arXiv:2602.06923cs.LGcs.AI2026-02被引 5

用简单架构设计让Transformer从拟合轨迹变为发现物理定律。

From Kepler to Newton: Inductive Biases Guide Learned World Models in Transformers

  • 引入平滑性、稳定性与时间局部性三类归纳偏置
  • 模型成功拟合行星轨道并推导出牛顿力的表达形式
  • 适合对自动科学发现感兴趣的AI研究者

通用人工智能架构能否超越预测,发现支配宇宙的物理规律?真正的智能依赖于世界模型——能够理解底层动态的因果抽象。以往的‘AI物理学家’方法虽能恢复这些规律,但通常依赖强领域先验,相当于‘预设’了物理规则。而Vafa等人近期发现,通用Transformer虽有高预测准确率,却无法捕捉底层物理规律。我们通过系统引入三种最小归纳偏置来弥合这一差距:将预测建模为连续回归以保证空间平滑性;在含噪上下文中训练以增强稳定性,缓解误差累积;限制注意力窗口仅关注近期状态,强制时间局部性。这使模型从曲线拟合转向发现牛顿力的表示,成功拟合行星椭圆轨道。结果表明,简单的架构选择决定了AI是曲线拟合器还是物理学家,标志着自动化科学发现的关键一步。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Can general-purpose AI architectures go beyond prediction to discover the physical laws governing the universe? True intelligence relies on "world models" -- causal abstractions that allow an agent to not only predict future states but understand the underlying governing dynamics. While previous "AI Physicist" approaches have successfully recovered such laws, they typically rely on strong, domain-specific priors that effectively "bake in" the physics. Conversely, Vafa et al. recently showed that generic Transformers fail to acquire these world models, achieving high predictive accuracy without capturing the underlying physical laws. We bridge this gap by systematically introducing three minimal inductive biases. We show that ensuring spatial smoothness (by formulating prediction as continuous regression) and stability (by training with noisy contexts to mitigate error accumulation) enables generic Transformers to surpass prior failures and learn a coherent Keplerian world model, successfully fitting ellipses to planetary trajectories. However, true physical insight requires a third bias: temporal locality. By restricting the attention window to the immediate past -- imposing the simple assumption that future states depend only on the local state rather than a complex history -- we force the model to abandon curve-fitting and discover Newtonian force representations. Our results demonstrate that simple architectural choices determine whether an AI becomes a curve-fitter or a physicist, marking a critical step toward automated scientific discovery.

世界模型物理规律Transformer归纳偏置

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