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May 12

Mitigating Premature Exploitation in Particle-based Monte Carlo for Inference-Time Scaling

Inference-Time Scaling (ITS) improves language models by allocating more computation at generation time. Particle Filtering (PF) has emerged as a strong ITS method for complex mathematical reasoning tasks, but it is vulnerable when guided by process reward models, which often assign overconfident scores early in the reasoning process. This causes PF to suffer from premature exploitation: it myopically commits to locally promising trajectories, prunes potentially correct hypotheses, and converges to suboptimal solutions. This failure mode, known as particle impoverishment, is especially severe under constrained computational budgets. To address this, we analyze the problem and identify two root causes: a lack of diversity in the particle set due to overconfident resampling and consequent inability to assess the potential of a reasoning path. We introduce Entropic Particle Filtering (ePF), an algorithm that integrates two new techniques to solve these issues. The first technique, Entropic Annealing (EA), directly mitigates particle impoverishment by monitoring search diversity via entropy; when diversity drops, it intervenes by dynamically annealing the resampling distribution to preserve exploration. The second, an enhancement called Look-ahead Modulation (LaM), adds a predictive guide to evaluate a state's potential based on its successors. On several challenging math benchmarks, ePF significantly outperforms strong baselines and achieves up to a 50 % relative improvement in task reward. Together, these methods improve PF's resilience by balancing the exploration of diverse solution spaces with the exploitation of high-reward regions, ultimately leading to higher-quality solutions.

  • 7 authors
·
Oct 7, 2025

Power-SMC: Low-Latency Sequence-Level Power Sampling for Training-Free LLM Reasoning

Many recent reasoning gains in large language models can be explained as distribution sharpening: biasing generation toward high-likelihood trajectories already supported by the pretrained model, rather than modifying its weights. A natural formalization is the sequence-level power distribution π_α(ymid x)propto p_θ(ymid x)^α (α>1), which concentrates mass on whole sequences instead of adjusting token-level temperature. Prior work shows that Metropolis--Hastings (MH) sampling from this distribution recovers strong reasoning performance, but at order-of-magnitude inference slowdowns. We introduce Power-SMC, a training-free Sequential Monte Carlo scheme that targets the same objective while remaining close to standard decoding latency. Power-SMC advances a small particle set in parallel, corrects importance weights token-by-token, and resamples when necessary, all within a single GPU-friendly batched decode. We prove that temperature τ=1/α is the unique prefix-only proposal minimizing incremental weight variance, interpret residual instability via prefix-conditioned Rényi entropies, and introduce an exponent-bridging schedule that improves particle stability without altering the target. On MATH500, Power-SMC matches or exceeds MH power sampling while reducing latency from 16--28times to 1.4--3.3times over baseline decoding. The code is available at https://github.com/ArminAzizi98/Power-SMC.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 22

Particle contact dynamics as the origin for non-integer power expansion rheology in attractive suspension networks

We show that Hertzian particle contacts are the underlying cause of the as-yet-unexplained noninteger power laws in weakly nonlinear rheology. In the medium amplitude oscillatory shear (MAOS) region, the cubic scaling of the leading order nonlinear shear stress (σ_3 sim γ_0^{m_3}, m_3=3) is the standard expectation. Expanding on the work by Natalia et al. [J. Rheol. 64 625-635 (2020)], we report an extensive data set of noncubical, noninteger power law scalings m_3 for particle suspensions in two immiscible fluids with a capillary attractive interaction, known as capillary suspensions. Here, we show that distinct power law exponents are found for the storage and loss moduli and these noninteger scalings occur at every secondary fluid concentration for two different contact angles. These compelling results indicate that the noninteger scalings are related to the underlying microstructure of capillary suspensions. We show that the magnitude of the third harmonic elastic stress scaling m_3,elastic originates from Hertzian-like contacts in combination with the attractive capillary force. The related third harmonic viscous stress scaling m_3,viscous is, found to be associated with adhesive-controlled friction. These observations, conducted for a wide range of compositions, can help explain previous reports of noninteger scaling for materials involving particle contacts and offers a new opportunity using the variable power law exponent of MAOS rheology to reveal the physics of particle bonds and friction in the rheological response under low deformation instead of at very high shear rates.

  • 3 authors
·
Nov 11, 2021

State and parameter learning with PaRIS particle Gibbs

Non-linear state-space models, also known as general hidden Markov models, are ubiquitous in statistical machine learning, being the most classical generative models for serial data and sequences in general. The particle-based, rapid incremental smoother PaRIS is a sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) technique allowing for efficient online approximation of expectations of additive functionals under the smoothing distribution in these models. Such expectations appear naturally in several learning contexts, such as likelihood estimation (MLE) and Markov score climbing (MSC). PARIS has linear computational complexity, limited memory requirements and comes with non-asymptotic bounds, convergence results and stability guarantees. Still, being based on self-normalised importance sampling, the PaRIS estimator is biased. Our first contribution is to design a novel additive smoothing algorithm, the Parisian particle Gibbs PPG sampler, which can be viewed as a PaRIS algorithm driven by conditional SMC moves, resulting in bias-reduced estimates of the targeted quantities. We substantiate the PPG algorithm with theoretical results, including new bounds on bias and variance as well as deviation inequalities. Our second contribution is to apply PPG in a learning framework, covering MLE and MSC as special examples. In this context, we establish, under standard assumptions, non-asymptotic bounds highlighting the value of bias reduction and the implicit Rao--Blackwellization of PPG. These are the first non-asymptotic results of this kind in this setting. We illustrate our theoretical results with numerical experiments supporting our claims.

  • 5 authors
·
Jan 2, 2023

Machine Learning-Ready Data Sets for the Analysis and Nowcasting of Atmospheric Radiation at Aviation Altitudes

Nowcasting and forecasting of the radiation environment in the Earth's lower atmosphere are critical for the safety of aircraft and spacecraft crews and passengers. Currently, this problem is addressed by employing statistical and physics-based models that take into account particle transport and precipitation. However, given the increased number of radiation measurements available to the community, it is possible to start developing data-driven approaches. We prepared Machine Learning-ready (ML-ready) datasets to nowcast the effective dose rates at aviation altitudes. The presented datasets contain 92,476 individual measurements from 589 flights obtained by the Automated Radiation Measurements for Aerospace Safety (ARMAS) experiment from 2013 to 2023. The ARMAS measurements are augmented with the properties of the Geospace environment, such as solar soft X-ray and proton fluxes, solar wind properties, secondary cosmic ray neutrons, space weather indexes, and global solar activity indicators (such as daily sunspot number). ARMAS data are separated into three partitions, ensuring that (1) the data points from a single flight remain within the same partition, and (2) each partition samples the flight locations and Geospace environment conditions equally. Several versions of the datasets allow predictions based on point-in-time measurements and use up to 24 hours of Geospace parameter history. The test of the use case demonstrates a possibility of nowcasting ARMAS measurements with accuracies slightly better than the considered physics-based models. The publicly available ML-ready datasets could serve as the first step in data preparation for ML-driven nowcasting and forecasting of the radiation environment.

