Understanding Generalization in Physics Informed Models through Affine Variety Dimensions

19 Jan 2025 (modified: 18 Jun 2025)Submitted to ICML 2025EveryoneRevisionsBibTeXCC BY 4.0
Abstract: In recent years, physics-informed machine learning has gained significant attention for its ability to enhance statistical performance and sample efficiency by integrating physical structures into machine learning models. These structures, such as differential equations, conservation laws, and symmetries, serve as inductive biases that can improve the generalization capacity of the hybrid model. However, the mechanisms by which these physical structures enhance generalization capacity are not fully understood, limiting the ability to guarantee the performance of the models. In this study, we show that the generalization performance of linear regressors incorporating differential equation structures is determined by the dimension of the associated affine variety, rather than the number of parameters. This finding enables a unified analysis of various equations, including nonlinear ones. We introduce a method to approximate the dimension of the affine variety and provide experimental evidence to validate our theoretical insights.
Primary Area: Theory->Learning Theory
Keywords: Physics-informed Machine Learning, Generalization Analysis
Submission Number: 2982
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