Most inverse problems from physical sciences are formulated as PDE-constrained optimization problems. This involves identifying unknown parameters in equations by optimizing the model to generate PDE solutions that closely match measured data. The formulation is powerful and widely used in many sciences and engineering fields. However, one crucial assumption is that the unknown parameter must be deterministic. In reality, however, many problems are stochastic in nature, and the unknown parameter is random. The challenge then becomes recovering the full distribution of this unknown random parameter. It is a much more complex task. In this paper, we examine this problem in a general setting. In particular, we conceptualize the PDE solver as a push-forward map that pushes the parameter distribution to the generated data distribution. This way, the SDE-constrained optimization translates to minimizing the distance between the generated distribution and the measurement distribution. We then formulate a gradient-flow equation to seek the ground-truth parameter probability distribution. This opens up a new paradigm for extending many techniques in PDE-constrained optimization to that for systems with stochasticity.
Ptychography, a prevalent imaging technique in fields such as biology and optics, poses substantial challenges in its reconstruction process, characterized by nonconvexity and large-scale requirements. This paper presents a novel approach by introducing a class of variational models that incorporate the weighted difference of anisotropic--isotropic total variation. This formulation enables the handling of measurements corrupted by Gaussian or Poisson noise, effectively addressing the nonconvex challenge. To tackle the large-scale nature of the problem, we propose an efficient stochastic alternating direction method of multipliers, which guarantees convergence under mild conditions. Numerical experiments validate the superiority of our approach by demonstrating its capability to successfully reconstruct complex-valued images, especially in recovering the phase components even in the presence of highly corrupted measurements.
Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms have shown tremendous success in simulation environments, but their application to real-world problems faces significant challenges, with safety being a major concern. In particular, enforcing state-wise constraints is essential for many challenging tasks such as autonomous driving and robot manipulation. However, existing safe RL algorithms under the framework of Constrained Markov Decision Process (CMDP) do not consider state-wise constraints. To address this gap, we propose State-wise Constrained Policy Optimization (SCPO), the first general-purpose policy search algorithm for state-wise constrained reinforcement learning. SCPO provides guarantees for state-wise constraint satisfaction in expectation. In particular, we introduce the framework of Maximum Markov Decision Process, and prove that the worst-case safety violation is bounded under SCPO. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on training neural network policies for extensive robot locomotion tasks, where the agent must satisfy a variety of state-wise safety constraints. Our results show that SCPO significantly outperforms existing methods and can handle state-wise constraints in high-dimensional robotics tasks.
Stochastic optimization has found wide applications in minimizing objective functions in machine learning, which motivates a lot of theoretical studies to understand its practical success. Most of existing studies focus on the convergence of optimization errors, while the generalization analysis of stochastic optimization is much lagging behind. This is especially the case for nonconvex and nonsmooth problems often encountered in practice. In this paper, we initialize a systematic stability and generalization analysis of stochastic optimization on nonconvex and nonsmooth problems. We introduce novel algorithmic stability measures and establish their quantitative connection on the gap between population gradients and empirical gradients, which is then further extended to study the gap between the Moreau envelope of the empirical risk and that of the population risk. To our knowledge, these quantitative connection between stability and generalization in terms of either gradients or Moreau envelopes have not been studied in the literature. We introduce a class of sampling-determined algorithms, for which we develop bounds for three stability measures. Finally, we apply these discussions to derive error bounds for stochastic gradient descent and its adaptive variant, where we show how to achieve an implicit regularization by tuning the step sizes and the number of iterations.
A long-standing goal in scene understanding is to obtain interpretable and editable representations that can be directly constructed from a raw monocular RGB-D video, without requiring specialized hardware setup or priors. The problem is significantly more challenging in the presence of multiple moving and/or deforming objects. Traditional methods have approached the setup with a mix of simplifications, scene priors, pretrained templates, or known deformation models. The advent of neural representations, especially neural implicit representations and radiance fields, opens the possibility of end-to-end optimization to collectively capture geometry, appearance, and object motion. However, current approaches produce global scene encoding, assume multiview capture with limited or no motion in the scenes, and do not facilitate easy manipulation beyond novel view synthesis. In this work, we introduce a factored neural scene representation that can directly be learned from a monocular RGB-D video to produce object-level neural presentations with an explicit encoding of object movement (e.g., rigid trajectory) and/or deformations (e.g., nonrigid movement). We evaluate ours against a set of neural approaches on both synthetic and real data to demonstrate that the representation is efficient, interpretable, and editable (e.g., change object trajectory). Code and data are available at //geometry.cs.ucl.ac.uk/projects/2023/factorednerf .
Gaussian processes are a powerful framework for quantifying uncertainty and for sequential decision-making but are limited by the requirement of solving linear systems. In general, this has a cubic cost in dataset size and is sensitive to conditioning. We explore stochastic gradient algorithms as a computationally efficient method of approximately solving these linear systems: we develop low-variance optimization objectives for sampling from the posterior and extend these to inducing points. Counterintuitively, stochastic gradient descent often produces accurate predictions, even in cases where it does not converge quickly to the optimum. We explain this through a spectral characterization of the implicit bias from non-convergence. We show that stochastic gradient descent produces predictive distributions close to the true posterior both in regions with sufficient data coverage, and in regions sufficiently far away from the data. Experimentally, stochastic gradient descent achieves state-of-the-art performance on sufficiently large-scale or ill-conditioned regression tasks. Its uncertainty estimates match the performance of significantly more expensive baselines on a large-scale Bayesian~optimization~task.