  • 13 authors
·
Feb 5

A Probabilistic Inference Approach to Inference-Time Scaling of LLMs using Particle-Based Monte Carlo Methods

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved significant performance gains via scaling up model sizes and/or data. However, recent evidence suggests diminishing returns from such approaches, motivating scaling the computation spent at inference time. Existing inference-time scaling methods, usually with reward models, cast the task as a search problem, which tends to be vulnerable to reward hacking as a consequence of approximation errors in reward models. In this paper, we instead cast inference-time scaling as a probabilistic inference task and leverage sampling-based techniques to explore the typical set of the state distribution of a state-space model with an approximate likelihood, rather than optimize for its mode directly. We propose a novel inference-time scaling approach by adapting particle-based Monte Carlo methods to this task. Our empirical evaluation demonstrates that our methods have a 4-16x better scaling rate over our deterministic search counterparts on various challenging mathematical reasoning tasks. Using our approach, we show that Qwen2.5-Math-1.5B-Instruct can surpass GPT-4o accuracy in only 4 rollouts, while Qwen2.5-Math-7B-Instruct scales to o1 level accuracy in only 32 rollouts. Our work not only presents an effective method to inference-time scaling, but also connects the rich literature in probabilistic inference with inference-time scaling of LLMs to develop more robust algorithms in future work. Code and further information is available at https://probabilistic-inference-scaling.github.io.

  • 5 authors
·
Feb 3, 2025 3

A mesh-free hybrid Chebyshev-Tucker tensor format with applications to multi-particle modelling

In this paper, we introduce a mesh-free two-level hybrid Tucker tensor format for approximation of multivariate functions, which combines the product Chebyshev interpolation with the ALS-based Tucker decomposition of the tensor of Chebyshev coefficients. It allows to avoid the expenses of the rank-structured approximation of function-related tensors defined on large spacial grids, while benefiting from the Tucker decomposition of the rather small core tensor of Chebyshev coefficients. This leads to nearly optimal Tucker rank parameters which are close to the results for well established Tucker-ALS algorithm applied to the large grid-based tensors. These rank parameters inherited from the Tucker-ALS decomposition of the coefficient tensor can be much less than the polynomial degrees of the initial Chebyshev interpolant via function independent basis set. Furthermore, the tensor product Chebyshev polynomials discretized on a tensor grid leads to a low-rank two-level orthogonal algebraic Tucker tensor that approximates the initial function with controllable accuracy. It is shown that our techniques could be gainfully applied to the long-range part of the electrostatic potential of multi-particle systems approximated in the range-separated tensor format. Error and complexity estimates of the proposed methods are presented. We demonstrate the efficiency of the suggested method numerically on examples of the long-range components of multi-particle interaction potentials generated by 3D Newton kernel for large bio-molecule systems and lattice-type compounds.

  • 4 authors
·
Mar 3, 2025

Time is on my sight: scene graph filtering for dynamic environment perception in an LLM-driven robot

Robots are increasingly being used in dynamic environments like workplaces, hospitals, and homes. As a result, interactions with robots must be simple and intuitive, with robots perception adapting efficiently to human-induced changes. This paper presents a robot control architecture that addresses key challenges in human-robot interaction, with a particular focus on the dynamic creation and continuous update of the robot state representation. The architecture uses Large Language Models to integrate diverse information sources, including natural language commands, robotic skills representation, real-time dynamic semantic mapping of the perceived scene. This enables flexible and adaptive robotic behavior in complex, dynamic environments. Traditional robotic systems often rely on static, pre-programmed instructions and settings, limiting their adaptability to dynamic environments and real-time collaboration. In contrast, this architecture uses LLMs to interpret complex, high-level instructions and generate actionable plans that enhance human-robot collaboration. At its core, the system Perception Module generates and continuously updates a semantic scene graph using RGB-D sensor data, providing a detailed and structured representation of the environment. A particle filter is employed to ensure accurate object localization in dynamic, real-world settings. The Planner Module leverages this up-to-date semantic map to break down high-level tasks into sub-tasks and link them to robotic skills such as navigation, object manipulation (e.g., PICK and PLACE), and movement (e.g., GOTO). By combining real-time perception, state tracking, and LLM-driven communication and task planning, the architecture enhances adaptability, task efficiency, and human-robot collaboration in dynamic environments.

  • 4 authors
·
Nov 22, 2024

Bayesian active learning for optimization and uncertainty quantification in protein docking

Motivation: Ab initio protein docking represents a major challenge for optimizing a noisy and costly "black box"-like function in a high-dimensional space. Despite progress in this field, there is no docking method available for rigorous uncertainty quantification (UQ) of its solution quality (e.g. interface RMSD or iRMSD). Results: We introduce a novel algorithm, Bayesian Active Learning (BAL), for optimization and UQ of such black-box functions and flexible protein docking. BAL directly models the posterior distribution of the global optimum (or native structures for protein docking) with active sampling and posterior estimation iteratively feeding each other. Furthermore, we use complex normal modes to represent a homogeneous Euclidean conformation space suitable for high-dimension optimization and construct funnel-like energy models for encounter complexes. Over a protein docking benchmark set and a CAPRI set including homology docking, we establish that BAL significantly improve against both starting points by rigid docking and refinements by particle swarm optimization, providing for one third targets a top-3 near-native prediction. BAL also generates tight confidence intervals with half range around 25% of iRMSD and confidence level at 85%. Its estimated probability of a prediction being native or not achieves binary classification AUROC at 0.93 and AUPRC over 0.60 (compared to 0.14 by chance); and also found to help ranking predictions. To the best of our knowledge, this study represents the first uncertainty quantification solution for protein docking, with theoretical rigor and comprehensive assessment. Source codes are available at https://github.com/Shen-Lab/BAL.

  • 2 authors
·
Jan 31, 2019

Beyond monoculture: Polydisperse moment methods for sub-stellar atmosphere cloud microphysics II. A three-moment gamma distribution formulation for GCM applications

Context. Understanding how the shape of cloud particle size distributions affects the atmospheric properties of sub-stellar atmospheres is a key area to explore, particularly in the JWST era of broad wavelength coverage, where observations are sensitive to particle size distributions. It is therefore important to elucidate how underlying cloud microphysical processes influence the size distribution, in order to better understand how clouds affect observed atmospheric properties. Aims. In this follow-up paper, we aim to extend our sub-stellar atmosphere microphysical cloud formation framework from Paper I to include effects of assuming a polydisperse gamma particle size distribution, requiring a three-moment solution set of equations. Methods. We develop a three-moment framework for sub-stellar mineral cloud particle microphysical nucleation, condensation, evaporation and collisional growth assuming a gamma distribution. As in the previous paper, we demonstrate the effects of polydispersity using a simple one-dimensional Y-dwarf KCl cloud formation scenario, and compare the results with the monodisperse case. Results. Our three-moment scheme provides a generalised framework applicable to any size distribution with a defined moment generation expression. In our test case, we show that the gamma distribution evolves with altitude, initially broad at the cloud base and narrowing at lower pressures. We find that differences between the gamma and monodisperse cloud structures can be significant, depending on the surface gravity of the atmosphere. Conclusions. We present a self-consistent framework for including the effects of polydispersity for sub-stellar microphysical cloud studies using the moment method.

