Physics-Aware Models

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5 papers in the last 28 days · 0.1% of indexed attention

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Period ending 2026-09-21

2 new papers

A weekly snapshot of new work published in Physics-Aware Models.

Period ending 2026-09-07

2 new papers

A weekly snapshot of new work published in Physics-Aware Models.

26 papers

Latest in Physics-Aware Models

Sep 20, 2026cs.LG

Discovering Physical Representation Languages

Before a machine can discover a physical law, it must discover what its measurements are: which observations live on cells, which are intensive or extensive, which sectors are dual, and which distinctions are merely gauge. We introduce physical representation-language discovery, the problem of recovering this hidden ontology directly from anonymous controlled experiments. We give an identifiability theory and constructive polynomial-time procedure that recovers a carrier and differential sequence, measurement types and orientation twist, noninvertible refinement semantics, primal-dual Maxwell diagrams, and the residual equivalences that no permitted experiment can break. The theory turns material nuisance into a commutant, uses refinement to separate quantities from coordinates, and selects physics only after its representation has been recovered. For a certified finite experiment family, we prove an end-to-end two-stage measurement bound and a matching minimax rate in dimension, accuracy, and confidence. Blind Maxwell experiments recover complete primal/relative-dual ontologies on regular and unstructured carriers under jointly corrupted observations; an independent unstructured RLC system demonstrates that the result is not specific to Maxwell. The framework scales to tens of thousands of cells per carrier, while stress audits demonstrate robustness across severe physical regimes - including non-Markovian memory, nonlinearities, nonlocality, and complex constitutive hysteresis. A public FDTD audit demonstrates the emergence of anonymous curl structure from incomplete field data, while characterizing the informational prerequisites for complete recovery. The goal is to move scientific ML from learning laws in a human-supplied language to discovering the language in which laws become expressible, establishing exact theoretical limits on observational identifiability.
Linzhe Zhang, Changming Xu
Sep 14, 2026cs.LG

Scaling Laws for Physics-Aware ACOPF Surrogate Learning

Learning-based surrogates for AC optimal power flow (ACOPF) promise large speedups over classical solvers, but their operational value depends on physical feasibility as much as predictive accuracy. Physics-aware objectives such as the augmented Lagrangian (AL) improve constraint satisfaction at additional per-step cost, yet how this trade-off behaves with scale is uncharacterized. We sweep model and dataset sizes under both MSE and AL training, and characterize how constraint violation changes with network size across grids. Both objectives improve as power laws, but at different rates: MSE is governed primarily by model capacity, while AL is balanced across both. Violation grows roughly twice as fast with network size under MSE as under AL. On matched hardware, AL reduces violation by nearly 30×30\times for an order of magnitude more training time, with negligible added memory. The training objective determines not only where a surrogate lands but how its quality evolves with scale.
Yijiang Li, Emon Dey, Stefano Fenu +3
Sep 14, 2026cs.CV

Physics as the label for measuring and correcting materials reasoning in multimodal models

Vision-language and language models increasingly interpret materials data, yet benchmarks report that they hallucinate invalid properties and violate physical law. Evaluation matches final answers to scarce human labels, while discovery agents verify final proposals or density functional theory (DFT) execution. Neither measures the physical consistency of a model's reasoning chain. Materials data carries its own physics, making a large class of materials reasoning verifiable without annotation. We introduce MatPCR, a label-free benchmark whose programmatic oracles check diffraction geometry through Bragg's law, scale bars, spectral peaks, and Materials Project-grounded checks of near-hull stability, computed band-gap class, and net magnetization. We define the Physical-Consistency Rate over image and structure inputs; introduce Constraint-Grounded Self-Verification, an agentic loop whose gain survives self-refinement and equal-compute re-prompting controls; release an open verifier useful in distribution but near chance on all six held-out constraint types; and derive an exact identity for how oracle error displaces the reported rate.
Hasan Kurban, Rasul Khanbayov, Mustafa Kurban
Sep 1, 2026cs.LG

DeSyR: A Decoupled Symbolic Recovery Framework with PINN-Guided Structure Search and Physics-Informed Coefficient Refinement

