What Physics do Data-Driven MoCap-to-Radar Models Learn?

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Chen, Kevin, Parker, Kenneth W., Arora, Anish
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Chen, Kevin
Parker, Kenneth W.
Arora, Anish
author_facet Chen, Kevin
Parker, Kenneth W.
Arora, Anish
contents Data-driven MoCap-to-radar models generate plausible micro-Doppler spectrograms, but do they actually learn the underlying physics? We introduce a physics-based interpretability framework to answer this question via two proposed complementary metrics: one measures alignment between model predictions and the physics-derived Doppler frequency, while the other tests whether predictions preserve the velocity-frequency relationship under velocity intervention. Both metrics require only MoCap input and model predictions, without access to measured radar data. Experiments across several model architectures reveal that low reconstruction error does not guarantee physical consistency: some, but not all, models achieve low error yet perform poorly on the two physics-based metrics. Further analysis shows that temporal attention is critical for transformer-based models to learn the underlying physics.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_00018
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle What Physics do Data-Driven MoCap-to-Radar Models Learn?
Chen, Kevin
Parker, Kenneth W.
Arora, Anish
Machine Learning
Signal Processing
Data-driven MoCap-to-radar models generate plausible micro-Doppler spectrograms, but do they actually learn the underlying physics? We introduce a physics-based interpretability framework to answer this question via two proposed complementary metrics: one measures alignment between model predictions and the physics-derived Doppler frequency, while the other tests whether predictions preserve the velocity-frequency relationship under velocity intervention. Both metrics require only MoCap input and model predictions, without access to measured radar data. Experiments across several model architectures reveal that low reconstruction error does not guarantee physical consistency: some, but not all, models achieve low error yet perform poorly on the two physics-based metrics. Further analysis shows that temporal attention is critical for transformer-based models to learn the underlying physics.
title What Physics do Data-Driven MoCap-to-Radar Models Learn?
topic Machine Learning
Signal Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.00018