals that are actually rougher and harder to learn, whereas a semi‑empirical baseline both shrinks the residual scale and smooths the target space. They propose a new diagnostic, scale‑normalized graph Dirichlet roughness (SD_{R}), to assess residual learnability and argue that choosing complementary baselines is as important as model architecture for successful target design.

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