Although beam emittance is critical for the performance of high-brightness accelerators, optimization is often time limited as emittance calculations, commonly done via quadrupole scans, are typically slow. Such calculations are a type of $\textit{multi-point query}$, i.e. each query requires multiple secondary measurements. Traditional black-box optimizers such as Bayesian optimization are slow and inefficient when dealing with such objectives as they must acquire the full series of measurements, but return only the emittance, with each query. We propose applying Bayesian Algorithm Execution (BAX) to instead query and model individual beam-size measurements. BAX avoids the slow multi-point query on the accelerator by acquiring points through a $\textit{virtual objective}$, i.e. calculating the emittance objective from a fast learned model rather than directly from the accelerator. Here, we use BAX to minimize emittance at the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) and the Facility for Advanced Accelerator Experimental Tests II (FACET-II). In simulation, BAX is 20$\times$ faster and more robust to noise compared to existing methods. In live LCLS and FACET-II tests, BAX performed the first automated emittance tuning, matching the hand-tuned emittance at FACET-II and achieving a 24% lower emittance at LCLS. Our method represents a conceptual shift for optimizing multi-point queries, and we anticipate that it can be readily adapted to similar problems in particle accelerators and other scientific instruments.
Multi-material design optimization problems can, after discretization, be solved by the iterative solution of simpler sub-problems which approximate the original problem at an expansion point to first order. In particular, models constructed from convex separable first order approximations have a long and successful tradition in the design optimization community and have led to powerful optimization tools like the prominently used method of moving asymptotes (MMA). In this paper, we introduce several new separable approximations to a model problem and examine them in terms of accuracy and fast evaluation. The models can, in general, be nonconvex and are based on the Sherman-Morrison-Woodbury matrix identity on the one hand, and on the mathematical concept of topological derivatives on the other hand. We show a surprising relation between two models originating from these two -- at a first sight -- very different concepts. Numerical experiments show a high level of accuracy for two of our proposed models while also their evaluation can be performed efficiently once enough data has been precomputed in an offline phase. Additionally it is demonstrated that suboptimal decisions can be avoided using our most accurate models.
In the usual Bayesian setting, a full probabilistic model is required to link the data and parameters, and the form of this model and the inference and prediction mechanisms are specified via de Finetti's representation. In general, such a formulation is not robust to model mis-specification of its component parts. An alternative approach is to draw inference based on loss functions, where the quantity of interest is defined as a minimizer of some expected loss, and to construct posterior distributions based on the loss-based formulation; this strategy underpins the construction of the Gibbs posterior. We develop a Bayesian non-parametric approach; specifically, we generalize the Bayesian bootstrap, and specify a Dirichlet process model for the distribution of the observables. We implement this using direct prior-to-posterior calculations, but also using predictive sampling. We also study the assessment of posterior validity for non-standard Bayesian calculations, and provide an efficient way to calibrate the scaling parameter in the Gibbs posterior so that it can achieve the desired coverage rate. We show that the developed non-standard Bayesian updating procedures yield valid posterior distributions in terms of consistency and asymptotic normality under model mis-specification. Simulation studies show that the proposed methods can recover the true value of the parameter efficiently and achieve frequentist coverage even when the sample size is small. Finally, we apply our methods to evaluate the causal impact of speed cameras on traffic collisions in England.
Given a dataset on actions and resulting long-term rewards, a direct estimation approach fits value functions that minimize prediction error on the training data. Temporal difference learning (TD) methods instead fit value functions by minimizing the degree of temporal inconsistency between estimates made at successive time-steps. Focusing on finite state Markov chains, we provide a crisp asymptotic theory of the statistical advantages of this approach. First, we show that an intuitive inverse trajectory pooling coefficient completely characterizes the percent reduction in mean-squared error of value estimates. Depending on problem structure, the reduction could be enormous or nonexistent. Next, we prove that there can be dramatic improvements in estimates of the difference in value-to-go for two states: TD's errors are bounded in terms of a novel measure - the problem's trajectory crossing time - which can be much smaller than the problem's time horizon.
