时间：2025年8月14日（周四）上午9:00-10:00

Time：9:00-10:00, Thursday, August 14, 2025

主持人：西湖大学交叉科学中心，讲席教授汤雷翰

Host：Prof. Leihan Tang, Chair Professor & Deputy Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies (CIS), Westlake University

地址：西湖大学云谷校区E10-215

Venue：E10-215, Yungu Campus, Westlake University

讲座语言：英文

Lecture Language：English

Dr. Yuanzhao Zhang (章元肇)

Omidyar Fellow, Santa Fe Institute

主讲人/Speaker:

Yuanzhao is an Omidyar Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute, where he studies collective dynamics on networks and data-driven modeling of nonlinear systems. Previously, he was a Schmidt Science Fellow at Cornell's Center for Applied Mathematics. He received his Ph.D. in Physics from Northwestern in 2020. Yuanzhao’s work develops mathematical and computational tools to understand complex systems, often motivated by applications in biology and neuroscience.

讲座摘要/Abstract:

In this talk, I will explore the interesting geometries that emerge in high-dimensional attraction basins, which are important in applications such as protein folding, cell differentiation, and neural networks. Using simple networks of coupled oscillators, I will show that high-dimensional basins are generally highly nonconvex and nonlocal, with most of the basin volume concentrated in tentacle-like structures. Next, I will show that introducing non-pairwise interactions in the network can make basins deeper but smaller—the attractors become linearly more stable but much harder to find due to basins shrinking dramatically. Finally, I will pose basin prediction as a challenging task to probe out-of-domain generalization in neural networks. Surprisingly, reservoir computers without relevant physics baked in can often extrapolate to reconstruct basins not seen during training.

讲座联系人/Contact:

交叉科学中心，朱子霖，邮箱：zhuzilin@westlake.edu.cn

Center for Interdisciplinary Studies (CIS), Ms. Zilin Zhu, Email: zhuzilin@westlake.edu.cn