Recently, the generalized primal-dual (GPD) method was developed for saddle-point problems (SPPs) with a linear coupling operator. However, the coupling operator in many engineering applications is nonlinear. In this letter, we propose a generalized primal-dual correction method (GPD-CM) to handle SPPs with a nonlinear coupling operator. To achieve this, we customize the proximal matrix and corrective matrix by adjusting the values of regularization factors. By the unified framework, the convergence of GPD-CM is directly obtained. Numerical results on a SPP with an exponential coupling operator support theoretical analysis.
We present Direct Reward Fine-Tuning (DRaFT), a simple and effective method for fine-tuning diffusion models to maximize differentiable reward functions, such as scores from human preference models. We first show that it is possible to backpropagate the reward function gradient through the full sampling procedure, and that doing so achieves strong performance on a variety of rewards, outperforming reinforcement learning-based approaches. We then propose more efficient variants of DRaFT: DRaFT-K, which truncates backpropagation to only the last K steps of sampling, and DRaFT-LV, which obtains lower-variance gradient estimates for the case when K=1. We show that our methods work well for a variety of reward functions and can be used to substantially improve the aesthetic quality of images generated by Stable Diffusion 1.4. Finally, we draw connections between our approach and prior work, providing a unifying perspective on the design space of gradient-based fine-tuning algorithms.
Despite the promising progress in multi-modal tasks, current large multi-modal models (LMMs) are prone to hallucinating inconsistent descriptions with respect to the associated image and human instructions. This paper addresses this issue by introducing the first large and diverse visual instruction tuning dataset, named Large-scale Robust Visual (LRV)-Instruction. Our dataset comprises 400k visual instructions generated by GPT4, covering 16 vision-and-language tasks with open-ended instructions and answers. Unlike existing studies that primarily focus on positive instruction samples, we design LRV-Instruction to include both positive and negative instructions for more robust visual instruction tuning. Our negative instructions are designed at three semantic levels: (i) Nonexistent Object Manipulation, (ii) Existent Object Manipulation and (iii) Knowledge Manipulation. To efficiently measure the hallucination generated by LMMs, we propose GPT4-Assisted Visual Instruction Evaluation (GAVIE), a stable approach to evaluate visual instruction tuning like human experts. GAVIE does not require human-annotated groundtruth answers and can adapt to diverse instruction formats. We conduct comprehensive experiments to investigate the hallucination of LMMs. Our results demonstrate existing LMMs exhibit significant hallucinations when presented with our negative instructions, particularly Existent Object and Knowledge Manipulation instructions. Moreover, we successfully mitigate hallucination by finetuning MiniGPT4 and mPLUG-Owl on LRV-Instruction while improving performance on several public datasets compared to state-of-the-art methods. Additionally, we observed that a balanced ratio of positive and negative instances in the training data leads to a more robust model.
Bayesian approaches are one of the primary methodologies to tackle an inverse problem in high dimensions. Such an inverse problem arises in hydrology to infer the permeability field given flow data in a porous media. It is common practice to decompose the unknown field into some basis and infer the decomposition parameters instead of directly inferring the unknown. Given the multiscale nature of permeability fields, wavelets are a natural choice for parameterizing them. This study uses a Bayesian approach to incorporate the statistical sparsity that characterizes discrete wavelet coefficients. First, we impose a prior distribution incorporating the hierarchical structure of the wavelet coefficient and smoothness of reconstruction via scale-dependent hyperparameters. Then, Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) method adaptively explores the posterior density on different scales, followed by model selection based on Bayes Factors. Finally, the permeability field is reconstructed from the coefficients using a multiresolution approach based on second-generation wavelets. Here, observations from the pressure sensor grid network are computed via Multilevel Adaptive Wavelet Collocation Method (AWCM). Results highlight the importance of prior modeling on parameter estimation in the inverse problem.
Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting in large language models (LLMs) has shown promising performance on mathematical reasoning tasks. Recently, Self-Consistency samples a diverse set of reasoning chains with different answers and chooses the answer by majority voting. Though effective, its performance cannot be further improved by sampling more reasoning chains. To address this problem, we propose to integrate backward reasoning into answer verification. We first mask a number in the question by ${\bf x}$. The LLM is then asked to predict the masked number with a candidate answer $A$ embedded in the template: ``If we know the answer to the above question is $\{A\}$, what is the value of unknown variable ${\bf x}$?'' The LLM is expected to predict the masked number successfully if the provided candidate answer is correct. To further improve performance, we propose FOBAR (FOrward-BAckward Reasoning) to combine forward and backward reasoning for verifying candidate answers. Experiments are performed on six standard mathematical data sets and three LLMs (text-davinci-003, GPT-3.5-Turbo, GPT-4). Results show that FOBAR achieves state-of-the-art performance. In particular, FOBAR outperforms Self-Consistency which uses forward reasoning alone, demonstrating that combining forward and forward reasoning is better. It also outperforms existing verification methods, verifying the effectiveness of using the simple template in backward reasoning and the proposed combination.
