Local Learning Rules for Out-of-Equilibrium Physical Generative Models

Cyrill Bösch; Geoffrey Roeder; Marc Serra-Garcia; Ryan P. Adams

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arXiv · 2506.19136

Local Learning Rules for Out-of-Equilibrium Physical Generative Models

Cyrill Bösch·Geoffrey Roeder·Marc Serra-Garcia·Ryan P. Adams

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Abstract

We show that the out-of-equilibrium driving protocol of score-based generative models (SGMs) can be learned via local learning rules. The gradient with respect to the parameters of the driving protocol is computed directly from force measurements or from observed system dynamics. As a demonstration, we implement an SGM in a network of driven, nonlinear, overdamped oscillators coupled to a thermal bath. We first apply it to the problem of sampling from a mixture of two Gaussians in 2D. Finally, we train an oscillator network on the MNIST dataset to generate images of handwritten digits 0 and 1.

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Cyrill Bösch, Geoffrey Roeder, Marc Serra-Garcia, Ryan P. Adams. 2025-06-23. Local Learning Rules for Out-of-Equilibrium Physical Generative Models. https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.19136

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