  • 2 authors
·
Jul 17, 2025

Interference in Fuzzy Dark Matter Filaments: Idealised Models and Statistics

Fuzzy (wave) dark matter (FDM), the dynamical model underlying an ultralight bosonic dark matter species, produces a rich set of non-gravitational signatures that distinguishes it markedly from the phenomenologically related warm (particle) dark matter (WDM) scenario. The emergence of extended interference fringes hosted by cosmic filaments is one such phenomenon reported by cosmological simulations, and a detailed understanding of such may strengthen existing limits on the boson mass but also break the degeneracy with WDM, and provide a unique fingerprint of interference in cosmology. In this paper, we provide initial steps towards this goal. In particular, we show in a bottom-up approach, how the presence of interference in an idealised filament population can lead to a non-suppressive feature in the matter power spectrum -- an observation supported by fully-cosmological FDM simulations. To this end, we build on a theoretically motivated and numerically observed steady-state approximation for filaments and express the equilibrium dynamics of such in an expansion of FDM eigenstates. We optimise the size of the expansion by incorporating classical phase-space information. Ellipsoidal collapse considerations are used to construct a fuzzy filament mass function which, together with the reconstructed FDM wave function, allow us to efficiently compute the one-filament power spectrum. We showcase our non-perturbative interference model for a selection of boson masses and confirm our approach is able to produce the matter power boost observed in fully-cosmological FDM simulations. More precisely, we find an excess in correlation between the spatial scale associated with the FDM ground state and the quantum pressure scale. We speculate about applications of this effect in data analysis.

  • 5 authors
·
Dec 14, 2024

Cybloids - Creation and Control of Cybernetic Colloids

Colloids play an important role in fundamental science as well as in nature and technology. They have had a strong impact on the fundamental understanding of statistical physics. For example, colloids have helped to obtain a better understanding of collective phenomena, ranging from phase transitions and glass formation to the swarming of active Brownian particles. Yet the success of colloidal systems hinges crucially on the specific physical and chemical properties of the colloidal particles, i.e. particles with the appropriate characteristics must be available. Here we present an idea to create particles with freely selectable properties. The properties might depend, for example, on the presence of other particles (hence mimicking specific pair or many-body interactions), previous configurations (hence introducing some memory or feedback), or a directional bias (hence changing the dynamics). Without directly interfering with the sample, each particle is fully controlled and can receive external commands through a predefined algorithm that can take into account any input parameters. This is realized with computer-controlled colloids, which we term cybloids - short for cybernetic colloids. The potential of cybloids is illustrated by programming a time-delayed external potential acting on a single colloid and interaction potentials for many colloids. Both an attractive harmonic potential and an annular potential are implemented. For a single particle, this programming can cause subdiffusive behavior or lend activity. For many colloids, the programmed interaction potential allows to select a crystal structure at wish. Beyond these examples, we discuss further opportunities which cybloids offer.

  • 4 authors
·
Aug 1, 2024

Particle-Grid Neural Dynamics for Learning Deformable Object Models from RGB-D Videos

Modeling the dynamics of deformable objects is challenging due to their diverse physical properties and the difficulty of estimating states from limited visual information. We address these challenges with a neural dynamics framework that combines object particles and spatial grids in a hybrid representation. Our particle-grid model captures global shape and motion information while predicting dense particle movements, enabling the modeling of objects with varied shapes and materials. Particles represent object shapes, while the spatial grid discretizes the 3D space to ensure spatial continuity and enhance learning efficiency. Coupled with Gaussian Splattings for visual rendering, our framework achieves a fully learning-based digital twin of deformable objects and generates 3D action-conditioned videos. Through experiments, we demonstrate that our model learns the dynamics of diverse objects -- such as ropes, cloths, stuffed animals, and paper bags -- from sparse-view RGB-D recordings of robot-object interactions, while also generalizing at the category level to unseen instances. Our approach outperforms state-of-the-art learning-based and physics-based simulators, particularly in scenarios with limited camera views. Furthermore, we showcase the utility of our learned models in model-based planning, enabling goal-conditioned object manipulation across a range of tasks. The project page is available at https://kywind.github.io/pgnd .

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 18, 2025

AutoCoreset: An Automatic Practical Coreset Construction Framework

A coreset is a tiny weighted subset of an input set, that closely resembles the loss function, with respect to a certain set of queries. Coresets became prevalent in machine learning as they have shown to be advantageous for many applications. While coreset research is an active research area, unfortunately, coresets are constructed in a problem-dependent manner, where for each problem, a new coreset construction algorithm is usually suggested, a process that may take time or may be hard for new researchers in the field. Even the generic frameworks require additional (problem-dependent) computations or proofs to be done by the user. Besides, many problems do not have (provable) small coresets, limiting their applicability. To this end, we suggest an automatic practical framework for constructing coresets, which requires (only) the input data and the desired cost function from the user, without the need for any other task-related computation to be done by the user. To do so, we reduce the problem of approximating a loss function to an instance of vector summation approximation, where the vectors we aim to sum are loss vectors of a specific subset of the queries, such that we aim to approximate the image of the function on this subset. We show that while this set is limited, the coreset is quite general. An extensive experimental study on various machine learning applications is also conducted. Finally, we provide a ``plug and play" style implementation, proposing a user-friendly system that can be easily used to apply coresets for many problems. Full open source code can be found at https://github.com/alaamaalouf/AutoCoreset{https://github.com/alaamaalouf/AutoCoreset}. We believe that these contributions enable future research and easier use and applications of coresets.

  • 4 authors
·
May 19, 2023

Physically Embodied Gaussian Splatting: A Realtime Correctable World Model for Robotics

For robots to robustly understand and interact with the physical world, it is highly beneficial to have a comprehensive representation - modelling geometry, physics, and visual observations - that informs perception, planning, and control algorithms. We propose a novel dual Gaussian-Particle representation that models the physical world while (i) enabling predictive simulation of future states and (ii) allowing online correction from visual observations in a dynamic world. Our representation comprises particles that capture the geometrical aspect of objects in the world and can be used alongside a particle-based physics system to anticipate physically plausible future states. Attached to these particles are 3D Gaussians that render images from any viewpoint through a splatting process thus capturing the visual state. By comparing the predicted and observed images, our approach generates visual forces that correct the particle positions while respecting known physical constraints. By integrating predictive physical modelling with continuous visually-derived corrections, our unified representation reasons about the present and future while synchronizing with reality. Our system runs in realtime at 30Hz using only 3 cameras. We validate our approach on 2D and 3D tracking tasks as well as photometric reconstruction quality. Videos are found at https://embodied-gaussians.github.io/.