The accurate representation and prediction of physical phenomena through numerical computer codes remains to be a vast and intricate interdisciplinary topic of research. Especially within the last decades, there has been a considerable push toward high performance numerical schemes to solve partial differential equations (PDEs) from the applied mathematics and numerics community. The resulting landscape of choices regarding numerical schemes for a given system of PDEs can thus easily appear daunting for an application expert that is familiar with the relevant physics, but not necessarily with the numerics. Bespoke high performance schemes in particular pose a substantial hurdle for domain scientists regarding their theory and implementation. Here, we propose a unifying scheme for grid based approximation methods to address this issue. We introduce some well defined restrictions to systematically guide an application expert through the process of classifying a given multiphysics problem, identifying suitable numerical schemes and implementing them. We introduce a fixed set of input parameters, amongst them for example the governing equations and the hardware configuration. This method not only helps to identify and assemble suitable schemes, but enables the unique combination of multiple methods on a per field basis. We exemplarily demonstrate this process and its effectiveness using different approaches and systematically show how one should exploit some given properties of a PDE problem to arrive at an efficient compound discretisation.
In an era where scientific experimentation is often costly, multi-fidelity emulation provides a powerful tool for predictive scientific computing. While there has been notable work on multi-fidelity modeling, existing models do not incorporate an important "conglomerate" property of multi-fidelity simulators, where the accuracies of different simulator components are controlled by different fidelity parameters. Such conglomerate simulators are widely encountered in complex nuclear physics and astrophysics applications. We thus propose a new CONglomerate multi-FIdelity Gaussian process (CONFIG) model, which embeds this conglomerate structure within a novel non-stationary covariance function. We show that the proposed CONFIG model can capture prior knowledge on the numerical convergence of conglomerate simulators, which allows for cost-efficient emulation of multi-fidelity systems. We demonstrate the improved predictive performance of CONFIG over state-of-the-art models in a suite of numerical experiments and two applications, the first for emulation of cantilever beam deflection and the second for emulating the evolution of the quark-gluon plasma, which was theorized to have filled the Universe shortly after the Big Bang.
We present a method for synthesizing dynamic, reduced-order output-feedback polynomial control policies for control-affine nonlinear systems which guarantees runtime stability to a goal state, when using visual observations and a learned perception module in the feedback control loop. We leverage Lyapunov analysis to formulate the problem of synthesizing such policies. This problem is nonconvex in the policy parameters and the Lyapunov function that is used to prove the stability of the policy. To solve this problem approximately, we propose two approaches: the first solves a sequence of sum-of-squares optimization problems to iteratively improve a policy which is provably-stable by construction, while the second directly performs gradient-based optimization on the parameters of the polynomial policy, and its closed-loop stability is verified a posteriori. We extend our approach to provide stability guarantees in the presence of observation noise, which realistically arises due to errors in the learned perception module. We evaluate our approach on several underactuated nonlinear systems, including pendula and quadrotors, showing that our guarantees translate to empirical stability when controlling these systems from images, while baseline approaches can fail to reliably stabilize the system.
Parameter inference for dynamical models of (bio)physical systems remains a challenging problem. Intractable gradients, high-dimensional spaces, and non-linear model functions are typically problematic without large computational budgets. A recent body of work in that area has focused on Bayesian inference methods, which consider parameters under their statistical distributions and therefore, do not derive point estimates of optimal parameter values. Here we propose a new metaheuristic that drives dimensionality reductions from feature-informed transformations (DR-FFIT) to address these bottlenecks. DR-FFIT implements an efficient sampling strategy that facilitates a gradient-free parameter search in high-dimensional spaces. We use artificial neural networks to obtain differentiable proxies for the model's features of interest. The resulting gradients enable the estimation of a local active subspace of the model within a defined sampling region. This approach enables efficient dimensionality reductions of highly non-linear search spaces at a low computational cost. Our test data show that DR-FFIT boosts the performances of random-search and simulated-annealing against well-established metaheuristics, and improves the goodness-of-fit of the model, all within contained run-time costs.
Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (QUBO) is a generic technique to model various NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems in the form of binary variables. The Hamiltonian function is often used to formulate QUBO problems where it is used as the objective function in the context of optimization. Recently, PI-GNN, a generic scalable framework, has been proposed to address the Combinatorial Optimization (CO) problems over graphs based on a simple Graph Neural Network (GNN) architecture. Their novel contribution was a generic QUBO-formulated Hamiltonian-inspired loss function that was optimized using GNN. In this study, we address a crucial issue related to the aforementioned setup especially observed in denser graphs. The reinforcement learning-based paradigm has also been widely used to address numerous CO problems. Here we also formulate and empirically evaluate the compatibility of the QUBO-formulated Hamiltonian as the generic reward function in the Reinforcement Learning paradigm to directly integrate the actual node projection status during training as the form of rewards. In our experiments, we observed up to 44% improvement in the RL-based setup compared to the PI-GNN algorithm. Our implementation can be found in //github.com/rizveeredwan/learning-graph-structure.
We construct and analyze a multiscale finite element method for an elliptic distributed optimal control problem with pointwise control constraints, where the state equation has rough coefficients. We show that the performance of the multiscale finite element method is similar to the performance of standard finite element methods for smooth problems and present corroborating numerical results.