IAIFI Fall 2025 Wrap-Up

IAIFI Opportunities Research Highlights Event Highlights and News Join IAIFI Research Papers Follow IAIFI

News from IAIFI Management

Thank you to everyone who attended our events this Fall and otherwise engaged with IAIFI on our research and activities at the intersection of AI and Physics! We have summarized some highlights and information from IAIFI for Fall 2025. Please feel free to reach out to us with questions or comments about any of the below. Best wishes for a safe and pleasant holiday season!

IAIFI Opportunities

IAIFI Summer School

Apply for our 2026 IAIFI Summer School, featuring lectures and events that illustrate interdisciplinary research at the intersection AI and Physics and encourage global networking. Hands-on code-based tutorials that build on foundational lecture materials help students put theory into practice, and a hackathon project provides an opportunity for students to collaborate and apply what they’ve learned. The mission of the IAIFI Summer School is to leverage the expertise of IAIFI researchers, affiliates, and partners toward promoting education and workforce development.

Application details:

• The application deadline is February 9, 2026. Applicants will be notified of their status by February 16, 2026.
• There is no registration fee for the Summer School. Costs of dorm accommodations will be reimbursed by IAIFI, contingent upon attendance. Students for the Summer School are expected to cover the cost of travel.
• Lunch each day, as well as coffee and snacks at breaks, will be provided during the Summer School, along with at least one dinner during the Summer School.
• Virtual attendance can be accomodated.

Summer School Details:

• When: August 3–August 7, 2026
• Where: Boston/Cambridge, MA (exact location TBA)
• What: View the agenda on the Summer School webpage. Lecturer details will be added as they are confirmed by the organizing committee.
• See FAQs on the Summer School webpage

Also save the date for the IAIFI Summer Workshop 2026, which will be held August 10–14, 2026 in Boston/Cambridge (exact location TBA)! Registration will open in January 2026.

MIT Summer Research Program (MSRP)

Undergraduate students (sophomore, junior, or non-graduating seniors) who might benefit from spending a summer on MIT’s campus, conducting research under the guidance of MIT faculty members, postdoctoral fellows, and advanced graduate students, are invited to apply to the MIT Summer Research Program (MSRP) and can indicate interest in working with IAIFI researchers.

Apply by January 20, 2026 and indicate interest in IAIFI in your application.

IAIFI Colloquium Series

Thank you to our speakers for this term: Francisco Villaescusa-Navarro, Berthy Feng, Peter Lu, Andy Keller, Melanie Weber, and T. Konstantin Rusch!

The IAIFI Colloquium series will continue in Spring 2026 with the following speakers:

• February 13: Roger Melko (University of Waterloo)
• February 27: Lisa Everett (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
• March 13: Roberto Trotta (SISSA)
• April 10: Tommaso Dorigo (INFN)
• April 24: James Requeima (Google DeepMind)
• May 8: Yury Polyanskiy (MIT)

If you missed any of this semester’s colloquia, you can watch recordings of all Fall 2025 colloquia on our YouTube channel, as well as recordings from previous semesters.

IAIFI Research Highlights

IAIFI regularly posts research highlights on our website, showcasing the innovative work of IAIFI investigators. View our Summer 2025 and Fall 2025 research highlights below!

• AutoSciDACT: Automated Scientific Discovery through Contrastive Embedding and Hypothesis Testing
• Evidence for an Instability-induced Binary Merger in the Double-peaked, Helium-rich Type IIn Supernova 2023zkd
• Enhancing events in neutrino telescopes through deep-learning-driven superresolution
• Remove Symmetries to Control Model Expressivity and Improve Optimization
• LEAPS: A discrete neural sampler via locally equivariant networks

View all Research Highlights

In Case You Missed It

Learn More about IAIFI Public Engagement Activities

MIT Splash 2025

November 22, 2025

IAIFI was pleased to participate in MIT’s Splash program this year! IAIFI members Christian Ferko (Northeastern), Christina Reissel (MIT), Jamie Sullivan (MIT), and Joydeep Naskar (Northeastern) shared an overview of their work at the intersection of AI and Physics and held a Q&A with a group of around 100 high school students!

Cambridge Science Carnival 2025

September 21, 2025

We hosted a booth at the Cambridge Science Carnival for the fourth year in a row! This included several AI+Physics activities for all ages, and IAIFI members were able to chat with more than 500 community members over the course of the afternoon.

