Many complex systems are composed of interacting parts, and the underlying laws are usually simple and universal. While graph neural networks provide a useful relational inductive bias for modeling such systems, generalization to new system instances of the same type is less studied. In this work we trained graph neural networks to fit time series from an example nonlinear dynamical system, the belief propagation algorithm. We found simple interpretations of the learned representation and model components, and they are consistent with core properties of the probabilistic inference algorithm. We successfully identified a `graph translator' between the statistical interactions in belief propagation and parameters of the corresponding trained network, and showed that it enables two types of novel generalization: to recover the underlying structure of a new system instance based solely on time series observations, or to construct a new network from this structure directly. Our results demonstrated a path towards understanding both dynamics and structure of a complex system and how such understanding can be used for generalization.

本研究训练了图神经网络以适应来自非线性动力系统的时间序列，发现了学习表示和模型组件的简单解释，并成功地确定了'图翻译器'，使两种新类型广义：仅基于时间序列观测来恢复新系统实例的潜在结构，或者直接从该结构构造新网络。结果表明，理解复杂系统的动态和结构及其如何用于泛化的途径。

使用图神经网络学习复杂系统的动力学和结构