Vedanta Thapar

Vedanta Thapar, Renaud Lambiotte, George T. Cantwell

We propose the first return time distribution (FRTD) of a random walk as an interpretable and mathematically grounded node embedding. The FRTD assigns a probability mass function to each node, allowing us to define a distance between any pair of nodes using standard metrics for discrete distributions. We present several arguments to motivate the FRTD embedding. First, we show that FRTDs are strictly more informative than eigenvalue spectra, yet insufficient for complete graph identification, thus placing FRTD equivalence between cospectrality and isomorphism. Second, we argue that FRTD equivalence between nodes captures structural similarity. Third, we empirically demonstrate that the FRTD embedding outperforms manually designed graph metrics in network alignment tasks. Finally, we show that random networks that approximately match the FRTD of a desired target also preserve other salient features. Together these results demonstrate the FRTD as a simple and mathematically principled embedding for complex networks.

Vedanta Thapar, Abhinav Gupta

Machine learning has become a powerful tool for discovering governing laws of dynamical systems from data. However, most existing approaches degrade severely when observations are sparse, noisy, or irregularly sampled. In this work, we address the problem of learning symbolic representations of nonlinear Hamiltonian dynamical systems under extreme data scarcity by explicitly incorporating physical structure into the learning architecture. We introduce Adaptable Symplectic Recurrent Neural Networks (ASRNNs), a parameter-cognizant, structure-preserving model that combines Hamiltonian learning with symplectic recurrent integration, avoiding time derivative estimation, and enabling stable learning under noise. We demonstrate that ASRNNs can accurately predict long-term dynamics even when each training trajectory consists of only two irregularly spaced time points, possibly corrupted by correlated noise. Leveraging ASRNNs as structure-preserving data generators, we further enable symbolic discovery using independent regression methods (SINDy and PySR), recovering exact symbolic equations for polynomial systems and consistent polynomial approximations for non-polynomial Hamiltonians. Our results show that such architectures can provide a robust pathway to interpretable discovery of Hamiltonian dynamics from sparse and noisy data.

Vedanta Thapar

We explore the use of Physics Informed Neural Networks to analyse nonlinear Hamiltonian Dynamical Systems with a first integral of motion. In this work, we propose an architecture which combines existing Hamiltonian Neural Network structures into Adaptable Symplectic Recurrent Neural Networks which preserve Hamilton's equations as well as the symplectic structure of phase space while predicting dynamics for the entire parameter space. This architecture is found to significantly outperform previously proposed neural networks when predicting Hamiltonian dynamics especially in potentials which contain multiple parameters. We demonstrate its robustness using the nonlinear Henon-Heiles potential under chaotic, quasiperiodic and periodic conditions. The second problem we tackle is whether we can use the high dimensional nonlinear capabilities of neural networks to predict the dynamics of a Hamiltonian system given only partial information of the same. Hence we attempt to take advantage of Long Short Term Memory networks to implement Takens' embedding theorem and construct a delay embedding of the system followed by mapping the topologically invariant attractor to the true form. This architecture is then layered with Adaptable Symplectic nets to allow for predictions which preserve the structure of Hamilton's equations. We show that this method works efficiently for single parameter potentials and provides accurate predictions even over long periods of time.