Thermoinformational State Construction: Generative Energies, Entropies, and H-Theorem Consistency

TL;DR

This paper presents a data-driven framework for constructing thermodynamic descriptions from microstate data, defining system-specific energies and entropies that are consistent with observed distributions.

Contribution

It introduces a method to infer energy functions and entropy functionals directly from empirical data, ensuring thermodynamic consistency in complex systems.

Findings

Successfully applied to harmonic and bistable systems

Recovers classical equilibrium in the harmonic case

Reveals barriers and coexistence in double-well systems

Abstract

We introduce a constructive framework for assigning thermodynamic structure to an arbitrary data system from its measured microstates. Starting from an empirical distribution over configurations, we first infer a data-driven energy function by fitting a Boltzmann-type model to the observed statistics, thereby defining an energy axis that is intrinsic to the system. We then push the empirical distribution onto this energy coordinate and pose an inverse maximum-entropy problem: we learn a strictly concave trace-form entropy functional whose maximizer, under a small set of constraints extracted from the data, reproduces the observed energy-space histogram. With energy and entropy defined in this coupled, system-specific manner, macroscopic variables such as internal energy, an entropy-energy relation S(U), and a thermoinformational temperature T^(-1)= dS/dU follow consistently along admissible families of states. We demonstrate the construction on canonical unimodal and multimodal examples, including a harmonic well (recovering the classical equilibrium limit up to gauge) and a bistable double-well where global-constraint MaxEnt surrogates can obscure barrier and coexistence structure. The resulting formulation provides a principled route from microstate data to thermodynamically consistent macroscopic descriptors, with an optimized entropy matched to the empirical system.