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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Amarel, James, Miller, Robyn, Hengartner, Nicolas, Migliori, Benjamin, Casleton, Emily, Skurikhin, Alexei, Lawrence, Earl, Kunde, Gerd J.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.20172
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Table of Contents:
  • We study how neural emulators of partial differential equation solution operators internalize physical symmetries by introducing an influence-based diagnostic that measures the propagation of parameter updates between symmetry-related states, defined as the metric-weighted overlap of loss gradients evaluated along group orbits. This quantity probes the local geometry of the learned loss landscape and goes beyond forward-pass equivariance tests by directly assessing whether learning dynamics couple physically equivalent configurations. Applying our diagnostic to autoregressive fluid flow emulators, we show that orbit-wise gradient coherence provides the mechanism for learning to generalize over symmetry transformations and indicates when training selects a symmetry compatible basin. The result is a novel technique for evaluating if surrogate models have internalized symmetry properties of the known solution operator.