Modeling the subgrid-scale dynamics of reduced models is a long standing open problem that finds application in ocean, atmosphere and climate predictions where direct numerical simulation (DNS) is impossible. While neural networks (NNs) have already been applied to a range of three-dimensional problems with success, the backward energy transfer of two-dimensional flows still remains a stability issue for trained models. We show that learning a model jointly with the dynamical solver and a meaningful $\textit{a posteriori}$-based loss function lead to stable and realistic simulations when applied to quasi-geostrophic turbulence.
We study nonparametric Bayesian models for reversible multi-dimensional diffusions with periodic drift. For continuous observation paths, reversibility is exploited to prove a general posterior contraction rate theorem for the drift gradient vector field under approximation-theoretic conditions on the induced prior for the invariant measure. The general theorem is applied to Gaussian priors and $p$-exponential priors, which are shown to converge to the truth at the minimax optimal rate over Sobolev smoothness classes in any dimension
The principle of least action is one of the most fundamental physical principle. It says that among all possible motions connecting two points in a phase space, the system will exhibit those motions which extremise an action functional. Many qualitative features of dynamical systems, such as the presence of conservation laws and energy balance equations, are related to the existence of an action functional. Incorporating variational structure into learning algorithms for dynamical systems is, therefore, crucial in order to make sure that the learned model shares important features with the exact physical system. In this paper we show how to incorporate variational principles into trajectory predictions of learned dynamical systems. The novelty of this work is that (1) our technique relies only on discrete position data of observed trajectories. Velocities or conjugate momenta do {\em not} need to be observed or approximated and {\em no} prior knowledge about the form of the variational principle is assumed. Instead, they are recovered using backward error analysis. (2) Moreover, our technique compensates discretisation errors when trajectories are computed from the learned system. This is important when moderate to large step-sizes are used and high accuracy is required. For this, we introduce and rigorously analyse the concept of inverse modified Lagrangians by developing an inverse version of variational backward error analysis. (3) Finally, we introduce a method to perform system identification from position observations only, based on variational backward error analysis.
We construct a space-time parallel method for solving parabolic partial differential equations by coupling the Parareal algorithm in time with overlapping domain decomposition in space. The goal is to obtain a discretization consisting of "local" problems that can be solved on parallel computers efficiently. However, this introduces significant sources of error that must be evaluated. Reformulating the original Parareal algorithm as a variational method and implementing a finite element discretization in space enables an adjoint-based a posteriori error analysis to be performed. Through an appropriate choice of adjoint problems and residuals the error analysis distinguishes between errors arising due to the temporal and spatial discretizations, as well as between the errors arising due to incomplete Parareal iterations and incomplete iterations of the domain decomposition solver. We first develop an error analysis for the Parareal method applied to parabolic partial differential equations, and then refine this analysis to the case where the associated spatial problems are solved using overlapping domain decomposition. These constitute our Time Parallel Algorithm (TPA) and Space-Time Parallel Algorithm (STPA) respectively. Numerical experiments demonstrate the accuracy of the estimator for both algorithms and the iterations between distinct components of the error.
The goal of this paper is to investigate a control theoretic analysis of linear stochastic iterative algorithm and temporal difference (TD) learning. TD-learning is a linear stochastic iterative algorithm to estimate the value function of a given policy for a Markov decision process, which is one of the most popular and fundamental reinforcement learning algorithms. While there has been a series of successful works in theoretical analysis of TD-learning, it was not until recently that researchers found some guarantees on its statistical efficiency. In this paper, we propose a control theoretic finite-time analysis TD-learning, which exploits standard notions in linear system control communities. Therefore, the proposed work provides additional insights on TD-learning and reinforcement learning with simple concepts and analysis tools in control theory.
We study the dynamics of a neural network in function space when optimizing the mean squared error via gradient flow. We show that in the underparameterized regime the network learns eigenfunctions of an integral operator $T_{K^\infty}$ determined by the Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK) at rates corresponding to their eigenvalues. For example, for uniformly distributed data on the sphere $S^{d - 1}$ and rotation invariant weight distributions, the eigenfunctions of $T_{K^\infty}$ are the spherical harmonics. Our results can be understood as describing a spectral bias in the underparameterized regime. The proofs use the concept of "Damped Deviations", where deviations of the NTK matter less for eigendirections with large eigenvalues due to the occurence of a damping factor. Aside from the underparameterized regime, the damped deviations point-of-view can be used to track the dynamics of the empirical risk in the overparameterized setting, allowing us to extend certain results in the literature. We conclude that damped deviations offers a simple and unifying perspective of the dynamics when optimizing the squared error.