Summer School and Workshop

August 2025

In August 2025, we held our fourth annual Summer School and Workshop at Harvard. The Summer School included lectures, hands-on tutorials, lightning talks, networking events, etc. The Summer Workshop featured plenary talks, poster sessions, and networking events. We were also excited to partner with the Boston Museum of Science for our Summer Workshop dinner, when we also hosted a planetarium show about AI and the search for dark matter, led by IAIFI Senior Investigator Lina Necib.

Watch the 2025 Workshop Talks on YouTube Apply for the 2026 Summer School

AI+Physics Science Communication

We had the opportunity to collaborate on two public engagement projects to communicate AI+Physics to the general public:

• Discovery Engines Podcast: IAIFI Director Jesse Thaler chatted with host Nabil Laoudji about how AI is reshaping physics discovery and how physicists are reshaping AI.

Watch the episode on YouTube

• ScienceClic Educational Video: IAIFI Investigators collaborated with popular science YouTube channel ScienceClic on a video covering “The Physics of AI,” which explores the connections between AI and Physics as related to the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics, and the link between neural networks and quantum fields.

Watch the video on YouTube

IAIFI News

• IAIFI Junior Investigator Christian Ferko receives Museum of Science digital communication fellowship. As a 2026 Museum of Science, Boston Digital Science Communication Fellow, Christian will participate in specialized training in strategic storytelling, digital content creation, civic trust, and evidence-based communication. December 11, 2025

• IAIFI Investigators honored by Schmidt Sciences as 2025 Early Career Fellows. IAIFI Fellow/Harvard Society of Fellows’ Michael Albergo and IAIFI Senior Investigator/MIT Professor Tess Smidt were selected for the AI2050 Early Career Fellowship, which is an enabling fellowship to encourage postdoctoral and pre-tenure researchers from around the world to pursue bold and ambitious work on hard problems in AI. November 17, 2025

• IAIFI alum Ziming Liu featured in the NSF AI Institutes Virtual Organization (AIVO) Student Spotlights. The article focuses on Ziming’s groundbreaking research in AI+Science. September 19, 2025

• IAIFI Senior Investigators collaborate with other interdisciplinary researchers on community white paper exploring “The Future of AI and the Mathematical and Physical Sciences.” The white paper, which developed out of an NSF-funded Workshop held in March 2025, presents how the MPS domains (Astronomy, Chemistry, Materials Research, Mathematical Sciences, and Physics) can best capitalize on, and contribute to, the future of AI. September 4, 2025

• IAIFI Summer School sponsor FirstPrinciples summarizes the impact of the School. Read Bridging Minds and Disciplines: The IAIFI Summer School and the Future of Collaborative Science. August 15, 2025

• IAIFI Researchers and Collaborators Discover New Type of Supernova. Read about the discovery, led by IAIFI Fellow Alex Gagliano along with IAIFI Senior Investigator Ashley Villar and their collaborators. August 13, 2025

• IAIFI Deputy Director Mike Williams participates on panel at AI+Science Summit. The panel, “Powering Innovation at the Intersection of AI & Science: NSF’s AI Institutes” was hosted by the Special Competitive Studies Project at their AI+Science Summit. July 23, 2025

• IAIFI Fellow Jessie Micallef receives Impact Award from MicroBooNE expirement. Jessie received the award for contributions to the experiment. July 20, 2025

• Marisa LaFleur promoted from IAIFI Project Manager to IAIFI Managing Director. As IAIFI Managing Director, Marisa will continue to oversee the implementation of IAIFI activities and to expand her responsibilities related to IAIFI’s long-term strategy and funding. July 9, 2025

View all IAIFI News

Join IAIFI

Visit IAIFI’s website for more ways to engage with the community.

Senior Researchers in the Boston Area

Senior Researchers include faculty members and senior research scientists with PI status. If you are interested in becoming an IAIFI Affiliate, complete the IAIFI Affiliate application form. Affiliate applications must include a Senior Investigator sponsor.

Details for Senior Researchers

Junior Researchers in the Boston Area

Junior Researchers include undergraduate students, graduate students, postdocs, and research scientists without PI status. If you are interested in getting more involved in IAIFI as a junior researcher, complete the Junior Researcher Interest Form.