Recovering compact explicit solutions from neural approximations is challenging when imperfect teacher data guide symbolic topology search and coefficient estimation. We present DeSyR, a decoupled symbolic recovery framework for differential equations. A physics-informed neural network guides repeated searches to construct candidate topologies with provisional constants. Once a topology is fixed, its coefficients are refined solely from the governing equation and prescribed constraints, followed by gated selection and verification. For linear fixed-topology parameterizations, we characterize teacher-error inheritance and show that finite-weight mixed data--physics fitting retains an O(β1)O(β^{-1}) teacher-dependent contribution when the teacher error projects onto the model space. Under well-posedness, representability, zero-residual attainment, and discrete determinacy, physics-only refinement conditionally recovers exact coefficients; for nonlinear parameterizations, the corresponding guarantees are local. DeSyR is evaluated on 15 differential-equation problems across 18 configurations covering high-order, space--time, multidimensional, nonlinear, and coupled systems. A candidate-level audit yields a 99.23% convergence rate among free-parameter refits, while every selected refinement involving free coefficients converges. Configuration-level median refined relative L2L_2 errors are 2.31×10142.31\times10^{-14} or lower. In same-topology comparisons, refinement reduces error by eight to fourteen orders of magnitude. These results show that an approximate neural teacher can guide topology discovery without imposing its error scale on final recovered coefficients, provided a target-capable topology is retained and physics-only refinement converges.
Pancheng Niu, Jun Guo, Qiaolin He +2
Aug 28, 2026physics.optics

HALO: A Physics-Aware LLM Agent Framework for Nanophotonic Design

Language models have recently been applied to nanophotonic design, but it remains unclear whether they can reliably translate optical objectives into simulation-ready designs, execute electromagnetic analysis, and revise decisions from numerical feedback. We introduce HALO, a physics-aware framework that couples language-model planners with typed design specifications, electromagnetic simulation, diagnostic evaluation, and optional reuse of prior failure trajectories in an iterative design loop. We further introduce HALO-Bench, a 52-task benchmark spanning lab-derived, paper-derived, and open-ended nanophotonic design tasks under a shared evaluation protocol. We compare three planner configurations: a Fixed Structured Workflow, an Autonomous Structured Agent using the same simulation interface, and an Autonomous Coding Agent that directly writes and executes simulation code. The Fixed Structured Workflow is the most token-efficient and exhibits no observed code- or path-level failures, while autonomous coding can achieve higher task success with stronger models at the cost of additional operational failures. We also study reuse of prior failed trajectories. On targeted multi-round tasks, retrieved failure feedback reduces both iterations to first success and total token use. These results clarify the tradeoffs between explicit interfaces, autonomous execution, and reusable design experience in scientific agents.
Yubo Zhang, Jinlin Xiang, Zijun Zhao +3
Aug 8, 2026cs.CE

Tools to Explain Neural Networks for Power System Dynamics

This paper presents, for the first time in power systems literature to our knowledge, analytical tools to explain the training performance of machine learning surrogate models for power system dynamics. Power system simulations are increasingly challenged by stiff and multi-timescale dynamics arising from converter-interfaced resources and fast control loops. Machine learning surrogates emerge as promising tools to handle this complexity and accelerate dynamic simulations. However, their performance remains difficult to interpret, which limits their adoption. Building on the small-signal eigenvalue analysis in power systems, this paper uses the Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK) method. NTK delivers a modal interpretation of the learning performance, identifying error modes that decay rapidly versus others that converge slowly. This connection explains how physical stiffness and timescale separation in power system dynamic models appear as optimization stiffness during Neural Network (NN) training. Based on this analysis, we develop adaptive loss-weighting strategies to improve and explain why structure-aware neural architectures, such as ActNet, perform better than vanilla NNs. We assess the proposed approach on physics-informed machine learning surrogate models of \acp{SM} and power electronic converters. The methods introduced in this paper can deliver the necessary analytical tools to interpret and improve the performance of machine learning surrogates, paving the way for the systematic, physics-aware design of NN architectures and training strategies. By moving beyond trial-and-error development, these tools reveal training dynamics and failure modes, support more reliable design decisions, and strengthen confidence in machine-learning surrogates for engineering applications.
Petros Ellinas, Johanna Vorwerk, Spyros Chatzivasileiadis
Jul 26, 2026cs.LG

