Machine Learning with Hard Constraints
Navid Azizan · Massachusetts Institute of Technology — Mechanical Engineering and Institute for Data, Systems & Society
Wed, Sep 30, 2026 · 16:00 UTC
Navid Azizan presents methods that make neural models obey physical, safety and operational constraints at deployment. Hard-constrained neural networks, or HardNets, enforce input-dependent constraints by construction while preserving universal approximation within the feasible function class. Applications include models of chaotic dynamics with bounded trajectories, energy-constrained operator learning, safe reinforcement learning and control with formal guarantees. The talk then turns to enforcing constraints during sampling from pretrained diffusion and flow-matching models. Formulating gen