Nonlinear extensions to the active subspaces method have brought remarkable results for dimension reduction in the parameter space and response surface design. We further develop a kernel-based nonlinear method. In particular we introduce it in a broader mathematical framework that contemplates also the reduction in parameter space of multivariate objective functions. The implementation is thoroughly discussed and tested on more challenging benchmarks than the ones already present in the literature, for which dimension reduction with active subspaces produces already good results. Finally, we show a whole pipeline for the design of response surfaces with the new methodology in the context of a parametric CFD application solved with the Discontinuous Galerkin method.
Surface defect inspection is of great importance for industrial manufacture and production. Though defect inspection methods based on deep learning have made significant progress, there are still some challenges for these methods, such as indistinguishable weak defects and defect-like interference in the background. To address these issues, we propose a transformer network with multi-stage CNN (Convolutional Neural Network) feature injection for surface defect segmentation, which is a UNet-like structure named CINFormer. CINFormer presents a simple yet effective feature integration mechanism that injects the multi-level CNN features of the input image into different stages of the transformer network in the encoder. This can maintain the merit of CNN capturing detailed features and that of transformer depressing noises in the background, which facilitates accurate defect detection. In addition, CINFormer presents a Top-K self-attention module to focus on tokens with more important information about the defects, so as to further reduce the impact of the redundant background. Extensive experiments conducted on the surface defect datasets DAGM 2007, Magnetic tile, and NEU show that the proposed CINFormer achieves state-of-the-art performance in defect detection.
Contract review is an essential step in construction projects to prevent potential losses. However, the current methods for reviewing construction contracts lack effectiveness and reliability, leading to time-consuming and error-prone processes. While large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in revolutionizing natural language processing (NLP) tasks, they struggle with domain-specific knowledge and addressing specialized issues. This paper presents a novel approach that leverages LLMs with construction contract knowledge to emulate the process of contract review by human experts. Our tuning-free approach incorporates construction contract domain knowledge to enhance language models for identifying construction contract risks. The use of a natural language when building the domain knowledge base facilitates practical implementation. We evaluated our method on real construction contracts and achieved solid performance. Additionally, we investigated how large language models employ logical thinking during the task and provide insights and recommendations for future research.
We consider a one-dimensional singularly perturbed 4th order problem with the additional feature of a shift term. An expansion into a smooth term, boundary layers and an inner layer yields a formal solution decomposition, and together with a stability result we have estimates for the subsequent numerical analysis. With classical layer adapted meshes we present a numerical method, that achieves supercloseness and optimal convergence orders in the associated energy norm. We also consider coarser meshes in view of the weak layers. Some numerical examples conclude the paper and support the theory.
Information inequalities appear in many database applications such as query output size bounds, query containment, and implication between data dependencies. Recently Khamis et al. proposed to study the algorithmic aspects of information inequalities, including the information inequality problem: decide whether a linear inequality over entropies of random variables is valid. While the decidability of this problem is a major open question, applications often involve only inequalities that adhere to specific syntactic forms linked to useful semantic invariance properties. This paper studies the information inequality problem in different syntactic and semantic scenarios that arise from database applications. Focusing on the boundary between tractability and intractability, we show that the information inequality problem is coNP-complete if restricted to normal polymatroids, and in polynomial time if relaxed to monotone functions. We also examine syntactic restrictions related to query output size bounds, and provide an alternative proof, through monotone functions, for the polynomial-time computability of the entropic bound over simple sets of degree constraints.
We make two contributions to the Isolation Forest method for anomaly and outlier detection. The first contribution is an information-theoretically motivated generalisation of the score function that is used to aggregate the scores across random tree estimators. This generalisation allows one to take into account not just the ensemble average across trees but instead the whole distribution. The second contribution is an alternative scoring function at the level of the individual tree estimator, in which we replace the depth-based scoring of the Isolation Forest with one based on hyper-volumes associated to an isolation tree's leaf nodes. We motivate the use of both of these methods on generated data and also evaluate them on 34 datasets from the recent and exhaustive ``ADBench'' benchmark, finding significant improvement over the standard isolation forest for both variants on some datasets and improvement on average across all datasets for one of the two variants. The code to reproduce our results is made available as part of the submission.