LAWFUL: Law-Aligned Witness for Faithful Use of Latents

When a neural network predicts a physical system accurately, has it learned the governing law as formal, structured knowledge, and if so, does the network's internal computation actually use that representation throughout the law's domain of validity? We identify four interpretability gaps that limit answering these questions for {\em physics laws over continuous variables}: the absence of a coverage-aware causal-consistency measure over continuous counterfactuals; of a domain-of-validity test for the identified circuit; of a verification of the law's invariants and forbidden behaviors; and of a quantification of how a derived physical quantity flows through the circuit. We develop a foundational framework, LAWFUL, that closes the first two and lays groundwork for the remaining two, and illustrate it on the Mocap2Radar transformer, validating whether it learns and internally uses the Doppler frequency law f(t)=2v(t)λf(t) = \frac{2 v(t)}λ from motion-capture and radar data in which neither f(t)f(t) nor v(t)v(t) appears.
Kevin Chen, Kenneth W. Parker, Anish Arora
Jul 25, 2026hep-ex

Predict before you train: Scaling Laws for particle physics foundation models

The largest machine learning models in particle physics are also the most expensive to train, yet the return on scaling a given architecture cannot be estimated before that compute is spent. Scaling laws have been fit for jets, but none has yet been shown to predict the performance of models it was not fit on. We show that, for a generic transformer pretrained on collider jets, it can be forecast. Fitting a joint model-and-data scaling law on small models alone, spanning three orders of magnitude of training compute, we predict the loss of models trained afterward with more than one hundred times more compute to within one percent. We then connect the forecast to downstream physics performance: across two standard tagging benchmarks, lower pretraining loss yields systematically lower fine-tuning loss and higher background rejection after fine-tuning. Within this model family and these tasks, a compute budget can therefore be translated into expected physics performance before any large model is trained. The final frontier model is consistent with the published numbers for current state-of-the-art physics-aware foundation models trained on the same corpus, on accuracy, AUC, and quark/gluon rejection, with a residual edge for the physics-aware model only in the high-purity tail of top tagging. We release five pretrained models spanning multiple sizes, together with the complete training recipe and code.
Jan-Lucas Uslu, Benjamin Nachman, Christopher Re
Jul 22, 2026cs.LG

PIER: Physics-Informed Environmental Retrieval for Time-Series Modeling

Accurate modeling of environmental systems is fundamental to scientific understanding and decision-making, yet remains challenging because observations are limited and physical dynamics vary across systems. Retrieval-augmented approaches offer a natural path to transfer knowledge across systems, but standard embedding-based retrieval does not guarantee consistency of underlying physical processes, since scenarios with similar embeddings may arise from different underlying mechanisms. We propose Physics-Informed Environmental Retrieval (PIER), a model-agnostic framework that augments embedding-based retrieval with a physics-aware stream that scores candidates by flux-response consistency with the target, using local verifiers trained on physics-derived flux features. A weight adjustment mechanism then learns per-scenario weights that adaptively balance the two retrieval streams based on diagnostic features summarizing physics-stream reliability. Experiments on 356 lakes across the Midwestern United States spanning 41 years show that PIER consistently outperforms baselines for water temperature and dissolved oxygen prediction, and serves as a general augmentation strategy across diverse backbones.
Shiyuan Luo, Runlong Yu, Chonghao Qiu +6
Jul 21, 2026cs.LG

Probabilistic Physics-Aware Machine Learning Predictions of Electric Truck Energy Consumption with Field Data

In this work, we incorporate first principle physics into the construction of data-driven methods by considering a model that accounts for the different sources of energy losses during vehicle operations. Our results show that Bayesian linear regression based on this physics-aware model can improve the reliability of the expected energy consumption, as compared with standard linear regression. Further, it is shown that more complex machine learning models such as neural networks and gradient boosted regression trees, based on the same physical model, can further improve the accuracy in energy forecasting and significantly outperform standard versions of the same machine learning models. In addition to point predictions of the energy consumption, we develop a framework for estimating the corresponding uncertainty in the form of predicted standard deviation. Our results show that all of the models learn to estimate the uncertainty reasonably well.
Hannes Nilsson, Rafael Basso, Balázs Kulcsár +1
Jul 21, 2026cs.CV

DeforM: Reasoning-Guided Physics-Aware Video Generation via Spatial-Temporal Masking

