hard constraint
Provable Gradient Editing of Deep Neural Networks
In explainable AI, DNN gradients are used to interpret the prediction; in safetycritical control systems, gradients could encode safety constraints; in scientificcomputing applications, gradients could encode physical invariants. While recent work on provable editing of DNNs has focused on input-output constraints, the problem of enforcing hard constraints on DNN gradients remains unaddressed. We present ProGrad, the first efficient approach for editing the parameters of a DNN to provably enforce hard constraints on the DNN gradients.
Physics-Constrained Flow Matching: Sampling Generative Models with Hard Constraints
Deep generative models have recently been applied to physical systems governed by partial differential equations (PDEs), offering scalable simulation and uncertainty-aware inference. However, enforcing physical constraints, such as conservation laws (linear and nonlinear) and physical consistencies, remains challenging. Existing methods often rely on soft penalties or architectural biases that fail to guarantee hard constraints. In this work, we propose Physics-Constrained Flow Matching (PCFM), a zero-shot inference framework that enforces arbitrary nonlinear constraints in pretrained flow-based generative models. PCFM continuously guides the sampling process through physics-based corrections applied to intermediate solution states, while remaining aligned with the learned flow and satisfying physical constraints. Empirically, PCFM outperforms both unconstrained and constrained baselines on a range of PDEs, including those with shocks, discontinuities, and sharp features, while ensuring exact constraint satisfaction at the final solution. Our method provides a flexible framework for enforcing hard constraints in both scientific and general-purpose generative models, especially in applications where constraint satisfaction is essential.
Noisy Dual Mirror Descent: A Near Optimal Algorithm for Jointly-DP Convex Resource Allocation
We study convex resource allocation problems with $m$ hard constraints under $(\varepsilon,\delta)$-joint differential privacy (Joint-DP or JDP) in an offline setting. To approximately solve the problem, we propose a generic algorithm called Noisy Dual Mirror Descent. The algorithm applies noisy Mirror Descent to a dual problem from relaxing the hard constraints for private shadow prices, and then uses the shadow prices to coordinate allocations in the primal problem.
Unity by Diversity: Improved Representation Learning for Multimodal VAEs
Variational Autoencoders for multimodal data hold promise for many tasks in data analysis, such as representation learning, conditional generation, and imputation.Current architectures either share the encoder output, decoder input, or both across modalities to learn a shared representation. Such architectures impose hard constraints on the model. In this work, we show that a better latent representation can be obtained by replacing these hard constraints with a soft constraint. We propose a new mixture-of-experts prior, softly guiding each modality's latent representation towards a shared aggregate posterior.This approach results in a superior latent representation and allows each encoding to preserve information better from its uncompressed original features. In extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets and two challenging real-world datasets, we show improved learned latent representations and imputation of missing data modalities compared to existing methods.
Rethinking Parity Check Enhanced Symmetry-Preserving Ansatz
With the arrival of the Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) era, Variational Quantum Algorithms (VQAs) have emerged to obtain possible quantum advantage. In particular, how to effectively incorporate hard constraints in VQAs remains a critical and open question. In this paper, we manage to combine the Hamming Weight Preserving ansatz with a topological-aware parity check on physical qubits to enforce error mitigation and further hard constraints. We demonstrate the combination significantly outperforms peer VQA methods on both quantum chemistry problems and constrained combinatorial optimization problems e.g.