Based on more than three decades of rod finite element theory, this publication unifies all the successful contributions found in literature and eradicates the arising drawbacks like loss of objectivity, locking, path-dependence and redundant coordinates. Specifically, the idea of interpolating the nodal orientations using relative rotation vectors, proposed by Crisfield and Jeleni\'c in 1999, is extended to the interpolation of nodal Euclidean transformation matrices with the aid of relative twists; a strategy that arises from the SE(3)-structure of the Cosserat rod kinematics. Applying a Petrov-Galerkin projection method, we propose a novel rod finite element formulation where the virtual displacements and rotations as well as the translational and angular velocities are interpolated instead of using the consistent variations and time-derivatives of the introduced interpolation formula. Properties such as the intrinsic absence of locking, preservation of objectivity after discretization and parametrization in terms of a minimal number of nodal unknowns are demonstrated by conclusive numerical examples in both statics and dynamics.
We derive an intuitionistic version of G\"odel-L\"ob modal logic ($\sf{GL}$) in the style of Simpson, via proof theoretic techniques. We recover a labelled system, $\sf{\ell IGL}$, by restricting a non-wellfounded labelled system for $\sf{GL}$ to have only one formula on the right. The latter is obtained using techniques from cyclic proof theory, sidestepping the barrier that $\sf{GL}$'s usual frame condition (converse well-foundedness) is not first-order definable. While existing intuitionistic versions of $\sf{GL}$ are typically defined over only the box (and not the diamond), our presentation includes both modalities. Our main result is that $\sf{\ell IGL}$ coincides with a corresponding semantic condition in birelational semantics: the composition of the modal relation and the intuitionistic relation is conversely well-founded. We call the resulting logic $\sf{IGL}$. While the soundness direction is proved using standard ideas, the completeness direction is more complex and necessitates a detour through several intermediate characterisations of $\sf{IGL}$.
We provide a new sequent calculus that enjoys syntactic cut-elimination and strongly terminating backward proof search for the intuitionistic Strong L\"ob logic $\sf{iSL}$, an intuitionistic modal logic with a provability interpretation. A novel measure on sequents is used to prove both the termination of the naive backward proof search strategy, and the admissibility of cut in a syntactic and direct way, leading to a straightforward cut-elimination procedure. All proofs have been formalised in the interactive theorem prover Coq.
The proximal Galerkin finite element method is a high-order, low iteration complexity, nonlinear numerical method that preserves the geometric and algebraic structure of bound constraints in infinite-dimensional function spaces. This paper introduces the proximal Galerkin method and applies it to solve free boundary problems, enforce discrete maximum principles, and develop scalable, mesh-independent algorithms for optimal design. The paper leads to a derivation of the latent variable proximal point (LVPP) algorithm: an unconditionally stable alternative to the interior point method. LVPP is an infinite-dimensional optimization algorithm that may be viewed as having an adaptive barrier function that is updated with a new informative prior at each (outer loop) optimization iteration. One of the main benefits of this algorithm is witnessed when analyzing the classical obstacle problem. Therein, we find that the original variational inequality can be replaced by a sequence of semilinear partial differential equations (PDEs) that are readily discretized and solved with, e.g., high-order finite elements. Throughout this work, we arrive at several unexpected contributions that may be of independent interest. These include (1) a semilinear PDE we refer to as the entropic Poisson equation; (2) an algebraic/geometric connection between high-order positivity-preserving discretizations and certain infinite-dimensional Lie groups; and (3) a gradient-based, bound-preserving algorithm for two-field density-based topology optimization. The complete latent variable proximal Galerkin methodology combines ideas from nonlinear programming, functional analysis, tropical algebra, and differential geometry and can potentially lead to new synergies among these areas as well as within variational and numerical analysis.
One of the central quantities of probabilistic seismic risk assessment studies is the fragility curve, which represents the probability of failure of a mechanical structure conditional to a scalar measure derived from the seismic ground motion. Estimating such curves is a difficult task because for most structures of interest, few data are available. For this reason, a wide range of the methods of the literature rely on a parametric log-normal model. Bayesian approaches allow for efficient learning of the model parameters. However, the choice of the prior distribution has a non-negligible influence on the posterior distribution, and therefore on any resulting estimate. We propose a thorough study of this parametric Bayesian estimation problem when the data are binary (i.e. data indicate the state of the structure, failure or non-failure). Using the reference prior theory as a support, we suggest an objective approach for the prior choice. This approach leads to the Jeffreys' prior which is explicitly derived for this problem for the first time. The posterior distribution is proven to be proper (i.e. it integrates to unity) with Jeffreys' prior and improper with some classical priors from the literature. The posterior distribution with Jeffreys' prior is also shown to vanish at the boundaries of the parameter domain, so sampling of the posterior distribution of the parameters does not produce anomalously small or large values, which in turn does not produce degenerate fragility curves such as unit step functions. The numerical results on three different case studies illustrate these theoretical predictions.