Video generation models achieve high visual quality but often struggle to generate physics-aware videos. Unlike rigid-body motion, which can be described by explicit trajectories or formulas, complex deformation dynamics remain challenging to synthesize. We observe that a lack of physical reasoning for localizing dynamic areas allows irrelevant regions to dilute the model's attention, leading to generation failure. In this paper, we propose DeforM, a reasoning-guided image-to-video generation framework that directs the model's focus toward physics-critical regions. To reason about and localize these critical regions, we introduce a VLM-guided physical reasoning module, DeforM-Reason, to identify target objects and generate spatial-temporal masks. For physical guidance, we develop two alternative strategies: DeforM-Free for training-free mechanism analysis and DeforM-Injection as a powerful training-based generator. Experimental results demonstrate that DeforM improves the realism of generated deformation scenarios, outperforming baseline models in both visual quality and physical consistency.
Yunyi Li, Yu Qiao, Yaohui Wang +1
Jul 17, 2026cs.NE

Evolutionary Algorithm-Guided LLMs for Physics-Informed Neural Network Design

Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) are unusually sensitive to interacting choices of architecture, activation, loss weighting, collocation, optimization, and constraint enforcement. Large language models (LLMs) can propose these choices, but independent recommendations do not accumulate experience from previously trained PINNs. We propose a closed-loop evolutionary algorithm that guides an LLM to generate complete, executable PINN configurations across generations, using measured training outcomes to determine subsequent search decisions. The algorithm maintains an evaluated population and lineage, applies parent-conditioned mutation and crossover, preserves elite and diverse solutions, rejects effective duplicates, and converts parent-relative successes and failures into the next-generation context supplied to the LLM. Every proposed configuration is executed directly under an exact optimizer-step budget. On a one-dimensional multiscale wave equation, two independent ten-generation runs trained 60 PINNs for 600,000 optimizer steps. In both runs, the best configuration appeared in the final generation, with best mean-squared error reduced by 2.97% and 95.38% relative to the initial population. The stronger run validated residual connections and increased depth on separate branches, combined them in a later generation, and then refined width and collocation density. It also revealed that low solution error can coexist with a high PDE residual. These results demonstrate the feasibility of evolutionary-algorithm-guided LLMs for PINN design on a controlled PDE while motivating broader, physics-aware evaluation.
Xu Yang, Mingyang Yu, Jing Xu +1
Jun 25, 2026cs.RO

In-Context Model Predictive Generation: Open-Vocabulary Motion Synthesis from Language Models to Physics

Synthesizing human motion from textual descriptions is essential for immersive digital applications, yet existing methods face a persistent trade-off between semantic fidelity and physical realism. Large language model (LLM)-based approaches can interpret diverse open-vocabulary instructions and compose high-level action plans, but they often generate motions that violate physical constraints. Physics-aware models improve realism through simulation or control, but they struggle with semantic complexity, fine-grained instructions, and novel concepts. To address this gap, we propose In-Context Model Predictive Generation (ICMPG), a framework that integrates language-model planning with inference-time physical feedback. ICMPG reformulates motion synthesis as a Model Predictive Control (MPC)-like process with two modules. The Context-Aware Motion Generation (CAMG) module uses an LLM as a planner to decompose textual commands and generate candidate motion sequences from motion tokens. The Model Predictive Generation (MPG) module evaluates these candidates through physical simulation and semantic alignment, estimates a composite reward, and selects the best sequence to guide subsequent generation steps. Unlike open-loop generation, this closed-loop refinement enables ICMPG to adapt motions to both the input semantics and the simulated physical environment without task-specific policy retraining. Extensive experiments across standard and zero-shot open-vocabulary settings show that ICMPG generalizes robustly to diverse commands and produces motions that are more physically plausible and semantically faithful than representative baselines on the evaluated benchmarks. The framework bridges semantic interpretation and physical simulation while remaining flexible enough to incorporate different LLM backbones, enabling more versatile and controllable text-driven motion synthesis.
Xiaomeng Fu, Junfan Lin, Yang Liu +4
Jun 25, 2026cs.CV

PhysRAG: Enhancing Physics-Awareness in Video Generation via Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Developing physically aware video generation models remains a significant challenge due to the difficulty in capturing diverse physical phenomena, such as thermal dynamics, mechanics, and optics. In this work, we introduce PhysRAG, a novel pipeline that enhances physical awareness in video generation through Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). To address the issue of limited high-quality data, we design a two-stage data filtering pipeline based on the WISA-80K dataset, resulting in a curated set of 7K high-quality videos for training. Furthermore, we construct a physical video database and develop a mechanism to inject physical knowledge into a video diffusion model using learnable queries. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in both visual quality and physical rule compliance, surpassing existing models in benchmarks such as PhyGenBench and VBench. We conduct extensive ablation studies to validate the effectiveness of our key components, including the data filtering pipeline, RAG mechanism, and method for physical information extraction. To facilitate future research, our code, data, and models are prepared for release at https://github.com/sediment1024/PhysRAG.
Kexu Cheng, Zicheng Liu, Mingju Gao +2
May 25, 2026stat.ML

