How Do Transformers Model Physics? Investigating the Simple Harmonic Oscillator.

Subhash Kantamneni, Ziming Liu, Max Tegmark

Abstract read

In one paragraph

Article in Entropy (Basel, Switzerland), 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.

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0citing papers in PubMed

–field-weighted citation impact

1 · What the graph read from it

What it found

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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.

2 · The registry

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0 citing papers in PubMed.

No citing paper in PubMed yet.

4 · The record

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PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.

5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

3 authors.

Subhash KantamneniInstitute for Artificial Intelligence and Fundamental Interactions, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.ORCID 0000-0001-6715-3763

Ziming LiuInstitute for Artificial Intelligence and Fundamental Interactions, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.

Max TegmarkInstitute for Artificial Intelligence and Fundamental Interactions, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.ORCID 0000-0001-7670-7190

Funding

NSF Graduate Research Fellowship 2141064NSF grant PHY-2019786Rothberg Family Fund for Cognitive Science Not sure

6 · The paper itself

Abstract

How do transformers model physics? Do transformers model systems with interpretable analytical solutions or do they create an "alien physics" that is difficult for humans to decipher? We have taken a step towards demystifying this larger puzzle by investigating the simple harmonic oscillator (SHO), x¨+2γx˙+ω02x=0, one of the most fundamental systems in physics. Our goal was to identify the methods transformers use to model the SHO, and to do so we hypothesized and evaluated possible methods by analyzing the encoding of these methods' intermediates. We developed four criteria for the use of a method within the simple test bed of linear regression, where our method was y=wx and our intermediate was

Indexed as

AI for sciencemechanistic intepretabilityphysics

Identifiers

PMID39593941

DOI10.3390/e26110997

PMCPMC11592621

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LicenceCC BY

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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.