Noether's razor: Learning Conserved Quantities

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: van der Ouderaa, Tycho F. A., van der Wilk, Mark, de Haan, Pim
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
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author van der Ouderaa, Tycho F. A.
van der Wilk, Mark
de Haan, Pim
author_facet van der Ouderaa, Tycho F. A.
van der Wilk, Mark
de Haan, Pim
contents Symmetries have proven useful in machine learning models, improving generalisation and overall performance. At the same time, recent advancements in learning dynamical systems rely on modelling the underlying Hamiltonian to guarantee the conservation of energy. These approaches can be connected via a seminal result in mathematical physics: Noether's theorem, which states that symmetries in a dynamical system correspond to conserved quantities. This work uses Noether's theorem to parameterise symmetries as learnable conserved quantities. We then allow conserved quantities and associated symmetries to be learned directly from train data through approximate Bayesian model selection, jointly with the regular training procedure. As training objective, we derive a variational lower bound to the marginal likelihood. The objective automatically embodies an Occam's Razor effect that avoids collapse of conservation laws to the trivial constant, without the need to manually add and tune additional regularisers. We demonstrate a proof-of-principle on $n$-harmonic oscillators and $n$-body systems. We find that our method correctly identifies the correct conserved quantities and U($n$) and SE($n$) symmetry groups, improving overall performance and predictive accuracy on test data.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_08087
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Noether's razor: Learning Conserved Quantities
van der Ouderaa, Tycho F. A.
van der Wilk, Mark
de Haan, Pim
Machine Learning
Symmetries have proven useful in machine learning models, improving generalisation and overall performance. At the same time, recent advancements in learning dynamical systems rely on modelling the underlying Hamiltonian to guarantee the conservation of energy. These approaches can be connected via a seminal result in mathematical physics: Noether's theorem, which states that symmetries in a dynamical system correspond to conserved quantities. This work uses Noether's theorem to parameterise symmetries as learnable conserved quantities. We then allow conserved quantities and associated symmetries to be learned directly from train data through approximate Bayesian model selection, jointly with the regular training procedure. As training objective, we derive a variational lower bound to the marginal likelihood. The objective automatically embodies an Occam's Razor effect that avoids collapse of conservation laws to the trivial constant, without the need to manually add and tune additional regularisers. We demonstrate a proof-of-principle on $n$-harmonic oscillators and $n$-body systems. We find that our method correctly identifies the correct conserved quantities and U($n$) and SE($n$) symmetry groups, improving overall performance and predictive accuracy on test data.
title Noether's razor: Learning Conserved Quantities
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.08087