DiscoverPhysics: Benchmarking LLMs for Out-of-the-Box Scientific Thinking

Frontier LLMs now perform strongly across a wide range of physics evaluations, but it is hard to disentangle genuine reasoning from recall of established science. We introduce DiscoverPhysics, an interactive benchmark that asks a LLM agent to discover the laws of motion of a simulated world whose physics deliberately deviates from our own. We construct 22 worlds governed by, among others, screened and fractional-power gravity, multi-species couplings, hidden dark-matter-like particles, non-coordinate-free physics, and time-varying interactions. Each world is generated on demand by an N-body simulator, for which the agent proposes several rounds of experiments, observes raw trajectory data, and ultimately submits both a natural-language explanation of the world's physics and a Python implementation of the inferred law. Because solving a world requires the agent to design informative experiments and revise its hypotheses, the benchmark probes long-horizon reasoning over an experimental history. We evaluate submissions along two complementary axes: trajectory MSE on held-out particles and an LLM-judged explanation score following an expert-written rubric assessing conceptual understanding of each world. Across eleven frontier models, we find that the strongest agents pass only half of the worlds and consistently fail on those where latent structure must be uncovered. Open-source models lag substantially behind commercial models, both in their ability to design informative experiments and in extracting conclusions from the data. We further find that good predictive accuracy does not guarantee high explanation quality and that conceptual understanding depends on hypothesis refinement through well-chosen experiments.
Matt L. Wiemann, Lindsay M. Smith, Peter Melchior +4
May 23, 2026cs.CV

Causal Physics Steering in Video World Models via Concept Activation Vectors

Video world models learn representations of physical dynamics, but controlling their physical expectations at inference time remains an open problem. Recent interpretability work identified a Physics Emergence Zone (PEZ), a group of middle transformer layers in VideoMAE where physical plausibility is represented separately from other visual features. However, it remained unclear whether this structure could be used to directly control the model's physics reasoning. We present physics steering, a training-free method that uses the weight vector of a linear probe at a PEZ layer as a Concept Activation Vector (CAV) and injects it into hidden states during inference. This shifts the model's physical expectations without changing any model weights. On the IntPhys benchmark, this intervention reliably shifts the model's plausibility judgment in either direction, depending on the steering sign. The effect appears only when the intervention is applied within the Physics Emergence Zone, suggesting that the relevant physics representation is localized there. We further find that physics is encoded separately from motion direction, and that different intuitive physics principles occupy distinct directions within this representation space. Together, these results show that physical reasoning in VideoMAE is not only readable, but also directly steerable.
Nahid Alam
May 22, 2026cs.LG

LLM-driven design of physics-constrained constitutive models: two agents are better than one

Developing constitutive models that capture how materials deform under load traditionally requires years of specialized expertise in continuum mechanics, machine learning, and scientific programming. Large language models (LLMs) have recently been shown to lower this barrier by generating constitutive models on demand, but existing single-agent pipelines lack systematic checks that the resulting models respect fundamental physical laws. To close this gap, we introduce the first multi-agent LLM-driven approach for constitutive model generation: a Creator agent proposes a model tailored to the data, while an Inspector agent critically audits each proposal against nine physical constraints and returns it for refinement whenever a violation is detected. We demonstrate this concept with constitutive artificial neural networks (CANNs) and benchmark it on brain tissue and rubber as isotropic materials, and on porcine skin tissue as a transversely isotropic material with a preferred fiber direction, using two different LLM backbones (Claude Opus 4.7 and Kimi K2.5). Whether a generated model satisfies the physical constraints is assessed numerically, by probing each constraint across a broad sample of deformation states, rotations, and perturbation directions. Adding the Inspector raises the share of exported models that pass all these checks from 90% to 95% for Opus and from 47% to 60% for Kimi. In addition, the generated models are on par with or even surpass expert-designed models in accuracy, extrapolate reliably beyond the training data, and generalize remarkably well to unseen loading paths. Separating generation from inspection thus turns LLM-driven constitutive modeling into a substantially more trustworthy process. The paradigm is deliberately technique-agnostic...
Marius Tacke, Matthias Busch, Kian Abdolazizi +4
May 21, 2026cs.CV

