Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Xi, Wenjie, Chen, Wei-Qiang
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.20821
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866916015255846912
author Xi, Wenjie
Chen, Wei-Qiang
author_facet Xi, Wenjie
Chen, Wei-Qiang
contents The unprecedented predictive success of deep generative models in complex many-body systems, such as AlphaFold3, raises an epistemological question: do these networks merely memorize data distributions via high-dimensional interpolation, or do they autonomously deduce the underlying physical laws? To address this, we introduce a rigorous algebraic framework to extract the implicit physical interactions learned by generative models. By establishing an exact equivalence between the zero-noise limit of a Riemannian diffusion score field and the thermodynamic restoring force, we utilize the trained neural network as a direct force estimator. Applying this framework to a sequence-dependent, frustrated 1D $O(3)$ spin glass, we probe the latent representations of an $O(3)$-equivariant attention architecture trained solely on thermal equilibrium snapshots. Without incorporating any energetic priors, an overdetermined linear inversion successfully recovers the microscopic Hamiltonian parameters of the spin system. The inferred Hamiltonian parameters exhibit a $99.7\%$ cosine similarity with the ground-truth interaction parameters. Furthermore, these sparse local parameters alone are sufficient to explain $87\%$ of the variance in the continuous force field predicted by the network. Our results provide quantitative, falsifiable evidence that deep generative architectures do not merely perform statistical pattern matching, but autonomously discover and internalize the underlying physical rules.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_20821
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Autonomous Emergence of Hamiltonian in Deep Generative Models
Xi, Wenjie
Chen, Wei-Qiang
Disordered Systems and Neural Networks
Statistical Mechanics
The unprecedented predictive success of deep generative models in complex many-body systems, such as AlphaFold3, raises an epistemological question: do these networks merely memorize data distributions via high-dimensional interpolation, or do they autonomously deduce the underlying physical laws? To address this, we introduce a rigorous algebraic framework to extract the implicit physical interactions learned by generative models. By establishing an exact equivalence between the zero-noise limit of a Riemannian diffusion score field and the thermodynamic restoring force, we utilize the trained neural network as a direct force estimator. Applying this framework to a sequence-dependent, frustrated 1D $O(3)$ spin glass, we probe the latent representations of an $O(3)$-equivariant attention architecture trained solely on thermal equilibrium snapshots. Without incorporating any energetic priors, an overdetermined linear inversion successfully recovers the microscopic Hamiltonian parameters of the spin system. The inferred Hamiltonian parameters exhibit a $99.7\%$ cosine similarity with the ground-truth interaction parameters. Furthermore, these sparse local parameters alone are sufficient to explain $87\%$ of the variance in the continuous force field predicted by the network. Our results provide quantitative, falsifiable evidence that deep generative architectures do not merely perform statistical pattern matching, but autonomously discover and internalize the underlying physical rules.
title Autonomous Emergence of Hamiltonian in Deep Generative Models
topic Disordered Systems and Neural Networks
Statistical Mechanics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.20821