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“We found to our great surprise that this substrate is very much active, jiving and responding in completely surprising ways as the film switches from an insulator to a metal and back when the electrical pulses arrive,” Gopalan said. “This is like watching the tail wagging the dog, which stumped us for a long while. This surprising and previously overlooked observation completely changes how we need to view this technology.”

To understand these findings, the theory and simulation effort — led by Long-Qing Chen, Hamer Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, professor of engineering science and mechanics and of mathematics at Penn State — developed a theoretical framework to explain the entire process of the film and the substrate bulging instead of shrinking. When their model incorporated naturally occurring missing oxygen atoms in this material of two types, charged and uncharged, the experimental results could be satisfactorily explained.

“These neutral oxygen vacancies hold a charge of two electrons, which they can release when the material switches from an insulator to a metal,” Gopalan said. “The oxygen vacancy left behind is now charged and the crystal swells up, leading to the observed surprising bulging in the device. This response can also happen in the substrate. All of these physical processes are beautifully captured in the phase-field theory and modeling performed in this work for the first time by the postdoc Yin Shi in Prof. Chen’s group.”

From U tubingen and cambridge U

Wu’s Method can Boost Symbolic AI to Rival Silver Medalists and AlphaGeometry to Outperform Gold Medalists at IMO Geometry https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.

- Wu’s…

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Nothing makes a mess of quantum physics quite like those space-warping, matter-gulping abominations known as black holes. If you want to turn Schrodinger’s eggs into an information omelet, just find an event horizon and let ‘em drop.

According to theoretical physicists and chemists from Rice University and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in the US, basic chemistry is capable of scrambling quantum information almost as effectively.

The team used a mathematical tool developed more than half a century ago to bridge a gap between known semiclassical physics and quantum effects in superconductivity. They found the delicate quantum states of reacting particles become scrambled with surprising speed and efficiency that comes close to matching the might of a black hole.

Machine learning techniques may appear ill-suited for application in fields that prioritize rigor and deep understanding; however, they have recently found unexpected uses in theoretical physics and pure mathematics. In this Perspective, Gukov, Halverson and Ruehle have discussed rigorous applications of machine learning to theoretical physics and pure mathematics.

“Gravity pulls matter together, so that when we throw a ball in the air, the Earth’s gravity pulls it down toward the planet,” Mustapha Ishak-Boushaki, a professor of physics in the School of Natural Sciences and Mathematics (NSM) at UT Dallas, and member of the DESI collaboration, said in a statement. “But at the largest scales, the universe acts differently. It’s acting like there is something repulsive pushing the universe apart and accelerating its expansion. This is a big mystery, and we are investigating it on several fronts. Is it an unknown dark energy in the universe, or is it a modification of Albert Einstein’s theory of gravity at cosmological scales?”

DESI’s data, however, shows that the universe may have evolved in a way that isn’t quite consistent with the Lambda CDM model, indicating that the effects of dark energy on the universe may have changed since the early days of the cosmos.

“Our results show some interesting deviations from the standard model of the universe that could indicate that dark energy is evolving over time,” Ishak-Boushaki said. “The more data we collect, the better equipped we will be to determine whether this finding holds. With more data, we might identify different explanations for the result we observe or confirm it. If it persists, such a result will shed some light on what is causing cosmic acceleration and provide a huge step in understanding the evolution of our universe.”

The traveling salesman problem is considered a prime example of a combinatorial optimization problem. Now a Berlin team led by theoretical physicist Prof. Dr. Jens Eisert of Freie Universität Berlin and HZB has shown that a certain class of such problems can actually be solved better and much faster with quantum computers than with conventional methods.

Quantum computers use so-called qubits, which are not either zero or one as in conventional logic circuits, but can take on any value in between. These qubits are realized by highly cooled atoms, ions, or superconducting circuits, and it is still physically very complex to build a quantum computer with many qubits. However, mathematical methods can already be used to explore what fault-tolerant quantum computers could achieve in the future.

“There are a lot of myths about it, and sometimes a certain amount of hot air and hype. But we have approached the issue rigorously, using mathematical methods, and delivered solid results on the subject. Above all, we have clarified in what sense there can be any advantages at all,” says Prof. Dr. Jens Eisert, who heads a joint research group at Freie Universität Berlin and Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin.

Despite being almost a year old, this blog by Chip Huyen is still a great read for getting into fine-tuning LLMs.

This article covers everything you need to know about Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF).

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Quantum cognition is a new research program that uses mathematical principles from quantum theory as a framework to explain human cognition, including judgment and decision making, concepts, reasoning, memory, and perception. This research is not concerned with whether the brain is a quantum computer. Instead, it uses quantum theory as a fresh conceptual framework and a coherent set of formal tools for explaining puzzling empirical findings in psychology. In this introduction, we focus on two quantum principles as examples to show why quantum cognition is an appealing new theoretical direction for psychology: complementarity, which suggests that some psychological measures have to be made sequentially and that the context generated by the first measure can influence responses to the next one, producing measurement order effects, and superposition, which suggests that some psychological states cannot be defined with respect to definite values but, instead, that all possible values within the superposition have some potential for being expressed. We present evidence showing how these two principles work together to provide a coherent explanation for many divergent and puzzling phenomena in psychology. (PsycInfo Database Record © 2020 APA, all rights reserved)

A small team of AI researchers at Microsoft reports that the company’s Orca-Math small language model outperforms other, larger models on standardized math tests. The group has published a paper on the arXiv preprint server describing their testing of Orca-Math on the Grade School Math 8K (GSM8K) benchmark and how it fared compared to well-known LLMs.

Many popular LLMs such as ChatGPT are known for their impressive conversational skills—less well known is that most of them can also solve math word problems. AI researchers have tested their abilities at such tasks by pitting them against the GSM8K, a dataset of 8,500 grade-school math word problems that require multistep reasoning to solve, along with their correct answers.

In this new study, the research team at Microsoft tested Orca-Math, an AI application developed by another team at Microsoft specifically designed to tackle math word problems, and compared the results with larger AI models.