Details for Junior Researchers

IAIFI members participate in a variety of events throughout the semester, including colloquia, journal clubs, and networking events.

IAIFI Research on arXiv

Read the latest IAIFI papers on arXiv! Here, the papers are grouped by the four IAIFI research domains.

Foundational AI

• AutoSciDACT: Automated Scientific Discovery through Contrastive Embedding and Hypothesis Testing
  

• On Uncertainty Calibration for Equivariant Functions
  

• Diffusion Autoencoders with Perceivers for Long, Irregular and Multimodal Astronomical Sequences
  

• FINDER: Feature Inference on Noisy Datasets using Eigenspace Residuals
  

• Tropical super Gromov-Witten invariants
  

• Topological Invariance and Breakdown in Learning
  

• To Augment or Not to Augment? Diagnosing Distributional Symmetry Breaking
  

• A universal compression theory: Lottery ticket hypothesis and superpolynomial scaling laws
  

• Implicit Augmentation from Distributional Symmetry in Turbulence Super-Resolution
  

• Deep Learning for Clouds and Cloud Shadow Segmentation in Methane Satellite and Airborne Imaging Spectroscopy
  

• Towards non-commutative crepant resolutions of affine toric Gorenstein varieties
  

• Beyond I-Con: Exploring New Dimension of Distance Measures in Representation Learning
  

• The Optimiser Hidden in Plain Sight: Training with the Loss Landscape’s Induced Metric
  

• Any-Order Flexible Length Masked Diffusion
  

• Training a Foundation Model for Materials on a Budget

• Efficient Constraint-Aware Flow Matching via Randomized Exploration
  

• The D-Geometric Hilbert Scheme – Part I: Involutivity and Stability
  

• Proof of a perfect platonic representation hypothesis
  

• Exploration Behavior of Untrained Policies
  

• Geography of Landau-Ginzburg models and threefold syzygies
  

• The Price of Freedom: Exploring Expressivity and Runtime Tradeoffs in Equivariant Tensor Products

• Generative Perception of Shape and Material from Differential Motion
  

• A Tale of Two Symmetries: Exploring the Loss Landscape of Equivariant Models
  

View all Foundational AI papers

Theoretical Physics

• An integrated neural wavefunction solver for spinful Fermi systems
  

• The Pareto Frontier of Resilient Jet Tagging
  

• Gradient-based search of quantum phases: discovering unconventional fractional Chern insulators
  

• Soliton Surfaces and the Geometry of Integrable Deformations of the ℂℙN−1 Model
  

• Attention is all you need to solve chiral superconductivity
  

• The DNA of nuclear models: How AI predicts nuclear masses
  

• Analytic Regression of Feynman Integrals from High-Precision Numerical Sampling
  

• Holography with Null Boundaries
  

• Qubit thermodynamics: Entropy production from nonadiabatic driving
  

View all Theoretical Physics papers

Experimental Physics

• Reducing Simulation Dependence in Neutrino Telescopes with Masked Point Transformers

• GW-YOLO: Multi-transient segmentation in LIGO using computer vision
  

• The Neutrino Kaleidoscope: Searches for Non-Standard Neutrino Oscillations at Neutrino Telescopes with a TeV Muon Accelerator Source
  

• Frequentist Uncertainties on Neural Density Ratios with wifi Ensembles

• Fast Low Energy Reconstruction using Convolutional Neural Networks
  

View all Experimental Physics papers

Astrophysics

• Large Language Model Driven Analysis of General Coordinates Network (GCN) Circulars
  

• Studying the gravitational-wave population without looking that FAR out
  

• When IIb Ceases To Be: Bridging the Gap Between IIb and Short-plateau Supernovae
  

• Detecting Model Misspecification in Cosmology with Scale-Dependent Normalizing Flows

• Mixture-of-Expert Variational Autoencoders for Cross-Modality Embedding of Type Ia Supernova Data
  

• reLAISS: A Python Package for Flexible Similarity Searches of Supernovae and Their Host Galaxies

• CosmoFlow: Scale-Aware Representation Learning for Cosmology with Flow Matching
  

• Modeling the Cosmological Lyman-α Forest at the Field Level
  

• A Detection of Helium in the Bright Superluminous Supernova SN 2024rmj
  

• A Wide Field Map of Ultra-Compact Dwarfs in the Coma Cluster

View all Astrophysics papers

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