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 15, 2024

Improving Pareto Set Learning for Expensive Multi-objective Optimization via Stein Variational Hypernetworks

Expensive multi-objective optimization problems (EMOPs) are common in real-world scenarios where evaluating objective functions is costly and involves extensive computations or physical experiments. Current Pareto set learning methods for such problems often rely on surrogate models like Gaussian processes to approximate the objective functions. These surrogate models can become fragmented, resulting in numerous small uncertain regions between explored solutions. When using acquisition functions such as the Lower Confidence Bound (LCB), these uncertain regions can turn into pseudo-local optima, complicating the search for globally optimal solutions. To address these challenges, we propose a novel approach called SVH-PSL, which integrates Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) with Hypernetworks for efficient Pareto set learning. Our method addresses the issues of fragmented surrogate models and pseudo-local optima by collectively moving particles in a manner that smooths out the solution space. The particles interact with each other through a kernel function, which helps maintain diversity and encourages the exploration of underexplored regions. This kernel-based interaction prevents particles from clustering around pseudo-local optima and promotes convergence towards globally optimal solutions. Our approach aims to establish robust relationships between trade-off reference vectors and their corresponding true Pareto solutions, overcoming the limitations of existing methods. Through extensive experiments across both synthetic and real-world MOO benchmarks, we demonstrate that SVH-PSL significantly improves the quality of the learned Pareto set, offering a promising solution for expensive multi-objective optimization problems.

  • 5 authors
·
Dec 23, 2024

CMT-Benchmark: A Benchmark for Condensed Matter Theory Built by Expert Researchers

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable progress in coding and math problem-solving, but evaluation on advanced research-level problems in hard sciences remains scarce. To fill this gap, we present CMT-Benchmark, a dataset of 50 problems covering condensed matter theory (CMT) at the level of an expert researcher. Topics span analytical and computational approaches in quantum many-body, and classical statistical mechanics. The dataset was designed and verified by a panel of expert researchers from around the world. We built the dataset through a collaborative environment that challenges the panel to write and refine problems they would want a research assistant to solve, including Hartree-Fock, exact diagonalization, quantum/variational Monte Carlo, density matrix renormalization group (DMRG), quantum/classical statistical mechanics, and model building. We evaluate LLMs by programmatically checking solutions against expert-supplied ground truth. We developed machine-grading, including symbolic handling of non-commuting operators via normal ordering. They generalize across tasks too. Our evaluations show that frontier models struggle with all of the problems in the dataset, highlighting a gap in the physical reasoning skills of current LLMs. Notably, experts identified strategies for creating increasingly difficult problems by interacting with the LLMs and exploiting common failure modes. The best model, GPT5, solves 30\% of the problems; average across 17 models (GPT, Gemini, Claude, DeepSeek, Llama) is 11.4pm2.1\%. Moreover, 18 problems are solved by none of the 17 models, and 26 by at most one. These unsolved problems span Quantum Monte Carlo, Variational Monte Carlo, and DMRG. Answers sometimes violate fundamental symmetries or have unphysical scaling dimensions. We believe this benchmark will guide development toward capable AI research assistants and tutors.

  • 19 authors
·
Oct 6, 2025

PhysProver: Advancing Automatic Theorem Proving for Physics

The combination of verifiable languages and LLMs has significantly influenced both the mathematical and computer science communities because it provides a rigorous foundation for theorem proving. Recent advancements in the field provide foundation models and sophisticated agentic systems pushing the boundaries of formal mathematical reasoning to approach the natural language capability of LLMs. However, little attention has been given to the formal physics reasoning, which also heavily relies on similar problem-solving and theorem-proving frameworks. To solve this problem, this paper presents, to the best of our knowledge, the first approach to enhance formal theorem proving in the physics domain. We compose a dedicated dataset PhysLeanData for the task. It is composed of theorems sampled from PhysLean and data generated by a conjecture-based formal data generation pipeline. In the training pipeline, we leverage DeepSeek-Prover-V2-7B, a strong open-source mathematical theorem prover, and apply Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) to train our model PhysProver. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that, using only sim5K training samples, PhysProver achieves an overall 2.4\% improvement in multiple sub-domains. Furthermore, after formal physics training, we observe 1.3\% gains on the MiniF2F-Test benchmark, which indicates non-trivial generalization beyond physics domains and enhancement for formal math capability as well. The results highlight the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach, which provides a paradigm for extending formal provers outside mathematical domains. To foster further research, we will release both our dataset and model to the community.

  • 6 authors
·
Jan 22

Enhancing Neural Subset Selection: Integrating Background Information into Set Representations

Learning neural subset selection tasks, such as compound selection in AI-aided drug discovery, have become increasingly pivotal across diverse applications. The existing methodologies in the field primarily concentrate on constructing models that capture the relationship between utility function values and subsets within their respective supersets. However, these approaches tend to overlook the valuable information contained within the superset when utilizing neural networks to model set functions. In this work, we address this oversight by adopting a probabilistic perspective. Our theoretical findings demonstrate that when the target value is conditioned on both the input set and subset, it is essential to incorporate an invariant sufficient statistic of the superset into the subset of interest for effective learning. This ensures that the output value remains invariant to permutations of the subset and its corresponding superset, enabling identification of the specific superset from which the subset originated. Motivated by these insights, we propose a simple yet effective information aggregation module designed to merge the representations of subsets and supersets from a permutation invariance perspective. Comprehensive empirical evaluations across diverse tasks and datasets validate the enhanced efficacy of our approach over conventional methods, underscoring the practicality and potency of our proposed strategies in real-world contexts.