Dual-Integrated Low-Latency Single-Lens Infrared Computational Imaging for Object Detection

Computational imaging enables compact infrared systems, but deep-learning pipelines that combine image reconstruction and object detection often introduce substantial inference latency. Most existing acceleration strategies compress the reconstruction network while overlooking physical priors from the optical path, leaving a trade-off between accuracy and speed. We present Physics-aware Dual-Integrated Network (PDI-Net), a low-latency framework that integrates infrared reconstruction with object detection and further embeds optical priors into the learning process. PDI-Net uses a supervised U-Net during training, while a semi-U-Net encoder shares features directly with a YOLO-based detector during inference, avoiding full image reconstruction. To bridge the gap between fidelity-oriented reconstruction features and detection-oriented semantics, we introduce a physics-aware large-small bridge (PALS-Bridge), which uses field-dependent point spread function priors to adaptively modulate multiscale convolutional branches. A physics-informed optical degradation simulation pipeline is also developed for training and validation. The method is deployed on a single-lens infrared camera, reducing system weight by about 50% compared with traditional multi-lens designs. On the M3FD benchmark under low-SNR conditions, PDI-Net reduces inference time by 84.06% compared with the Rec+Det with pruning strategy while improving mAP@0.5:0.95 by 5.07%. These results demonstrate compact, low-latency computational infrared imaging for real-time object detection on resource-constrained platforms.
Xuquan Wang, Guishuo Yang, Dapeng Yan +5
May 18, 2026cs.LG

PH-Dreamer: A Physics-Driven World Model via Port-Hamiltonian Generative Dynamics

World models built on recurrent state space architectures enable efficient latent imagination, yet remain physically unstructured, producing dynamics that violate conservation and dissipative principles. We introduce a unified Port-Hamiltonian framework that remedies this through three synergistic mechanisms. First, we embed implicit physical priors into recurrent transitions by modeling projected latent evolution as action controlled energy routing governed by flow and dissipation, biasing the projected PH phase space toward a more compact and physically structured representation. Second, we develop a kinematics aware energy world model that estimates the Hamiltonian and power balance from proprioceptive observations, providing an explicit physical signal for thermodynamic reasoning. Third, leveraging these energy gradients, we establish an energy guided Actor-Critic that uses Lagrangian multipliers to regularize policy optimization toward lower energy and smoother control. Across visual control benchmarks, this paradigm not only attains superior asymptotic returns but also elevates internal simulator fidelity by establishing a tighter, lower variance alignment between imagined and real rewards, all while reducing latent phase space volume by 4.18-8.41%, energy consumption by up to 7.80%, and mean squared jerk by up to 9.38%.
Xueyu Luan, Chenwei Shi
May 15, 2026cs.LG

Identify Then Project: Contrastive Learning of Latent Dynamics from Partial Observations with Port-Hamiltonian Structure

Identifying latent state representations and dynamics is essential when direct modeling in observation space is infeasible, particularly under partial and high-dimensional observations. In such settings, representation learning and physics-aware modeling are inherently coupled. We study this problem for latent port-Hamiltonian systems, a structured class encompassing both conservative and dissipative dynamics. We propose a two-stage identify-then-project framework. First, a contrastive teacher learns continuous-time latent dynamics from partial observations. Then, a student projects the identified teacher representation and dynamics onto a port-Hamiltonian submanifold via a learned affine chart, yielding a physically consistent realization. As a conceptual counterfactual, we also consider a single-stage variant that jointly learns latent identification and port-Hamiltonian structure, but find it to be less reliable, motivating the proposed two-stage teacher-student framework. We show theoretically that affine projection is the natural bridge between the affine gauge of contrastive latent identification and the port-Hamiltonian systems. Empirically, we demonstrate that the proposed two-stage approach preserves the teacher's dynamics while enforcing physical structure, and performs more reliably than the single-stage alternative, particularly in dissipative regimes and high-dimensional visual settings.
Peilun Li, Kaiyuan Tan, Daniel Moyer +1
May 13, 2026cs.CL