We establish globally optimal solutions to a class of fractional optimization problems on a class of constraint sets, whose key characteristics are as follows: 1) The numerator and the denominator of the objective function are both convex, semi-algebraic, Lipschitz continuous and differentiable with Lipschitz continuous gradients on the constraint set. 2) The constraint set is closed, convex and semi-algebraic. Compared with Dinkelbach's approach, our novelty falls into the following aspects: 1) Dinkelbach's has to solve a concave maximization problem in each iteration, which is nontrivial to obtain a solution, while ours only needs to conduct one proximity gradient operation in each iteration. 2) Dinkelbach's requires at least one nonnegative point for the numerator to proceed the algorithm, but ours does not, which is available to a much wider class of situations. 3) Dinkelbach's requires a closed and bounded constraint set, while ours only needs the closedness but not necessarily the boundedness. Therefore, our approach is viable for many more practical models, like optimizing the Sharpe ratio (SR) or the Information ratio in mathematical finance. Numerical experiments show that our approach achieves the ground-truth solutions in two simple examples. For real-world financial data, it outperforms several existing approaches for SR maximization.
Large-scale administrative or observational datasets are increasingly used to inform decision making. While this effort aims to ground policy in real-world evidence, challenges have arise as that selection bias and other forms of distribution shift often plague observational data. Previous attempts to provide robust inferences have given guarantees depending on a user-specified amount of possible distribution shift (e.g., the maximum KL divergence between the observed and target distributions). However, decision makers will often have additional knowledge about the target distribution which constrains the kind of shifts which are possible. To leverage such information, we proposed a framework that enables statistical inference in the presence of distribution shifts which obey user-specified constraints in the form of functions whose expectation is known under the target distribution. The output is high-probability bounds on the value an estimand takes on the target distribution. Hence, our method leverages domain knowledge in order to partially identify a wide class of estimands. We analyze the computational and statistical properties of methods to estimate these bounds, and show that our method can produce informative bounds on a variety of simulated and semisynthetic tasks.
Sparse functional/longitudinal data have attracted widespread interest due to the prevalence of such data in social and life sciences. A prominent scenario where such data are routinely encountered are accelerated longitudinal studies, where subjects are enrolled in the study at a random time and are only tracked for a short amount of time relative to the domain of interest. The statistical analysis of such functional snippets is challenging since information for the far-off-diagonal regions of the covariance structure is missing. Our main methodological contribution is to address this challenge by bypassing covariance estimation and instead modeling the underlying process as the solution of a data-adaptive stochastic differential equation. Taking advantage of the interface between Gaussian functional data and stochastic differential equations makes it possible to efficiently reconstruct the target process by estimating its dynamic distribution. The proposed approach allows one to consistently recover forward sample paths from functional snippets at the subject level. We establish the existence and uniqueness of the solution to the proposed data-driven stochastic differential equation and derive rates of convergence for the corresponding estimators. The finite-sample performance is demonstrated with simulation studies and functional snippets arising from a growth study and spinal bone mineral density data.
The conjoining of dynamical systems and deep learning has become a topic of great interest. In particular, neural differential equations (NDEs) demonstrate that neural networks and differential equation are two sides of the same coin. Traditional parameterised differential equations are a special case. Many popular neural network architectures, such as residual networks and recurrent networks, are discretisations. NDEs are suitable for tackling generative problems, dynamical systems, and time series (particularly in physics, finance, ...) and are thus of interest to both modern machine learning and traditional mathematical modelling. NDEs offer high-capacity function approximation, strong priors on model space, the ability to handle irregular data, memory efficiency, and a wealth of available theory on both sides. This doctoral thesis provides an in-depth survey of the field. Topics include: neural ordinary differential equations (e.g. for hybrid neural/mechanistic modelling of physical systems); neural controlled differential equations (e.g. for learning functions of irregular time series); and neural stochastic differential equations (e.g. to produce generative models capable of representing complex stochastic dynamics, or sampling from complex high-dimensional distributions). Further topics include: numerical methods for NDEs (e.g. reversible differential equations solvers, backpropagation through differential equations, Brownian reconstruction); symbolic regression for dynamical systems (e.g. via regularised evolution); and deep implicit models (e.g. deep equilibrium models, differentiable optimisation). We anticipate this thesis will be of interest to anyone interested in the marriage of deep learning with dynamical systems, and hope it will provide a useful reference for the current state of the art.
This manuscript portrays optimization as a process. In many practical applications the environment is so complex that it is infeasible to lay out a comprehensive theoretical model and use classical algorithmic theory and mathematical optimization. It is necessary as well as beneficial to take a robust approach, by applying an optimization method that learns as one goes along, learning from experience as more aspects of the problem are observed. This view of optimization as a process has become prominent in varied fields and has led to some spectacular success in modeling and systems that are now part of our daily lives.