We propose a new model-based algorithm solving the inverse rig problem in facial animation retargeting, exhibiting higher accuracy of the fit and sparser, more interpretable weight vector compared to SOTA. The proposed method targets a specific subdomain of human face animation - highly-realistic blendshape models used in the production of movies and video games. In this paper, we formulate an optimization problem that takes into account all the requirements of targeted models. Our objective goes beyond a linear blendshape model and employs the quadratic corrective terms necessary for correctly fitting fine details of the mesh. We show that the solution to the proposed problem yields highly accurate mesh reconstruction even when general-purpose solvers, like SQP, are used. The results obtained using SQP are highly accurate in the mesh space but do not exhibit favorable qualities in terms of weight sparsity and smoothness, and for this reason, we further propose a novel algorithm relying on a MM technique. The algorithm is specifically suited for solving the proposed objective, yielding a high-accuracy mesh fit while respecting the constraints and producing a sparse and smooth set of weights easy to manipulate and interpret by artists. Our algorithm is benchmarked with SOTA approaches, and shows an overall superiority of the results, yielding a smooth animation reconstruction with a relative improvement up to 45 percent in root mean squared mesh error while keeping the cardinality comparable with benchmark methods. This paper gives a comprehensive set of evaluation metrics that cover different aspects of the solution, including mesh accuracy, sparsity of the weights, and smoothness of the animation curves, as well as the appearance of the produced animation, which human experts evaluated.
In computer vision, camera pose estimation from correspondences between 3D geometric entities and their projections into the image has been a widely investigated problem. Although most state-of-the-art methods exploit low-level primitives such as points or lines, the emergence of very effective CNN-based object detectors in the recent years has paved the way to the use of higher-level features carrying semantically meaningful information. Pioneering works in that direction have shown that modelling 3D objects by ellipsoids and 2D detections by ellipses offers a convenient manner to link 2D and 3D data. However, the mathematical formalism most often used in the related litterature does not enable to easily distinguish ellipsoids and ellipses from other quadrics and conics, leading to a loss of specificity potentially detrimental in some developments. Moreover, the linearization process of the projection equation creates an over-representation of the camera parameters, also possibly causing an efficiency loss. In this paper, we therefore introduce an ellipsoid-specific theoretical framework and demonstrate its beneficial properties in the context of pose estimation. More precisely, we first show that the proposed formalism enables to reduce the pose estimation problem to a position or orientation-only estimation problem in which the remaining unknowns can be derived in closed-form. Then, we demonstrate that it can be further reduced to a 1 Degree-of-Freedom (1DoF) problem and provide the analytical derivations of the pose as a function of that unique scalar unknown. We illustrate our theoretical considerations by visual examples and include a discussion on the practical aspects. Finally, we release this paper along with the corresponding source code in order to contribute towards more efficient resolutions of ellipsoid-related pose estimation problems.
Although extensive research in emergency collision avoidance has been carried out for straight or curved roads in a highway scenario, a general method that could be implemented for all road environments has not been thoroughly explored. Moreover, most current algorithms don't consider collision mitigation in an emergency. This functionality is essential since the problem may have no feasible solution. We propose a safe controller using model predictive control and artificial potential function to address these problems. A new artificial potential function inspired by line charge is proposed as the cost function for our model predictive controller. The vehicle dynamics and actuator limitations are set as constraints. The new artificial potential function considers the shape of all objects. In particular, the artificial potential function we proposed has the flexibility to fit the shape of the road structures, such as the intersection. We could also realize collision mitigation for a specific part of the vehicle by increasing the charge quantity at the corresponding place. We have tested our methods in 192 cases from 8 different scenarios in simulation with two different models. The simulation results show that the success rate of the proposed safe controller is 20% higher than using HJ-reachability with system decomposition by using a unicycle model. It could also decrease 43% of collision that happens at the pre-assigned part. The method is further validated in a dynamic bicycle model.
