Special Session 22: Models of emergence and collective dynamics

From Nanbu Particle Systems to Transformer Approximations of Boltzmann Solutions
Trevor Teolis
Rice University
USA
Co-Author(s):    Trevor Teolis, Maarten de Hoop
Abstract:
We show that solutions of the Boltzmann equation can be uniformly approximated, in suitable Wasserstein metrics, by measure-theoretic transformer models. Our approach is based on a pushforward representation of Boltzmann dynamics induced by the Nanbu stochastic particle system, in which the evolution of a tagged particle depends on an underlying context consisting of the initial velocity distribution and a Poisson random measure encoding collision events. In this formulation, the fundamental objects (or tokens) consist of velocity-path pairs, where the paths are Radon measures describing jump sequences. By exploiting this structure, we place the Boltzmann pushforward representation within the scope of recent universality results for measure-theoretic transformers.