  • 8 authors
·
Feb 5, 2024

Time evolution of the Boltzmann entropy for a nonequilibrium dilute gas

We investigate the time evolution of the Boltzmann entropy of a dilute gas of N particles, N>>1, as it undergoes a free expansion doubling its volume. The microstate of the system, a point in the 4N dimensional phase space, changes in time via Hamiltonian dynamics. Its entropy, at any time t, is given by the logarithm of the phase space volume of all the microstates giving rise to its macrostate at time t. The macrostates that we consider are defined by coarse graining the one-particle phase space into cells Δ_α. The initial and final macrostates of the system are equilibrium states in volumes V and 2V, with the same energy E and particle number N. Their entropy per particle is given, for sufficiently large systems, by the thermodynamic entropy as a function of the particle and energy density, whose leading term is independent of the size of the Δ_α. The intermediate (non-equilibrium) entropy does however depend on the size of the cells Δ_α. Its change with time is due to (i) dispersal in physical space from free motion and to (ii) the collisions between particles which change their velocities. The former depends strongly on the size of the velocity coarse graining Δv: it produces entropy at a rate proportional to Δv. This dependence is investigated numerically and analytically for a dilute two-dimensional gas of hard discs. It becomes significant when the mean free path between collisions is of the same order or larger than the length scale of the initial spatial inhomogeneity. In the opposite limit, the rate of entropy production is essentially independent of Δv and is given by the Boltzmann equation for the limit Δvrightarrow 0. We show that when both processes are active the time dependence of the entropy has a scaling form involving the ratio of the rates of its production by the two processes.

  • 4 authors
·
Mar 12, 2024

PAC Prediction Sets for Large Language Models of Code

Prediction sets have recently been shown to be a promising strategy for quantifying the uncertainty of deep neural networks in a way that provides theoretical guarantees. However, existing techniques have largely targeted settings where the space of labels is simple, so prediction sets can be arbitrary subsets of labels. For structured prediction problems where the space of labels is exponential in size, even prediction sets containing a small fraction of all labels can be exponentially large. In the context of code generation, we propose a solution that considers a restricted set of prediction sets that can compactly be represented as partial programs, which are programs with portions replaced with holes. Given a trained code generation model, our algorithm leverages a programming language's abstract syntax tree to generate a set of programs such that the correct program is in the set with high-confidence. Valuable applications of our algorithm include a Codex-style code generator with holes in uncertain parts of the generated code, which provides a partial program with theoretical guarantees. We evaluate our approach on PICARD (a T5 model for SQL semantic parsing) and Codex (a GPT model for over a dozen programming languages, including Python), demonstrating that our approach generates compact PAC prediction sets. This is the first research contribution that generates PAC prediction sets for generative code models.

  • 3 authors
·
Feb 17, 2023

Denotational validation of higher-order Bayesian inference

We present a modular semantic account of Bayesian inference algorithms for probabilistic programming languages, as used in data science and machine learning. Sophisticated inference algorithms are often explained in terms of composition of smaller parts. However, neither their theoretical justification nor their implementation reflects this modularity. We show how to conceptualise and analyse such inference algorithms as manipulating intermediate representations of probabilistic programs using higher-order functions and inductive types, and their denotational semantics. Semantic accounts of continuous distributions use measurable spaces. However, our use of higher-order functions presents a substantial technical difficulty: it is impossible to define a measurable space structure over the collection of measurable functions between arbitrary measurable spaces that is compatible with standard operations on those functions, such as function application. We overcome this difficulty using quasi-Borel spaces, a recently proposed mathematical structure that supports both function spaces and continuous distributions. We define a class of semantic structures for representing probabilistic programs, and semantic validity criteria for transformations of these representations in terms of distribution preservation. We develop a collection of building blocks for composing representations. We use these building blocks to validate common inference algorithms such as Sequential Monte Carlo and Markov Chain Monte Carlo. To emphasize the connection between the semantic manipulation and its traditional measure theoretic origins, we use Kock's synthetic measure theory. We demonstrate its usefulness by proving a quasi-Borel counterpart to the Metropolis-Hastings-Green theorem.

  • 10 authors
·
Nov 8, 2017

Maximizing Efficiency of Dataset Compression for Machine Learning Potentials With Information Theory

Machine learning interatomic potentials (MLIPs) balance high accuracy and lower costs compared to density functional theory calculations, but their performance often depends on the size and diversity of training datasets. Large datasets improve model accuracy and generalization but are computationally expensive to produce and train on, while smaller datasets risk discarding rare but important atomic environments and compromising MLIP accuracy/reliability. Here, we develop an information-theoretical framework to quantify the efficiency of dataset compression methods and propose an algorithm that maximizes this efficiency. By framing atomistic dataset compression as an instance of the minimum set cover (MSC) problem over atom-centered environments, our method identifies the smallest subset of structures that contains as much information as possible from the original dataset while pruning redundant information. The approach is extensively demonstrated on the GAP-20 and TM23 datasets, and validated on 64 varied datasets from the ColabFit repository. Across all cases, MSC consistently retains outliers, preserves dataset diversity, and reproduces the long-tail distributions of forces even at high compression rates, outperforming other subsampling methods. Furthermore, MLIPs trained on MSC-compressed datasets exhibit reduced error for out-of-distribution data even in low-data regimes. We explain these results using an outlier analysis and show that such quantitative conclusions could not be achieved with conventional dimensionality reduction methods. The algorithm is implemented in the open-source QUESTS package and can be used for several tasks in atomistic modeling, from data subsampling, outlier detection, and training improved MLIPs at a lower cost.

  • 3 authors
·
Nov 13, 2025

Robust Attentional Aggregation of Deep Feature Sets for Multi-view 3D Reconstruction

We study the problem of recovering an underlying 3D shape from a set of images. Existing learning based approaches usually resort to recurrent neural nets, e.g., GRU, or intuitive pooling operations, e.g., max/mean poolings, to fuse multiple deep features encoded from input images. However, GRU based approaches are unable to consistently estimate 3D shapes given different permutations of the same set of input images as the recurrent unit is permutation variant. It is also unlikely to refine the 3D shape given more images due to the long-term memory loss of GRU. Commonly used pooling approaches are limited to capturing partial information, e.g., max/mean values, ignoring other valuable features. In this paper, we present a new feed-forward neural module, named AttSets, together with a dedicated training algorithm, named FASet, to attentively aggregate an arbitrarily sized deep feature set for multi-view 3D reconstruction. The AttSets module is permutation invariant, computationally efficient and flexible to implement, while the FASet algorithm enables the AttSets based network to be remarkably robust and generalize to an arbitrary number of input images. We thoroughly evaluate FASet and the properties of AttSets on multiple large public datasets. Extensive experiments show that AttSets together with FASet algorithm significantly outperforms existing aggregation approaches.