We introduce new control-volume finite-element discretization schemes suitable for solving the Stokes problem. Within a common framework, we present different approaches for constructing such schemes. The first and most established strategy employs a non-overlapping partitioning into control volumes. The second represents a new idea by splitting into two sets of control volumes, the first set yielding a partition of the domain and the second containing the remaining overlapping control volumes required for stability. The third represents a hybrid approach where finite volumes are combined with finite elements based on a hierarchical splitting of the ansatz space. All approaches are based on typical finite element function spaces but yield locally mass and momentum conservative discretization schemes that can be interpreted as finite volume schemes. We apply all strategies to the inf-sub stable MINI finite-element pair. Various test cases, including convergence tests and the numerical observation of the boundedness of the number of preconditioned Krylov solver iterations, as well as more complex scenarios of flow around obstacles or through a three-dimensional vessel bifurcation, demonstrate the stability and robustness of the schemes.
A standard approach to solve ordinary differential equations, when they describe dynamical systems, is to adopt a Runge-Kutta or related scheme. Such schemes, however, are not applicable to the large class of equations which do not constitute dynamical systems. In several physical systems, we encounter integro-differential equations with memory terms where the time derivative of a state variable at a given time depends on all past states of the system. Secondly, there are equations whose solutions do not have well-defined Taylor series expansion. The Maxey-Riley-Gatignol equation, which describes the dynamics of an inertial particle in nonuniform and unsteady flow, displays both challenges. We use it as a test bed to address the questions we raise, but our method may be applied to all equations of this class. We show that the Maxey-Riley-Gatignol equation can be embedded into an extended Markovian system which is constructed by introducing a new dynamical co-evolving state variable that encodes memory of past states. We develop a Runge-Kutta algorithm for the resultant Markovian system. The form of the kernels involved in deriving the Runge-Kutta scheme necessitates the use of an expansion in powers of $t^{1/2}$. Our approach naturally inherits the benefits of standard time-integrators, namely a constant memory storage cost, a linear growth of operational effort with simulation time, and the ability to restart a simulation with the final state as the new initial condition.
Hawkes processes are often applied to model dependence and interaction phenomena in multivariate event data sets, such as neuronal spike trains, social interactions, and financial transactions. In the nonparametric setting, learning the temporal dependence structure of Hawkes processes is generally a computationally expensive task, all the more with Bayesian estimation methods. In particular, for generalised nonlinear Hawkes processes, Monte-Carlo Markov Chain methods applied to compute the doubly intractable posterior distribution are not scalable to high-dimensional processes in practice. Recently, efficient algorithms targeting a mean-field variational approximation of the posterior distribution have been proposed. In this work, we first unify existing variational Bayes approaches under a general nonparametric inference framework, and analyse the asymptotic properties of these methods under easily verifiable conditions on the prior, the variational class, and the nonlinear model. Secondly, we propose a novel sparsity-inducing procedure, and derive an adaptive mean-field variational algorithm for the popular sigmoid Hawkes processes. Our algorithm is parallelisable and therefore computationally efficient in high-dimensional setting. Through an extensive set of numerical simulations, we also demonstrate that our procedure is able to adapt to the dimensionality of the parameter of the Hawkes process, and is partially robust to some type of model mis-specification.
We propose a new randomized method for solving systems of nonlinear equations, which can find sparse solutions or solutions under certain simple constraints. The scheme only takes gradients of component functions and uses Bregman projections onto the solution space of a Newton equation. In the special case of euclidean projections, the method is known as nonlinear Kaczmarz method. Furthermore, if the component functions are nonnegative, we are in the setting of optimization under the interpolation assumption and the method reduces to SGD with the recently proposed stochastic Polyak step size. For general Bregman projections, our method is a stochastic mirror descent with a novel adaptive step size. We prove that in the convex setting each iteration of our method results in a smaller Bregman distance to exact solutions as compared to the standard Polyak step. Our generalization to Bregman projections comes with the price that a convex one-dimensional optimization problem needs to be solved in each iteration. This can typically be done with globalized Newton iterations. Convergence is proved in two classical settings of nonlinearity: for convex nonnegative functions and locally for functions which fulfill the tangential cone condition. Finally, we show examples in which the proposed method outperforms similar methods with the same memory requirements.
We present a multigrid algorithm to solve efficiently the large saddle-point systems of equations that typically arise in PDE-constrained optimization under uncertainty. The algorithm is based on a collective smoother that at each iteration sweeps over the nodes of the computational mesh, and solves a reduced saddle-point system whose size depends on the number $N$ of samples used to discretized the probability space. We show that this reduced system can be solved with optimal $O(N)$ complexity. We test the multigrid method on three problems: a linear-quadratic problem for which the multigrid method is used to solve directly the linear optimality system; a nonsmooth problem with box constraints and $L^1$-norm penalization on the control, in which the multigrid scheme is used within a semismooth Newton iteration; a risk-adverse problem with the smoothed CVaR risk measure where the multigrid method is called within a preconditioned Newton iteration. In all cases, the multigrid algorithm exhibits very good performances and robustness with respect to all parameters of interest.
We investigate a class of parametric elliptic eigenvalue problems with homogeneous essential boundary conditions where the coefficients (and hence the solution $u$) may depend on a parameter $y$. For the efficient approximate evaluation of parameter sensitivities of the first eigenpairs on the entire parameter space we propose and analyse Gevrey class and analytic regularity of the solution with respect to the parameters. This is made possible by a novel proof technique which we introduce and demonstrate in this paper. Our regularity result has immediate implications for convergence of various numerical schemes for parametric elliptic eigenvalue problems, in particular, for elliptic eigenvalue problems with infinitely many parameters arising from elliptic differential operators with random coefficients.