The 11th LITP Spring Symposium : Theoretical Physics and AI

US/Eastern
340 (West Hall)

340

West Hall

Clifford Cheung (Caltech LFTP), James Wells (UM, LITP), Jessica Howard (KITP, Santa Barbara), Kevin Zhang (Utah)
Description

May 18th – 20th, 2026 in 340 West Hall

The Physics Department at the University of Michigan supported by The Leinweber Institute for Theoretical Physics will host the 11th LCTP Spring Symposium: Theoretical Physics and AI.

The focus of the Symposium will be on how the activities and goals of theoretical physics can be advanced by the recent and future-anticipated developments of artificial intelligence. This ranges from high-speed computations of trained neural networks to synthesis activities of large sets of “theory data” into meaningful results that humans cannot readily do.


We also plan to cover what theoretical physics can do for artificial intelligence. Deep Neural Networks have many properties directly analogous to field theories. Theoretical physics has spent more than a century developing extraordinary tools to evaluate and solve field theories. Much physical intuition has been developed as well. There has already been good progress on making fruitful connections between field theory and DNN. We wish to cover those developments and invited speakers will explain the latest progress and future hopes.

 

The workshop will be on May 18th – 20th, 2026, with talks ending near midday on the 20th and a reception on the evening of the 18th. However, participants will be welcome to stay later in the week for additional interaction as desired. There will be no registration fee. Participants should register for planning purposes. Registration link is at the bottom of this page.

Co-Organisers:

Clifford Cheung (Caltech LFTP)
Jessica Howard (KITP, Santa Barbara)
James Wells (Michigan LITP)
Kevin Zhang (Utah)
Registration
The 11th LITP Spring Symposium
    • 09:00 09:10
      Welcome 10m 340

      340

      West Hall

    • 09:10 09:50
      Neural Networks and Field Theory 40m 340

      340

      West Hall

      Speaker: Jim Halverson
    • 09:50 10:30
      Universality, Topology, and Symmetry in Neural Network Field Theory 40m 340

      340

      West Hall

      Speaker: Christian Ferko
    • 10:30 11:10
      Coffee Break 40m 340

      340

      West Hall

    • 11:10 11:50
      The FERMIACC: Agents for Particle Theory 40m 340

      340

      West Hall

      Speaker: Amalia Madden
    • 11:50 12:30
      Generative AI and Agentic Computing in the Theoretical Sciences: Progress and the Road Ahead 40m 340

      340

      West Hall

      Speaker: Karthik Duraisamy
    • 12:30 14:00
      Lunch 1h 30m 340

      340

      West Hall

    • 14:00 14:40
      Generative AI and Lattice Gauge Theory 40m 340

      340

      West Hall

      Speaker: Octavio Vega (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)
    • 14:40 15:20
      Viability of perturbative expansion for quantum field theories on neurons 40m 340

      340

      West Hall

      Speaker: Srimoyee Sen
    • 15:20 16:00
      Coffee Break 40m 340

      340

      West Hall

    • 16:00 16:40
      On the Separability of Information in Diffusion models 40m 340

      340

      West Hall

      Speaker: Akhil Premkumar
    • 17:30 20:00
      Reception 2h 30m 337

      337

      West Hall

    • 09:10 09:50
      Adventures with Agentic AI (in Particle Physics) 40m 340

      340

      West Hall

      Speaker: David Shih
    • 09:50 10:30
      AI for Amplitudes: Building Sentences from Words 40m 340

      340

      West Hall

      Speaker: Julie Pagès
    • 10:30 11:10
      Coffee Break 40m 340

      340

      West Hall

    • 11:10 11:50
      QCD Theory meets Information Theory 40m 340

      340

      West Hall

      Speaker: Ben Assi
    • 11:50 12:30
      Trustworthy Neural Simulation-Based Inference at Colliders 40m 340

      340

      West Hall

      Speaker: Sean Benevedes
    • 12:30 14:00
      Lunch 1h 30m 340

      340

      West Hall

    • 14:00 14:40
      Giving Machine Learning a Boost Towards Respecting (Approximate) Symmetries 40m 340

      340

      West Hall

      Speaker: Inbar Savoray
    • 14:40 15:20
      Resummed Distribution Functions: making perturbation theory positive and normalized 40m 340

      340

      West Hall

      Speaker: Radha Mastandrea
    • 15:20 16:00
      Coffee Break 40m 340

      340

      West Hall

    • 16:00 16:40
      Computing the Uncomputable: String Compactifications with Neural Networks 40m 340

      340

      West Hall

      Speaker: Thomas Harvey
    • 09:10 09:50
      Towards Probabilistic Cataloging of Next Generation Cosmology Surveys with BLISS: the Bayesian Light Source Separator 40m 340

      340

      West Hall

      Speaker: Camille Avestruz
    • 09:50 10:30
      Fine-Tuning Small Reasoning Models for Quantum Field Theory 40m 340

      340

      West Hall

      Speaker: Nathaniel S. Woodward (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
    • 10:30 11:10
      Coffee Break 40m 340

      340

      West Hall

    • 11:10 11:50
      TBD 40m 340

      340

      West Hall

      Speaker: Tilman Plehn
    • 11:50 12:30
      AI and the Research Enterprise: Discussion 40m 340

      340

      West Hall