  • 4 authors
·
Aug 2, 2018

Quarks to Cosmos: Particles and Plasma in Cosmological evolution

We describe in the context of the particle physics (PP) standard model (SM) `PP-SM' the understanding of the primordial properties and composition of the Universe in the temperature range 130GeV>T>20keV. The Universe evolution is described using FLRW cosmology. We present a global view on particle content across time and describe the different evolution eras using deceleration parameter q. We follow the arrow of time in the expanding and cooling Universe: After the PP-SM heavies (t, h, W, Z) diminish in abundance below Tsimeq 50GeV, the PP-SM plasma in the Universe is governed by the strongly interacting Quark-Gluon content. Once the temperature drops below Tsimeq 150MeV, quarks and gluons hadronize into strongly interacting matter particles. Rapid disappearance of baryonic antimatter completes at T_B=38.2MeV. We study the ensuing disappearance of strangeness and mesons in general. We show that the different eras defined by particle populations are barely separated from each other with abundance of muons fading out just prior to T=O(2.5)MeV, the era of emergence of the free-streaming neutrinos. We discuss the two relevant fundamental constants controlling the decoupling of neutrinos. We subsequently follow the primordial Universe as it passes through the hot dense electron-positron plasma epoch. The high density of positron antimatter disappears near T=20.3keV: Nuclear reactions occur in the presence of a highly mobile and relatively strongly interacting electron-positron plasma phase. We apply plasma theory methods to describe the strong screening effects between heavy dust particle (nucleons). We analyze the paramagnetic characteristics of the electron-positron plasma when exposed to an external primordial magnetic field.

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 26, 2024

The probabilistic world

Physics is based on probabilities as fundamental entities of a mathematical description. Expectation values of observables are computed according to the classical statistical rule. The overall probability distribution for one world covers all times. The quantum formalism arises once one focuses on the evolution of the time-local probabilistic information. Wave functions or the density matrix allow the formulation of a general linear evolution law for classical statistics. The quantum formalism for classical statistics is a powerful tool which allows us to implement for generalized Ising models the momentum observable with the associated Fourier representation. The association of operators to observables permits the computation of expectation values in terms of the density matrix by the usual quantum rule. We show that probabilistic cellular automata are quantum systems in a formulation with discrete time steps and real wave functions. With a complex structure the evolution operator for automata can be expressed in terms of a Hamiltonian involving fermionic creation and annihilation operators. The time-local probabilistic information amounts to a subsystem of the overall probabilistic system which is correlated with its environment consisting of the past and future. Such subsystems typically involve probabilistic observables for which only a probability distribution for their possible measurement values is available. Incomplete statistics does not permit to compute classical correlation functions for arbitrary subsystem-observables. Bell's inequalities are not generally applicable.

  • 1 authors
·
Nov 4, 2020

Probabilistic Partitive Partitioning (PPP)

Clustering is a NP-hard problem. Thus, no optimal algorithm exists, heuristics are applied to cluster the data. Heuristics can be very resource-intensive, if not applied properly. For substantially large data sets computational efficiencies can be achieved by reducing the input space if a minimal loss of information can be achieved. Clustering algorithms, in general, face two common problems: 1) these converge to different settings with different initial conditions and; 2) the number of clusters has to be arbitrarily decided beforehand. This problem has become critical in the realm of big data. Recently, clustering algorithms have emerged which can speedup computations using parallel processing over the grid but face the aforementioned problems. Goals: Our goals are to find methods to cluster data which: 1) guarantee convergence to the same settings irrespective of the initial conditions; 2) eliminate the need to establish the number of clusters beforehand, and 3) can be applied to cluster large datasets. Methods: We introduce a method that combines probabilistic and combinatorial clustering methods to produce repeatable and compact clusters that are not sensitive to initial conditions. This method harnesses the power of k-means (a combinatorial clustering method) to cluster/partition very large dimensional datasets and uses the Gaussian Mixture Model (a probabilistic clustering method) to validate the k-means partitions. Results: We show that this method produces very compact clusters that are not sensitive to initial conditions. This method can be used to identify the most 'separable' set in a dataset which increases the 'clusterability' of a dataset. This method also eliminates the need to specify the number of clusters in advance.

  • 1 authors
·
Mar 9, 2020

Addendum to Research MMMCV; A Man/Microbio/Megabio/Computer Vision

In October 2007, a Research Proposal for the University of Sydney, Australia, the author suggested that biovie-physical phenomenon as `electrodynamic dependant biological vision', is governed by relativistic quantum laws and biovision. The phenomenon on the basis of `biovielectroluminescence', satisfies man/microbio/megabio/computer vision (MMMCV), as a robust candidate for physical and visual sciences. The general aim of this addendum is to present a refined text of Sections 1-3 of that proposal and highlighting the contents of its Appendix in form of a `Mechanisms' Section. We then briefly remind in an article aimed for December 2007, by appending two more equations into Section 3, a theoretical II-time scenario as a time model well-proposed for the phenomenon. The time model within the core of the proposal, plays a significant role in emphasizing the principle points on Objectives no. 1-8, Sub-hypothesis 3.1.2, mentioned in Article [arXiv:0710.0410]. It also expresses the time concept in terms of causing quantized energy f(|E|) of time |t|, emit in regard to shortening the probability of particle loci as predictable patterns of particle's un-occurred motion, a solution to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle (HUP) into a simplistic manner. We conclude that, practical frames via a time algorithm to this model, fixates such predictable patterns of motion of scenery bodies onto recordable observation points of a MMMCV system. It even suppresses/predicts superposition phenomena coming from a human subject and/or other bio-subjects for any decision making event, e.g., brainwave quantum patterns based on vision. Maintaining the existential probability of Riemann surfaces of II-time scenarios in the context of biovielectroluminescence, makes motion-prediction a possibility.

  • 1 authors
·
Nov 6, 2007

SETOL: A Semi-Empirical Theory of (Deep) Learning

We present a SemiEmpirical Theory of Learning (SETOL) that explains the remarkable performance of State-Of-The-Art (SOTA) Neural Networks (NNs). We provide a formal explanation of the origin of the fundamental quantities in the phenomenological theory of Heavy-Tailed Self-Regularization (HTSR): the heavy-tailed power-law layer quality metrics, alpha and alpha-hat. In prior work, these metrics have been shown to predict trends in the test accuracies of pretrained SOTA NN models, importantly, without needing access to either testing or training data. Our SETOL uses techniques from statistical mechanics as well as advanced methods from random matrix theory and quantum chemistry. The derivation suggests new mathematical preconditions for ideal learning, including a new metric, ERG, which is equivalent to applying a single step of the Wilson Exact Renormalization Group. We test the assumptions and predictions of SETOL on a simple 3-layer multilayer perceptron (MLP), demonstrating excellent agreement with the key theoretical assumptions. For SOTA NN models, we show how to estimate the individual layer qualities of a trained NN by simply computing the empirical spectral density (ESD) of the layer weight matrices and plugging this ESD into our SETOL formulas. Notably, we examine the performance of the HTSR alpha and the SETOL ERG layer quality metrics, and find that they align remarkably well, both on our MLP and on SOTA NNs.