Inferring chemical reaction networks (CRN) from concentration time series is a challenge encouragedby the growing availability of quantitative temporal data at the cellular level. This motivates thedesign of algorithms to infer the preponderant reactions between the molecular species observed ina given biochemical process, and build CRN structure and kinetics models. Existing ODE-basedinference methods such as SINDy resort to least square regression combined with sparsity-enforcingpenalization, such as Lasso. However, we observe that these methods fail to learn sparse modelswhen the input time series are only available in wild type conditions, i.e. without the possibility toplay with combinations of zeroes in the initial conditions. We present a CRN inference algorithmwhich enforces sparsity by inferring reactions in a sequential fashion within a search tree of boundeddepth, ranking the inferred reaction candidates according to the variance of their kinetics on theirsupporting transitions, and re-optimizing the kinetic parameters of the CRN candidates on the wholetrace in a final pass. We show that Reactmine succeeds both on simulation data by retrievinghidden CRNs where SINDy fails, and on two real datasets, one of fluorescence videomicroscopyof cell cycle and circadian clock markers, the other one of biomedical measurements of systemiccircadian biomarkers possibly acting on clock gene expression in peripheral organs, by inferringpreponderant regulations in agreement with previous model-based analyses. The code is available at//gitlab.inria.fr/julmarti/crninf/ together with introductory notebooks.
The nonconvex formulation of matrix completion problem has received significant attention in recent years due to its affordable complexity compared to the convex formulation. Gradient descent (GD) is the simplest yet efficient baseline algorithm for solving nonconvex optimization problems. The success of GD has been witnessed in many different problems in both theory and practice when it is combined with random initialization. However, previous works on matrix completion require either careful initialization or regularizers to prove the convergence of GD. In this work, we study the rank-1 symmetric matrix completion and prove that GD converges to the ground truth when small random initialization is used. We show that in logarithmic amount of iterations, the trajectory enters the region where local convergence occurs. We provide an upper bound on the initialization size that is sufficient to guarantee the convergence and show that a larger initialization can be used as more samples are available. We observe that implicit regularization effect of GD plays a critical role in the analysis, and for the entire trajectory, it prevents each entry from becoming much larger than the others.
For deploying a deep learning model into production, it needs to be both accurate and compact to meet the latency and memory constraints. This usually results in a network that is deep (to ensure performance) and yet thin (to improve computational efficiency). In this paper, we propose an efficient method to train a deep thin network with a theoretic guarantee. Our method is motivated by model compression. It consists of three stages. In the first stage, we sufficiently widen the deep thin network and train it until convergence. In the second stage, we use this well-trained deep wide network to warm up (or initialize) the original deep thin network. This is achieved by letting the thin network imitate the immediate outputs of the wide network from layer to layer. In the last stage, we further fine tune this well initialized deep thin network. The theoretical guarantee is established by using mean field analysis, which shows the advantage of layerwise imitation over traditional training deep thin networks from scratch by backpropagation. We also conduct large-scale empirical experiments to validate our approach. By training with our method, ResNet50 can outperform ResNet101, and BERT_BASE can be comparable with BERT_LARGE, where both the latter models are trained via the standard training procedures as in the literature.
Since hardware resources are limited, the objective of training deep learning models is typically to maximize accuracy subject to the time and memory constraints of training and inference. We study the impact of model size in this setting, focusing on Transformer models for NLP tasks that are limited by compute: self-supervised pretraining and high-resource machine translation. We first show that even though smaller Transformer models execute faster per iteration, wider and deeper models converge in significantly fewer steps. Moreover, this acceleration in convergence typically outpaces the additional computational overhead of using larger models. Therefore, the most compute-efficient training strategy is to counterintuitively train extremely large models but stop after a small number of iterations. This leads to an apparent trade-off between the training efficiency of large Transformer models and the inference efficiency of small Transformer models. However, we show that large models are more robust to compression techniques such as quantization and pruning than small models. Consequently, one can get the best of both worlds: heavily compressed, large models achieve higher accuracy than lightly compressed, small models.