Improving Generalization with Physical Equations

This paper was accepted at the workshop "Machine Learning 4 Physical Sciences" at NeurIPS 2022.

Hybrid modelling reduces the misspecification of expert physical models with a machine learning (ML) component learned from data. Similarly to many ML algorithms, hybrid model performance guarantees are limited to the training distribution. To address this limitation, here we introduce a hybrid data augmentation strategy, termed expert augmentation. Based on a probabilistic formalization of hybrid modelling, we demonstrate that expert augmentation improves generalization. We validate the practical benefits of expert augmentation on a set of simulated and real-world systems described by classical mechanics.