  • 2 authors
·
Jul 23, 2025

Model-Based and Sample-Efficient AI-Assisted Math Discovery in Sphere Packing

Sphere packing, Hilbert's eighteenth problem, asks for the densest arrangement of congruent spheres in n-dimensional Euclidean space. Although relevant to areas such as cryptography, crystallography, and medical imaging, the problem remains unresolved: beyond a few special dimensions, neither optimal packings nor tight upper bounds are known. Even a major breakthrough in dimension n=8, later recognised with a Fields Medal, underscores its difficulty. A leading technique for upper bounds, the three-point method, reduces the problem to solving large, high-precision semidefinite programs (SDPs). Because each candidate SDP may take days to evaluate, standard data-intensive AI approaches are infeasible. We address this challenge by formulating SDP construction as a sequential decision process, the SDP game, in which a policy assembles SDP formulations from a set of admissible components. Using a sample-efficient model-based framework that combines Bayesian optimisation with Monte Carlo Tree Search, we obtain new state-of-the-art upper bounds in dimensions 4-16, showing that model-based search can advance computational progress in longstanding geometric problems. Together, these results demonstrate that sample-efficient, model-based search can make tangible progress on mathematically rigid, evaluation limited problems, pointing towards a complementary direction for AI-assisted discovery beyond large-scale LLM-driven exploration.

  • 6 authors
·
Dec 4, 2025 2

Mathematical Capabilities of ChatGPT

We investigate the mathematical capabilities of ChatGPT by testing it on publicly available datasets, as well as hand-crafted ones, and measuring its performance against other models trained on a mathematical corpus, such as Minerva. We also test whether ChatGPT can be a useful assistant to professional mathematicians by emulating various use cases that come up in the daily professional activities of mathematicians (question answering, theorem searching). In contrast to formal mathematics, where large databases of formal proofs are available (e.g., the Lean Mathematical Library), current datasets of natural-language mathematics, used to benchmark language models, only cover elementary mathematics. We address this issue by introducing a new dataset: GHOSTS. It is the first natural-language dataset made and curated by working researchers in mathematics that (1) aims to cover graduate-level mathematics and (2) provides a holistic overview of the mathematical capabilities of language models. We benchmark ChatGPT on GHOSTS and evaluate performance against fine-grained criteria. We make this new dataset publicly available to assist a community-driven comparison of ChatGPT with (future) large language models in terms of advanced mathematical comprehension. We conclude that contrary to many positive reports in the media (a potential case of selection bias), ChatGPT's mathematical abilities are significantly below those of an average mathematics graduate student. Our results show that ChatGPT often understands the question but fails to provide correct solutions. Hence, if your goal is to use it to pass a university exam, you would be better off copying from your average peer!

  • 8 authors
·
Jan 31, 2023

Set2Seq Transformer: Temporal and Position-Aware Set Representations for Sequential Multiple-Instance Learning

In many real-world applications, modeling both the internal structure of sets and their temporal relationships is essential for capturing complex underlying patterns. Sequential multiple-instance learning aims to address this challenge by learning permutation-invariant representations of sets distributed across discrete timesteps. However, existing methods either focus on learning set representations at a static level, ignoring temporal dynamics, or treat sequences as ordered lists of individual elements, lacking explicit mechanisms for representing sets. Crucially, effective modeling of such sequences of sets often requires encoding both the positional ordering across timesteps and their absolute temporal values to jointly capture relative progression and temporal context. In this work, we propose Set2Seq Transformer, a novel architecture that jointly models permutation-invariant set structure and temporal dependencies by learning temporal and position-aware representations of sets within a sequence in an end-to-end multimodal manner. We evaluate our Set2Seq Transformer on two tasks that require modeling set structure alongside temporal and positional patterns, but differ significantly in domain, modality, and objective. First, we consider a fine art analysis task, modeling artists' oeuvres for predicting artistic success using a novel dataset, WikiArt-Seq2Rank. Second, we utilize our Set2Seq Transformer for short-term wildfire danger forecasting. Through extensive experimentation, we show that our Set2Seq Transformer consistently improves over traditional static multiple-instance learning methods by effectively learning permutation-invariant set, temporal, and position-aware representations across diverse domains, modalities, and tasks. We release all code and datasets at https://github.com/thefth/set2seq-transformer.

  • 5 authors
·
Aug 6, 2024

Training-free CryoET Tomogram Segmentation

Cryogenic Electron Tomography (CryoET) is a useful imaging technology in structural biology that is hindered by its need for manual annotations, especially in particle picking. Recent works have endeavored to remedy this issue with few-shot learning or contrastive learning techniques. However, supervised training is still inevitable for them. We instead choose to leverage the power of existing 2D foundation models and present a novel, training-free framework, CryoSAM. In addition to prompt-based single-particle instance segmentation, our approach can automatically search for similar features, facilitating full tomogram semantic segmentation with only one prompt. CryoSAM is composed of two major parts: 1) a prompt-based 3D segmentation system that uses prompts to complete single-particle instance segmentation recursively with Cross-Plane Self-Prompting, and 2) a Hierarchical Feature Matching mechanism that efficiently matches relevant features with extracted tomogram features. They collaborate to enable the segmentation of all particles of one category with just one particle-specific prompt. Our experiments show that CryoSAM outperforms existing works by a significant margin and requires even fewer annotations in particle picking. Further visualizations demonstrate its ability when dealing with full tomogram segmentation for various subcellular structures. Our code is available at: https://github.com/xulabs/aitom

  • 8 authors
·
Jul 7, 2024

Diffeomorphic Mesh Deformation via Efficient Optimal Transport for Cortical Surface Reconstruction

Mesh deformation plays a pivotal role in many 3D vision tasks including dynamic simulations, rendering, and reconstruction. However, defining an efficient discrepancy between predicted and target meshes remains an open problem. A prevalent approach in current deep learning is the set-based approach which measures the discrepancy between two surfaces by comparing two randomly sampled point-clouds from the two meshes with Chamfer pseudo-distance. Nevertheless, the set-based approach still has limitations such as lacking a theoretical guarantee for choosing the number of points in sampled point-clouds, and the pseudo-metricity and the quadratic complexity of the Chamfer divergence. To address these issues, we propose a novel metric for learning mesh deformation. The metric is defined by sliced Wasserstein distance on meshes represented as probability measures that generalize the set-based approach. By leveraging probability measure space, we gain flexibility in encoding meshes using diverse forms of probability measures, such as continuous, empirical, and discrete measures via varifold representation. After having encoded probability measures, we can compare meshes by using the sliced Wasserstein distance which is an effective optimal transport distance with linear computational complexity and can provide a fast statistical rate for approximating the surface of meshes. To the end, we employ a neural ordinary differential equation (ODE) to deform the input surface into the target shape by modeling the trajectories of the points on the surface. Our experiments on cortical surface reconstruction demonstrate that our approach surpasses other competing methods in multiple datasets and metrics.