Physics-R1: An Audited Olympiad Corpus and Recipe for Visual Physics Reasoning

We audit the multimodal-physics evaluation pipeline end-to-end and document three undetected construction practices that distort how the field measures vision-language reasoning: train-eval contamination, translation drift, and MCQ saturation. (1) Public training pools (UGPhysics-Train, SciInstruct, MMK12) pass single-stage 5-gram-Jaccard audits with zero hits across all six public physics evals; a three-stage audit (Jaccard -> mxbai-embed-large cosine -> Haiku-4.5 LLM-judge) surfaces 134 near-duplicates and 4,846 paraphrase candidates in SciInstruct alone. (2) A 17-pp Sonnet 4.5 delta on 59 paired Estonian-English olympiad problems (30.5% vs. 13.6%; sign test p=0.011, McNemar p=0.021, paired bootstrap 95% CI [+5.1, +28.9] pp). (3) A 46-pp format-and-novelty gradient on identical Sonnet weights between MCQ (79.7% on PhyX) and open-ended olympiad evaluation (33.4% on PhysOlym-A). We release four artifacts addressing these gaps: PhysCorp-A (6,432-record three-stage-audited multimodal corpus), PhysR1Corp (2,268-record closed-form RL pool), PhysOlym-A (500-problem, 99.8% novel-source held-out olympiad eval with native difficulty labels and an EN/ET bilingual subset), and Physics-R1, a reference GSPO+DAPO recipe cold-started from Qwen3-VL-8B-Thinking. Across 3 seeds, Physics-R1 lifts the audited corpus over the 8B base by +18.3 pp on PhysOlym-A liberal (8.0 -> 26.3 +/- 1.7; 7.1 pp behind Sonnet 4.5), +15.7 pp on PhysReason (23.9 -> 39.6 +/- 6.4; ahead of Qwen3-VL-32B and Gemini 2.5 Pro), +6.9 pp on OlympiadBench-Physics (46.2 +/- 1.5), and +4.1 pp on PhyX MCQ (77.8 +/- 0.3).
Shan Yang
May 11, 2026cs.LG

PhysEDA: Physics-Aware Learning Framework for Efficient EDA With Manhattan Distance Decay

Electronic design automation (EDA) addresses placement, routing, timing analysis, and power-integrity verification for integrated circuits. Learning methods -- attention (Transformer) and reinforcement learning (RL) -- have recently emerged on EDA tasks, yet face two common bottlenecks: vanilla attention's quadratic complexity limits scaling, and data-scarce models overfit statistical noise and amplify weak long-range correlations against the underlying physics. We observe that EDA tasks share a physical prior -- pairwise electrical and routing interactions decay exponentially along Manhattan distance -- and integrate it as a unified inductive bias into both architecture and training. We propose PhysEDA, comprising two components Physics-Structured Linear Attention (PSLA) folds the separable Manhattan decay into the linear-attention kernel as a multiplicative bias, reducing complexity from quadratic to linear; Potential-Based Reward Shaping (PBRS) constructs a physical potential from the same kernel, providing dense reward signal under sparse RL while preserving the optimal policy via the policy-invariance theorem. Across three EDA scenarios -- decoupling-capacitor placement, macro placement, and IR-drop prediction -- PhysEDA improves zero-shot cross-scale transfer by 56.8% and achieves 14x inference speedup with 98.5% memory savings on 100x100 grids; PBRS adds another 10.8% in sparse-reward DPP.
Zetao Yang
May 4, 2026hep-ex

From Experimental Limits to Physical Insight: A Retrieval-Augmented Multi-Agent Framework for Interpreting Searches Beyond the Standard Model

Modern searches for physics beyond the Standard Model produce rapidly expanding literature containing heterogeneous information, including textual analyses, numerical datasets, and graphical exclusion limits. Integrating these distributed sources remains a time-consuming and manual process for physicists. We present HEP-CoPilot, a retrieval-augmented multi-agent AI framework for the exploration and interpretation of high-energy physics literature. The system unifies textual information from publications, structured experimental data from HEPData, and reconstructed physics plots within a multimodal retrieval and reasoning architecture. By combining retrieval-augmented language models with coordinated agent workflows, it enables evidence-grounded reasoning over experimental analyses and structured interpretation of collider results. We evaluate the framework on recent CMS searches for physics beyond the Standard Model. Case studies show that HEP-CoPilot can retrieve relevant measurements, reconstruct exclusion limits directly from HEPData records, and perform cross-paper comparisons of experimental constraints. This enables consistent, physics-aware comparison across analyses without manual data integration. These results demonstrate that retrieval-augmented AI systems can function as scientific co-pilots for particle physics, facilitating navigation of complex literature, structuring heterogeneous evidence, and accelerating the interpretation pipeline for new physics searches.
Altan Cakir, Ayca Yerlikaya
Apr 28, 2026q-bio.BM

