Use of generative models and deep learning for physics-based systems is currently dominated by the task of emulation. However, the remarkable flexibility offered by data-driven architectures would suggest to extend this representation to other aspects of system synthesis including model inversion and identifiability. We introduce inVAErt (pronounced \emph{invert}) networks, a comprehensive framework for data-driven analysis and synthesis of parametric physical systems which uses a deterministic encoder and decoder to represent the forward and inverse solution maps, normalizing flow to capture the probabilistic distribution of system outputs, and a variational encoder designed to learn a compact latent representation for the lack of bijectivity between inputs and outputs. We formally investigate the selection of penalty coefficients in the loss function and strategies for latent space sampling, since we find that these significantly affect both training and testing performance. We validate our framework through extensive numerical examples, including simple linear, nonlinear, and periodic maps, dynamical systems, and spatio-temporal PDEs.
Many applications in computational physics involve approximating problems with microstructure, characterized by multiple spatial scales in their data. However, these numerical solutions are often computationally expensive due to the need to capture fine details at small scales. As a result, simulating such phenomena becomes unaffordable for many-query applications, such as parametrized systems with multiple scale-dependent features. Traditional projection-based reduced order models (ROMs) fail to resolve these issues, even for second-order elliptic PDEs commonly found in engineering applications. To address this, we propose an alternative nonintrusive strategy to build a ROM, that combines classical proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) with a suitable neural network (NN) model to account for the small scales. Specifically, we employ sparse mesh-informed neural networks (MINNs), which handle both spatial dependencies in the solutions and model parameters simultaneously. We evaluate the performance of this strategy on benchmark problems and then apply it to approximate a real-life problem involving the impact of microcirculation in transport phenomena through the tissue microenvironment.
This paper aims at the algorithmic/theoretical core of reinforcement learning (RL) by introducing the novel class of proximal Bellman mappings. These mappings are defined in reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces (RKHSs), to benefit from the rich approximation properties and inner product of RKHSs, they are shown to belong to the powerful Hilbertian family of (firmly) nonexpansive mappings, regardless of the values of their discount factors, and possess ample degrees of design freedom to even reproduce attributes of the classical Bellman mappings and to pave the way for novel RL designs. An approximate policy-iteration scheme is built on the proposed class of mappings to solve the problem of selecting online, at every time instance, the "optimal" exponent $p$ in a $p$-norm loss to combat outliers in linear adaptive filtering, without training data and any knowledge on the statistical properties of the outliers. Numerical tests on synthetic data showcase the superior performance of the proposed framework over several non-RL and kernel-based RL schemes.
We study scalable machine learning models for full event reconstruction in high-energy electron-positron collisions based on a highly granular detector simulation. Particle-flow (PF) reconstruction can be formulated as a supervised learning task using tracks and calorimeter clusters or hits. We compare a graph neural network and kernel-based transformer and demonstrate that both avoid quadratic memory allocation and computational cost while achieving realistic PF reconstruction. We show that hyperparameter tuning on a supercomputer significantly improves the physics performance of the models. We also demonstrate that the resulting model is highly portable across hardware processors, supporting Nvidia, AMD, and Intel Habana cards. Finally, we demonstrate that the model can be trained on highly granular inputs consisting of tracks and calorimeter hits, resulting in a competitive physics performance with the baseline. Datasets and software to reproduce the studies are published following the findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR) principles.
Finding the optimal model complexity that minimizes the generalization error (GE) is a key issue of machine learning. For the conventional supervised learning, this task typically involves the bias-variance tradeoff: lowering the bias by making the model more complex entails an increase in the variance. Meanwhile, little has been studied about whether the same tradeoff exists for unsupervised learning. In this study, we propose that unsupervised learning generally exhibits a two-component tradeoff of the GE, namely the model error and the data error -- using a more complex model reduces the model error at the cost of the data error, with the data error playing a more significant role for a smaller training dataset. This is corroborated by training the restricted Boltzmann machine to generate the configurations of the two-dimensional Ising model at a given temperature and the totally asymmetric simple exclusion process with given entry and exit rates. Our results also indicate that the optimal model tends to be more complex when the data to be learned are more complex.
In-context learning, i.e., learning from in-context samples, is an impressive ability of Transformer. However, the mechanism driving the in-context learning is not yet fully understood. In this study, we aim to investigate from an underexplored perspective of representation learning. The representation is more complex for in-context learning senario, where the representation can be impacted by both model weights and in-context samples. We refer the above two conceptually aspects of representation as in-weight component and in-context component, respectively. To study how the two components affect in-context learning capabilities, we construct a novel synthetic task, making it possible to device two probes, in-weights probe and in-context probe, to evaluate the two components, respectively. We demonstrate that the goodness of in-context component is highly related to the in-context learning performance, which indicates the entanglement between in-context learning and representation learning. Furthermore, we find that a good in-weights component can actually benefit the learning of the in-context component, indicating that in-weights learning should be the foundation of in-context learning. To further understand the the in-context learning mechanism and importance of the in-weights component, we proof by construction that a simple Transformer, which uses pattern matching and copy-past mechanism to perform in-context learning, can match the in-context learning performance with more complex, best tuned Transformer under the perfect in-weights component assumption. In short, those discoveries from representation learning perspective shed light on new approaches to improve the in-context capacity.
