We’d like to highlight our recent work on how useful NNs are for stability and resolvent analysis of non-linear systems (https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.19465) This is a very fundamental, and classic topic, and Chengyun established a firm connection between the theoretical basis and modern AI methods. Importantly, it shows how the differentiability of NNs enables explainability and analysis of complex dynamical systems.
Investigating how complex systems respond to perturbations remains a central challenge in both science and engineering. Traditional analysis methods are limited to simple, linearized systems or require explicit governing equations. We introduce a general, data-driven framework that uses neural networks to automatically discover the stability and receptivity properties of any system. Our approach identifies which perturbations will grow unstably near an equilibrium state and, crucially, pinpoints the optimal way to force the system to elicit the most amplified responses (resolvent analysis), even for strongly nonlinear systems. This framework is potentially relevant to applications in fields ranging from climate science and neuroscience to fluid engineering, particularly where first-principles models are often intractable but sufficiently rich trajectory data is available.
Source code examples are available: https://github.com/tum-pbs/NonlinearRA/
