Carlos Ruiz-Gonzalez

Tareq Jaouni, Sören Arlt, Carlos Ruiz-Gonzalez et al.

Despite their promise to facilitate new scientific discoveries, the opaqueness of neural networks presents a challenge in interpreting the logic behind their findings. Here, we use a eXplainable-AI (XAI) technique called $inception$ or $deep$ $dreaming$, which has been invented in machine learning for computer vision. We use this technique to explore what neural networks learn about quantum optics experiments. Our story begins by training deep neural networks on the properties of quantum systems. Once trained, we "invert" the neural network -- effectively asking how it imagines a quantum system with a specific property, and how it would continuously modify the quantum system to change a property. We find that the network can shift the initial distribution of properties of the quantum system, and we can conceptualize the learned strategies of the neural network. Interestingly, we find that, in the first layers, the neural network identifies simple properties, while in the deeper ones, it can identify complex quantum structures and even quantum entanglement. This is in reminiscence of long-understood properties known in computer vision, which we now identify in a complex natural science task. Our approach could be useful in a more interpretable way to develop new advanced AI-based scientific discovery techniques in quantum physics.

Philipp Schmidt, Sören Arlt, Carlos Ruiz-Gonzalez et al.

Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) models can propose solutions to scientific problems beyond human capability. To truly make conceptual contributions, researchers need to be capable of understanding the AI-generated structures and extracting the underlying concepts and ideas. When algorithms provide little explanatory reasoning alongside the output, scientists have to reverse-engineer the fundamental insights behind proposals based solely on examples. This task can be challenging as the output is often highly complex and thus not immediately accessible to humans. In this work we show how transferring part of the analysis process into an immersive Virtual Reality (VR) environment can assist researchers in developing an understanding of AI-generated solutions. We demonstrate the usefulness of VR in finding interpretable configurations of abstract graphs, representing Quantum Optics experiments. Thereby, we can manually discover new generalizations of AI-discoveries as well as new understanding in experimental quantum optics. Furthermore, it allows us to customize the search space in an informed way - as a human-in-the-loop - to achieve significantly faster subsequent discovery iterations. As concrete examples, with this technology, we discover a new resource-efficient 3-dimensional entanglement swapping scheme, as well as a 3-dimensional 4-particle Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger-state analyzer. Our results show the potential of VR for increasing a human researcher's ability to derive knowledge from graph-based generative AI that, which is a common abstract data representation used in diverse fields of science.

Michael Aich, Andreas Fürst, Florian Sestak et al.

Deep learning has revolutionized weather and climate modeling, yet the current landscape remains fragmented: highly specialized models are typically trained individually for distinct tasks. To unify this landscape, we introduce WIND, a single pre-trained foundation model capable of replacing specialized baselines across a vast array of tasks. Crucially, in contrast to previous atmospheric foundation models, we achieve this without any task-specific fine-tuning. To learn a robust, task-agnostic prior of the atmosphere, we pre-train WIND with a self-supervised video reconstruction objective, utilizing an unconditional video diffusion model to iteratively reconstruct atmospheric dynamics from a noisy state. At inference, we frame diverse domain-specific problems strictly as inverse problems and solve them via posterior sampling. This unified approach allows us to tackle highly relevant weather and climate problems, including probabilistic forecasting, spatial and temporal downscaling, sparse reconstruction and enforcing conservation laws purely with our pre-trained model. We further demonstrate the model's capacity to generate physically consistent counterfactual storylines of extreme weather events under global warming scenarios. By combining generative video modeling with inverse problem solving, WIND offers a computationally efficient paradigm shift in AI-based atmospheric modeling.

Carlos Ruiz-Gonzalez, Sören Arlt, Sebastian Lehner et al.

Physics simulators are essential in science and engineering, enabling the analysis, control, and design of complex systems. In experimental sciences, they are increasingly used to automate experimental design, often via combinatorial search and optimization. However, as the setups grow more complex, the computational cost of traditional, CPU-based simulators becomes a major limitation. Here, we show how neural surrogate models can significantly reduce reliance on such slow simulators while preserving accuracy. Taking the design of interferometric gravitational wave detectors as a representative example, we train a neural network to surrogate the gravitational wave physics simulator Finesse, which was developed by the LIGO community. Despite that small changes in physical parameters can change the output by orders of magnitudes, the model rapidly predicts the quality and feasibility of candidate designs, allowing an efficient exploration of large design spaces. Our algorithm loops between training the surrogate, inverse designing new experiments, and verifying their properties with the slow simulator for further training. Assisted by auto-differentiation and GPU parallelism, our method proposes high-quality experiments much faster than direct optimization. Solutions that our algorithm finds within hours outperform designs that take five days for the optimizer to reach. Though shown in the context of gravitational wave detectors, our framework is broadly applicable to other domains where simulator bottlenecks hinder optimization and discovery.