Physical Knowledge Integration into Deep Learning
Contact

Sai Karthikeya Vemuri

Overview

This research area focuses on integrating physical knowledge into deep learning models for scientific and engineering problems. Modern neural networks are powerful function approximators, but in many physical systems we also have strong prior structure: governing equations, conservation laws, symmetries, and well-tested empirical relations. The core idea is to make these constraints part of learning, so that models do not merely fit observations but remain consistent with known science. This becomes especially valuable in regimes where measurements are expensive or sparse, where purely data-driven training can be brittle or inefficient.

A main mechanism for this integration is to incorporate physics directly into the training objective via differentiable constraints, an approach commonly known as Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs). In this view, learning is guided not only by data mismatch but also by penalties that enforce governing relations, typically expressed through differential operators or other scientific laws. Building on this principle, we develop and study PINN-based methods across regimes of available physics and data: from PDE-solving settings with strong physical knowledge and limited observations, to inverse problems where key physical parameters must be identified from sparse measurements, and to applications where physics appears as structural priors rather than explicit PDEs. Recently, we have been exploring probabilistic extensions that combine physics-based constraints with latent-variable models to handle uncertainty when the available physical descriptions are incomplete or exhibit systematic discrepancies.

Publications
2026
Sai Karthikeya Vemuri, Adithya Ashok Chalain Valapil, Tim Büchner, Joachim Denzler:
RamPINN: Recovering Raman Spectra From Coherent Anti-Stokes Spectra Using Embedded Physics.
International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS). 2026. (accepted)
[bibtex] [pdf] [doi] [abstract]
Sai Karthikeya Vemuri, Tim Büchner, Joachim Denzler:
F-INR: Functional Tensor Decomposition for Implicit Neural Representations.
Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV). 2026. (accepted)
[bibtex] [web] [doi] [abstract]
2024
Gideon Stein, Sai Karthikeya Vemuri, Yuanyuan Huang, Anne Ebeling, Nico Eisenhauer, Maha Shadaydeh, Joachim Denzler:
Investigating the Effects of Plant Diversity on Soil Thermal Diffusivity Using Physics- Informed Neural Networks.
ICLR Workshop on AI4DifferentialEquations In Science (ICLR-WS). 2024.
[bibtex] [pdf] [web] [abstract]
Sai Karthikeya Vemuri, Tim Büchner, Joachim Denzler:
Estimating Soil Hydraulic Parameters for Unsaturated Flow using Physics-Informed Neural Networks.
International Conference on Computational Science (ICCS). Pages 338-351. 2024.
[bibtex] [pdf] [doi] [abstract]
Sai Karthikeya Vemuri, Tim Büchner, Julia Niebling, Joachim Denzler:
Functional Tensor Decompositions for Physics-Informed Neural Networks.
International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR). Pages 32-46. 2024. Best Paper Award
[bibtex] [pdf] [web] [doi] [code] [abstract]
2023
Sai Karthikeya Vemuri, Joachim Denzler:
Physics Informed Neural Networks for Aeroacoustic Source Estimation.
IACM Mechanistic Machine Learning and Digital Engineering for Computational Science Engineering and Technology. 2023.
[bibtex] [web] [doi] [abstract]