Ordinary state-based peridynamic (OSB-PD) models have an unparalleled capability to simulate crack propagation phenomena in solids with arbitrary Poisson's ratio. However, their non-locality also leads to prohibitively high computational cost. In this paper, a fast solution scheme for OSB-PD models based on matrix operation is introduced, with which, the graphics processing units (GPUs) are used to accelerate the computation. For the purpose of comparison and verification, a commonly used solution scheme based on loop operation is also presented. An in-house software is developed in MATLAB. Firstly, the vibration of a cantilever beam is solved for validating the loop- and matrix-based schemes by comparing the numerical solutions to those produced by a FEM software. Subsequently, two typical dynamic crack propagation problems are simulated to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed schemes in solving dynamic fracture problems. Finally, the simulation of the Brokenshire torsion experiment is carried out by using the matrix-based scheme, and the similarity in the shapes of the experimental and numerical broken specimens further demonstrates the ability of the proposed approach to deal with 3D non-planar fracture problems. In addition, the speed-up of the matrix-based scheme with respect to the loop-based scheme and the performance of the GPU acceleration are investigated. The results emphasize the high computational efficiency of the matrix-based implementation scheme.
We examine a stochastic formulation for data-driven optimization wherein the decision-maker is not privy to the true distribution, but has knowledge that it lies in some hypothesis set and possesses a historical data set, from which information about it can be gleaned. We define a prescriptive solution as a decision rule mapping such a data set to decisions. As there does not exist prescriptive solutions that are generalizable over the entire hypothesis set, we define out-of-sample optimality as a local average over a neighbourhood of hypotheses, and averaged over the sampling distribution. We prove sufficient conditions for local out-of-sample optimality, which reduces to functions of the sufficient statistic of the hypothesis family. We present an optimization problem that would solve for such an out-of-sample optimal solution, and does so efficiently by a combination of sampling and bisection search algorithms. Finally, we illustrate our model on the newsvendor model, and find strong performance when compared against alternatives in the literature. There are potential implications of our research on end-to-end learning and Bayesian optimization.
Expecting intelligent machines to efficiently work in real world requires a new method to understand unstructured information in unknown environments with good accuracy, scalability and generalization, like human. Here, a memristive neural computing based perceptual signal differential processing and learning method for intelligent machines is presented, via extracting main features of environmental information and applying associated encoded stimuli to memristors, we successfully obtain human-like ability in processing unstructured environmental information, such as amplification (>720%) and adaptation (<50%) of mechanical stimuli. The method also exhibits good scalability and generalization, validated in two typical applications of intelligent machines: object grasping and autonomous driving. In the former, a robot hand experimentally realizes safe and stable grasping, through learning unknown object features (e.g., sharp corner and smooth surface) with a single memristor in 1 ms. In the latter, the decision-making information of 10 unstructured environments in autonomous driving (e.g., overtaking cars, pedestrians) are accurately (94%) extracted with a 40x25 memristor array. By mimicking the intrinsic nature of human low-level perception mechanisms in electronic memristive neural circuits, the proposed method is adaptable to diverse sensing technologies, helping intelligent machines to generate smart high-level decisions in real world.
We propose an approach to compute inner and outer-approximations of the sets of values satisfying constraints expressed as arbitrarily quantified formulas. Such formulas arise for instance when specifying important problems in control such as robustness, motion planning or controllers comparison. We propose an interval-based method which allows for tractable but tight approximations. We demonstrate its applicability through a series of examples and benchmarks using a prototype implementation.
In recent years, object detection has experienced impressive progress. Despite these improvements, there is still a significant gap in the performance between the detection of small and large objects. We analyze the current state-of-the-art model, Mask-RCNN, on a challenging dataset, MS COCO. We show that the overlap between small ground-truth objects and the predicted anchors is much lower than the expected IoU threshold. We conjecture this is due to two factors; (1) only a few images are containing small objects, and (2) small objects do not appear enough even within each image containing them. We thus propose to oversample those images with small objects and augment each of those images by copy-pasting small objects many times. It allows us to trade off the quality of the detector on large objects with that on small objects. We evaluate different pasting augmentation strategies, and ultimately, we achieve 9.7\% relative improvement on the instance segmentation and 7.1\% on the object detection of small objects, compared to the current state of the art method on MS COCO.