Researchers have developed a method called Disentanglement of Invariant Functions (DIF) to learn the underlying laws of dynamical systems governed by ordinary differential equations.
The key challenge was to discover intrinsic dynamics across multiple environments while avoiding environment-specific mechanisms.
The method addresses complex environments where changes extend beyond function coefficients to entirely different function forms.
For example, it can detect the natural motion of an ideal pendulum like alpha^2 sin(theta_t) by observing pendulum dynamics in varied environments.
The problem is formulated as an invariant function learning task grounded in causal analysis.
A causal graph and an encoder-decoder hypernetwork are designed in the DIF method to disentangle invariant functions from environment-specific dynamics.
The method ensures the independence between extracted invariant functions and environments through an information-based principle.
Quantitative comparisons with meta-learning and invariant learning baselines on three ODE systems have shown the effectiveness and efficiency of the DIF method.
Symbolic regression explanation results demonstrate the framework's ability to uncover intrinsic laws.
The code for the method has been made available as part of the AIRS library on GitHub.