AI & ML Paradigm Shift

Proposes the 'Theory Compiler,' a system that automatically translates formal domain specifications into neural architectures with built-in physical or logical constraints.

March 17, 2026

Original Paper

From Specification to Architecture: A Theory Compiler for Knowledge-Guided Machine Learning

Asela Hevapathige, Yu Xia, Sachith Seneviratne, Saman Halgamuge

arXiv · 2603.14369

The Takeaway

It moves scientific ML from manual, unverified architecture design to a formal compilation process. This ensures that models satisfy domain-specific theories by construction, significantly improving sample efficiency and out-of-distribution generalization compared to standard regularization methods.

From the abstract

Theory-guided machine learning has demonstrated that including authentic domain knowledge directly into model design improves performance, sample efficiency and out-of-distribution generalisation. Yet the process by which a formal domain theory is translated into architectural constraints remains entirely manual, specific to each domain formalism, and devoid of any formal correctness guarantee. This translation is non-transferable between domains, not verified, and does not scale. We propose the