The design dataset is the backbone of data-driven design. Ideally, the dataset should be fairly distributed in both shape and property spaces to efficiently explore the underlying relationship. However, the classical experimental design focuses on shape diversity and thus yields biased exploration in the property space. Recently developed methods either conduct subset selection from a large dataset or employ assumptions with severe limitations. In this paper, fairness- and uncertainty-aware data generation (FairGen) is proposed to actively detect and generate missing properties starting from a small dataset. At each iteration, its coverage module computes the data coverage to guide the selection of the target properties. The uncertainty module ensures that the generative model can make certain and thus accurate shape predictions. Integrating the two modules, Bayesian optimization determines the target properties, which are thereafter fed into the generative model to predict the associated shapes. The new designs, whose properties are analyzed by simulation, are added to the design dataset. An S-slot design dataset case study was implemented to demonstrate the efficiency of FairGen in auxetic structural design. Compared with grid and randomized sampling, FairGen increased the coverage score at twice the speed and significantly expanded the sampled region in the property space. As a result, the generative models trained with FairGen-generated datasets showed consistent and significant reductions in mean absolute errors.
It is crucial to detect when an instance lies downright too far from the training samples for the machine learning model to be trusted, a challenge known as out-of-distribution (OOD) detection. For neural networks, one approach to this task consists of learning a diversity of predictors that all can explain the training data. This information can be used to estimate the epistemic uncertainty at a given newly observed instance in terms of a measure of the disagreement of the predictions. Evaluation and certification of the ability of a method to detect OOD require specifying instances which are likely to occur in deployment yet on which no prediction is available. Focusing on regression tasks, we choose a simple yet insightful model for this OOD distribution and conduct an empirical evaluation of the ability of various methods to discriminate OOD samples from the data. Moreover, we exhibit evidence that a diversity of parameters may fail to translate to a diversity of predictors. Based on the choice of an OOD distribution, we propose a new way of estimating the entropy of a distribution on predictors based on nearest neighbors in function space. This leads to a variational objective which, combined with the family of distributions given by a generative neural network, systematically produces a diversity of predictors that provides a robust way to detect OOD samples.
Recent advances in data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence, such as the emergence of large language models, are leading to an increasing demand for data that can be processed by such models. While data sources are application-specific, and it is impossible to produce an exhaustive list of such data sources, it seems that a comprehensive, rather than complete, list would still benefit data scientists and machine learning experts of all levels of seniority. The goal of this publication is to provide just such an (inevitably incomplete) list -- or compendium -- of data sources across multiple areas of applications, including finance and economics, legal (laws and regulations), life sciences (medicine and drug discovery), news sentiment and social media, retail and ecommerce, satellite imagery, and shipping and logistics, and sports.
We hypothesize that due to the greedy nature of learning in multi-modal deep neural networks, these models tend to rely on just one modality while under-fitting the other modalities. Such behavior is counter-intuitive and hurts the models' generalization, as we observe empirically. To estimate the model's dependence on each modality, we compute the gain on the accuracy when the model has access to it in addition to another modality. We refer to this gain as the conditional utilization rate. In the experiments, we consistently observe an imbalance in conditional utilization rates between modalities, across multiple tasks and architectures. Since conditional utilization rate cannot be computed efficiently during training, we introduce a proxy for it based on the pace at which the model learns from each modality, which we refer to as the conditional learning speed. We propose an algorithm to balance the conditional learning speeds between modalities during training and demonstrate that it indeed addresses the issue of greedy learning. The proposed algorithm improves the model's generalization on three datasets: Colored MNIST, Princeton ModelNet40, and NVIDIA Dynamic Hand Gesture.
Most algorithms for representation learning and link prediction in relational data have been designed for static data. However, the data they are applied to usually evolves with time, such as friend graphs in social networks or user interactions with items in recommender systems. This is also the case for knowledge bases, which contain facts such as (US, has president, B. Obama, [2009-2017]) that are valid only at certain points in time. For the problem of link prediction under temporal constraints, i.e., answering queries such as (US, has president, ?, 2012), we propose a solution inspired by the canonical decomposition of tensors of order 4. We introduce new regularization schemes and present an extension of ComplEx (Trouillon et al., 2016) that achieves state-of-the-art performance. Additionally, we propose a new dataset for knowledge base completion constructed from Wikidata, larger than previous benchmarks by an order of magnitude, as a new reference for evaluating temporal and non-temporal link prediction methods.