In this paper, we study the learning of safe policies in the setting of reinforcement learning problems. This is, we aim to control a Markov Decision Process (MDP) of which we do not know the transition probabilities, but we have access to sample trajectories through experience. We define safety as the agent remaining in a desired safe set with high probability during the operation time. We therefore consider a constrained MDP where the constraints are probabilistic. Since there is no straightforward way to optimize the policy with respect to the probabilistic constraint in a reinforcement learning framework, we propose an ergodic relaxation of the problem. The advantages of the proposed relaxation are threefold. (i) The safety guarantees are maintained in the case of episodic tasks and they are kept up to a given time horizon for continuing tasks. (ii) The constrained optimization problem despite its non-convexity has arbitrarily small duality gap if the parametrization of the policy is rich enough. (iii) The gradients of the Lagrangian associated with the safe-learning problem can be easily computed using standard policy gradient results and stochastic approximation tools. Leveraging these advantages, we establish that primal-dual algorithms are able to find policies that are safe and optimal. We test the proposed approach in a navigation task in a continuous domain. The numerical results show that our algorithm is capable of dynamically adapting the policy to the environment and the required safety levels.
The discrepant posterior phenomenon (DPP) is a counter-intuitive phenomenon that can frequently occur in a Bayesian analysis of multivariate parameters. It refers to the phenomenon that a parameter estimate based on a posterior is more extreme than both of those inferred based on either the prior or the likelihood alone. Inferential claims that exhibit DPP defy the common intuition that the posterior is a prior-data compromise, and the phenomenon can be surprisingly ubiquitous in well-behaved Bayesian models. In this paper we revisit this phenomenon and, using point estimation as an example, derive conditions under which the DPP occurs in Bayesian models with exponential quadratic likelihoods and conjugate multivariate Gaussian priors. The family of exponential quadratic likelihood models includes Gaussian models and those models with local asymptotic normality property. We provide an intuitive geometric interpretation of the phenomenon and show that there exists a nontrivial space of marginal directions such that the DPP occurs. We further relate the phenomenon to the Simpson's paradox and discover their deep-rooted connection that is associated with marginalization. We also draw connections with Bayesian computational algorithms when difficult geometry exists. Our discovery demonstrates that DPP is more prevalent than previously understood and anticipated. Theoretical results are complemented by numerical illustrations. Scenarios covered in this study have implications for parameterization, sensitivity analysis, and prior choice for Bayesian modeling.
We study the offline meta-reinforcement learning (OMRL) problem, a paradigm which enables reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms to quickly adapt to unseen tasks without any interactions with the environments, making RL truly practical in many real-world applications. This problem is still not fully understood, for which two major challenges need to be addressed. First, offline RL usually suffers from bootstrapping errors of out-of-distribution state-actions which leads to divergence of value functions. Second, meta-RL requires efficient and robust task inference learned jointly with control policy. In this work, we enforce behavior regularization on learned policy as a general approach to offline RL, combined with a deterministic context encoder for efficient task inference. We propose a novel negative-power distance metric on bounded context embedding space, whose gradients propagation is detached from the Bellman backup. We provide analysis and insight showing that some simple design choices can yield substantial improvements over recent approaches involving meta-RL and distance metric learning. To the best of our knowledge, our method is the first model-free and end-to-end OMRL algorithm, which is computationally efficient and demonstrated to outperform prior algorithms on several meta-RL benchmarks.
Since deep neural networks were developed, they have made huge contributions to everyday lives. Machine learning provides more rational advice than humans are capable of in almost every aspect of daily life. However, despite this achievement, the design and training of neural networks are still challenging and unpredictable procedures. To lower the technical thresholds for common users, automated hyper-parameter optimization (HPO) has become a popular topic in both academic and industrial areas. This paper provides a review of the most essential topics on HPO. The first section introduces the key hyper-parameters related to model training and structure, and discusses their importance and methods to define the value range. Then, the research focuses on major optimization algorithms and their applicability, covering their efficiency and accuracy especially for deep learning networks. This study next reviews major services and toolkits for HPO, comparing their support for state-of-the-art searching algorithms, feasibility with major deep learning frameworks, and extensibility for new modules designed by users. The paper concludes with problems that exist when HPO is applied to deep learning, a comparison between optimization algorithms, and prominent approaches for model evaluation with limited computational resources.
Most policy search algorithms require thousands of training episodes to find an effective policy, which is often infeasible with a physical robot. This survey article focuses on the extreme other end of the spectrum: how can a robot adapt with only a handful of trials (a dozen) and a few minutes? By analogy with the word "big-data", we refer to this challenge as "micro-data reinforcement learning". We show that a first strategy is to leverage prior knowledge on the policy structure (e.g., dynamic movement primitives), on the policy parameters (e.g., demonstrations), or on the dynamics (e.g., simulators). A second strategy is to create data-driven surrogate models of the expected reward (e.g., Bayesian optimization) or the dynamical model (e.g., model-based policy search), so that the policy optimizer queries the model instead of the real system. Overall, all successful micro-data algorithms combine these two strategies by varying the kind of model and prior knowledge. The current scientific challenges essentially revolve around scaling up to complex robots (e.g., humanoids), designing generic priors, and optimizing the computing time.