Learning Structure, Energy, and Dynamics: A Survey of Artificial Intelligence for Protein Dynamics

Protein dynamics underlie many biological functions, yet remain difficult to characterize due to the high computational cost of molecular dynamics simulations and the scarcity of dynamic structural data. This survey reviews recent advances in artificial intelligence for protein dynamics from three perspectives: learning from structural ensembles and trajectories, learning from physical energy signals, and learning to accelerate molecular simulations. We summarize representative methods for conformation ensemble generation, trajectory generation, Boltzmann generators, physics-aware adaptation, machine learning potentials, coarse-grained modeling, and collective variable discovery. We further discuss available datasets and key open challenges, such as scalability, thermodynamic consistency, kinetic fidelity, and integration with experimental constraints.
Haocheng Tang, Liang Shi, Ya-Shi Zhang +3
Apr 24, 2026cs.RO

Information-Theoretic Geometry Optimization and Physics-Aware Learning for Calibration-Free Magnetic Localization

Wireless localization of permanent magnets enables occlusion-free guidance for medical interventions, yet its practical accuracy is fundamentally limited by two coupled challenges: the poor observability of conventional planar sensor arrays and the simulation-to-reality (Sim-to-Real) gap of learning-based estimators. To address these issues, this article presents a unified framework that combines information-theoretic sensor geometry optimization with physics-aware deep learning. First, a rigorous Fisher Information Matrix (FIM)-based evaluation framework is established to quantify geometry-induced observability limitations. The results show that a staggered split-array topology provides a substantially stronger observability foundation for localization while remaining compatible with practical external deployment. Second, building on this optimized sensing configuration, we propose Phy-GAANet, a calibration-free estimator trained entirely on hardware-aware synthetic data. By incorporating Physics-Informed Features (PIF) for saturation modeling and Geometry-Aware Attention (GAA) for preserving cross-layer vector structure, the network effectively bridges the Sim-to-Real gap. Extensive real-world experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, achieving a position error of 1.84 mm and an orientation error of 3.18 degrees at a refresh rate exceeding 270 Hz. The proposed method consistently outperforms classical Levenberg--Marquardt solvers and generic convolutional baselines, particularly in suppressing catastrophic outliers and maintaining robustness in challenging near-field boundary regions. Beyond the proposed network, the FIM-guided analysis also provides a framework for sensor geometry design in magnetic localization systems under practical deployment constraints.
Wenxuan Xie, Yuelin Zhang, Qingpeng Ding +4
Apr 20, 2026cs.CV

Re2^2MoGen: Open-Vocabulary Motion Generation via LLM Reasoning and Physics-Aware Refinement

Text-to-motion (T2M) generation aims to control the behavior of a target character via textual descriptions. Leveraging text-motion paired datasets, existing T2M models have achieved impressive performance in generating high-quality motions within the distribution of their training data. However, their performance deteriorates notably when the motion descriptions differ significantly from the training texts. To address this issue, we propose Re2^2MoGen, a Reasoning and Refinement open-vocabulary Motion Generation framework that leverages enhanced Large Language Model (LLM) reasoning to generate an initial motion planning and then refine its physical plausibility via reinforcement learning (RL) post-training. Specifically, Re2^2MoGen consists of three stages: We first employ Monte Carlo tree search to enhance the LLM's reasoning ability in generating reasonable keyframes of the motion based on text prompts, specifying only the root and several key joints' positions to ease the reasoning process. Then, we apply a human pose model as a prior to optimize the full-body poses based on the planned keyframes and use the resulting incomplete motion to supervise fine-tuning a pre-trained motion generator via a dynamic temporal matching objective, enabling spatiotemporal completion. Finally, we use post-training with physics-aware reward to refine motion quality to eliminate physical implausibility in LLM-planned motions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework can generate semantically consistent and physically plausible motions and achieve state-of-the-art performance in open-vocabulary motion generation.
Jiakun Zheng, Ting Xiao, Shiqin Cao +3