Abstract: A physical neural network system includes a physical and digital component. The digital component includes a computing system. The physical component and the digital component work in conjunction to execute a physics aware training process. The physics aware training process includes generating, by the digital component, an input data set for input to the physical component, applying, by the physical component, one or more transformations to the input data set to generate an output for a forward pass of the physics aware training process, comparing, by the digital component, the generated output to a canonical output to determine an error, generating, by the digital component, a loss gradient using a differentiable digital model for a backward pass of the physics aware training process, and updating, by the digital component, training parameters for subsequent input to the physical component based on the loss gradient.