  • 6 authors
·
May 27, 2023

Scaling Physical Reasoning with the PHYSICS Dataset

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress on advanced reasoning tasks such as mathematics and coding competitions. Meanwhile, physics, despite being both reasoning-intensive and essential to real-world understanding, received limited academic and industrial attention. This paper introduces PHYSICS, a dataset containing 16,568 high-quality physics problems spanning subjects and difficulty levels, to facilitate this issue. Specifically, PHYSICS is curated with exercises from over 100 textbooks through a carefully designed pipeline for quality control. It covers five major physics domains: Mechanics, Electromagnetism, Thermodynamics, Optics, and Modern Physics. It also spans a wide range of difficulty levels, from high school to graduate-level physics courses. To utilize the data for improving and evaluating the model's physical reasoning capabilities, we split the dataset into training and test sets, and provide reasoning paths generated by powerful reasoning models for the training data to facilitate model training. In addition, for the evaluation part, we find that existing evaluation frameworks exhibit biases in aspects such as units, simplification, and precision in physics domain. To balance efficiency and accuracy, we introduce a Rule+Model evaluation framework tailored to physics problems. Our evaluations on current state-of-the-art open-source and proprietary models highlight the limitations of current models in handling physics-related tasks. We hope that our dataset and evaluation methodology will jointly advance the development of LLMs in the field of physics.

  • 12 authors
·
May 21, 2025

Dynamical evolution of massless particles in star clusters with NBODY6++GPU-MASSLESS: I. Free-floating MLPs

Context. Low-mass bodies, such as comets, asteroids, planetesimals, and free-floating planets, are continuously injected into the intra-cluster environment after expulsion from their host planetary systems. These can be modeled as massless particles (MLPs, hereafter). The dynamics of large populations of MLPs, however, has yet received little attention in literature. Aims. We investigate the dynamical evolution of MLP populations in star clusters, and characterize their kinematics and ejection rates. Methods. We present NBODY6++GPU-MASSLESS, a modified version of the N-body simulation code NBODY6++GPU, that allows fast integration of star clusters that contain large numbers of massless particles (MLPs). NBODY6++GPU-MASSLESS contains routines specifically directed at the dynamical evolution of low-mass bodies, such as planets. Results. Unlike stars, MLPs do not participate in the mass segregation process. Instead, MLPs mostly follow the gravitational potential of the star cluster, which gradually decreases over time due to stellar ejections and stellar evolution. The dynamical evolution of MLPs is primarily affected by the evolution of the core of the star cluster. This is most apparent in the outer regions for clusters with higher initial densities. High escape rates of MLPs are observed before the core-collapse, after which escape rates remain stable. Denser star clusters undergo a more intense core collapse, but this does not impact the dynamical evolution of MLPs. The speeds of escaping stars are similar to those of escaping MLPs, when disregarding the high-velocity ejections of neutron stars during the first 50 Myr.

  • 5 authors
·
Dec 11, 2024

Deep learning probability flows and entropy production rates in active matter

Active matter systems, from self-propelled colloids to motile bacteria, are characterized by the conversion of free energy into useful work at the microscopic scale. These systems generically involve physics beyond the reach of equilibrium statistical mechanics, and a persistent challenge has been to understand the nature of their nonequilibrium states. The entropy production rate and the magnitude of the steady-state probability current provide quantitative ways to do so by measuring the breakdown of time-reversal symmetry and the strength of nonequilibrium transport of measure. Yet, their efficient computation has remained elusive, as they depend on the system's unknown and high-dimensional probability density. Here, building upon recent advances in generative modeling, we develop a deep learning framework that estimates the score of this density. We show that the score, together with the microscopic equations of motion, gives direct access to the entropy production rate, the probability current, and their decomposition into local contributions from individual particles, spatial regions, and degrees of freedom. To represent the score, we introduce a novel, spatially-local transformer-based network architecture that learns high-order interactions between particles while respecting their underlying permutation symmetry. We demonstrate the broad utility and scalability of the method by applying it to several high-dimensional systems of interacting active particles undergoing motility-induced phase separation (MIPS). We show that a single instance of our network trained on a system of 4096 particles at one packing fraction can generalize to other regions of the phase diagram, including systems with as many as 32768 particles. We use this observation to quantify the spatial structure of the departure from equilibrium in MIPS as a function of the number of particles and the packing fraction.

  • 2 authors
·
Sep 22, 2023

Towards Foundational Models for Molecular Learning on Large-Scale Multi-Task Datasets

Recently, pre-trained foundation models have enabled significant advancements in multiple fields. In molecular machine learning, however, where datasets are often hand-curated, and hence typically small, the lack of datasets with labeled features, and codebases to manage those datasets, has hindered the development of foundation models. In this work, we present seven novel datasets categorized by size into three distinct categories: ToyMix, LargeMix and UltraLarge. These datasets push the boundaries in both the scale and the diversity of supervised labels for molecular learning. They cover nearly 100 million molecules and over 3000 sparsely defined tasks, totaling more than 13 billion individual labels of both quantum and biological nature. In comparison, our datasets contain 300 times more data points than the widely used OGB-LSC PCQM4Mv2 dataset, and 13 times more than the quantum-only QM1B dataset. In addition, to support the development of foundational models based on our proposed datasets, we present the Graphium graph machine learning library which simplifies the process of building and training molecular machine learning models for multi-task and multi-level molecular datasets. Finally, we present a range of baseline results as a starting point of multi-task and multi-level training on these datasets. Empirically, we observe that performance on low-resource biological datasets show improvement by also training on large amounts of quantum data. This indicates that there may be potential in multi-task and multi-level training of a foundation model and fine-tuning it to resource-constrained downstream tasks.

  • 34 authors
·
Oct 6, 2023

Polymorphic Combinatorial Frameworks (PCF): Guiding the Design of Mathematically-Grounded, Adaptive AI Agents

The Polymorphic Combinatorial Framework (PCF) leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) and mathematical frameworks to guide the meta-prompt enabled design of solution spaces and adaptive AI agents for complex, dynamic environments. Unlike static agent architectures, PCF enables real-time parameter reconfiguration through mathematically-grounded combinatorial spaces, allowing agents to adapt their core behavioral traits dynamically. Grounded in combinatorial logic, topos theory, and rough fuzzy set theory, PCF defines a multidimensional SPARK parameter space (Skills, Personalities, Approaches, Resources, Knowledge) to capture agent behaviors. This paper demonstrates how LLMs can parameterize complex spaces and estimate likely parameter values/variabilities. Using PCF, we parameterized mock caf\'e domains (five levels of complexity), estimated variables/variabilities, and conducted over 1.25 million Monte Carlo simulations. The results revealed trends in agent adaptability and performance across the five complexity tiers, with diminishing returns at higher complexity levels highlighting thresholds for scalable designs. PCF enables the generation of optimized agent configurations for specific scenarios while maintaining logical consistency. This framework supports scalable, dynamic, explainable, and ethical AI applications in domains like customer service, healthcare, robotics, and collaborative systems, paving the way for adaptable and cooperative next-generation polymorphic agents.

  • 3 authors
·
Aug 3, 2025