We critically assess the performance of several variants of dual and dual-primal domain decomposition strategies in problems with fixed subdomain partitioning and high heterogeneity in stiffness coefficients typically arising in topology optimization of modular structures. Our study considers Total FETI and FETI Dual-Primal methods along with three enhancements: k-scaling, full orthogonalization of the search directions, and considering multiple search-direction at once, which gives us twelve variants in total. We test these variants both on academic examples and snapshots of topology optimization iterations. Based on the results, we conclude that (i) the original methods exhibit very slow convergence in the presence of severe heterogeneity in stiffness coefficients, which makes them practically useless, (ii) the full orthogonalization enhancement helps only for mild heterogeneity, and (iii) the only robust method is FETI Dual-Primal with multiple search direction and k-scaling.
In recent work (Maierhofer & Huybrechs, 2022, Adv. Comput. Math.), the authors showed that least-squares oversampling can improve the convergence properties of collocation methods for boundary integral equations involving operators of certain pseudo-differential form. The underlying principle is that the discrete method approximates a Bubnov$-$Galerkin method in a suitable sense. In the present work, we extend this analysis to the case when the integral operator is perturbed by a compact operator $\mathcal{K}$ which is continuous as a map on Sobolev spaces on the boundary, $\mathcal{K}:H^{p}\rightarrow H^{q}$ for all $p,q\in\mathbb{R}$. This study is complicated by the fact that both the test and trial functions in the discrete Bubnov-Galerkin orthogonality conditions are modified over the unperturbed setting. Our analysis guarantees that previous results concerning optimal convergence rates and sufficient rates of oversampling are preserved in the more general case. Indeed, for the first time, this analysis provides a complete explanation of the advantages of least-squares oversampled collocation for boundary integral formulations of the Laplace equation on arbitrary smooth Jordan curves in 2D. Our theoretical results are shown to be in very good agreement with numerical experiments.
We study properties of secret sharing schemes, where a random secret value is transformed into shares distributed among several participants in such a way that only the qualified groups of participants can recover the secret value. We improve the lower bounds on the sizes of shares for several specific problems of secret sharing. To this end, we use the method of non-Shannon type information inequalities going back to Z. Zhang and R.W. Yeung. We extend and employ the linear programming technique that allows to apply new information inequalities indirectly, without even writing them down explicitly. To reduce the complexity of the problems of linear programming involved in the bounds we use extensively symmetry considerations.
Functional constrained optimization is becoming more and more important in machine learning and operations research. Such problems have potential applications in risk-averse machine learning, semisupervised learning, and robust optimization among others. In this paper, we first present a novel Constraint Extrapolation (ConEx) method for solving convex functional constrained problems, which utilizes linear approximations of the constraint functions to define the extrapolation (or acceleration) step. We show that this method is a unified algorithm that achieves the best-known rate of convergence for solving different functional constrained convex composite problems, including convex or strongly convex, and smooth or nonsmooth problems with a stochastic objective and/or stochastic constraints. Many of these rates of convergence were in fact obtained for the first time in the literature. In addition, ConEx is a single-loop algorithm that does not involve any penalty subproblems. Contrary to existing primal-dual methods, it does not require the projection of Lagrangian multipliers into a (possibly unknown) bounded set. Second, for nonconvex functional constrained problems, we introduce a new proximal point method that transforms the initial nonconvex problem into a sequence of convex problems by adding quadratic terms to both the objective and constraints. Under a certain MFCQ-type assumption, we establish the convergence and rate of convergence of this method to KKT points when the convex subproblems are solved exactly or inexactly. For large-scale and stochastic problems, we present a more practical proximal point method in which the approximate solutions of the subproblems are computed by the aforementioned ConEx method. To the best of our knowledge, most of these convergence and complexity results of the proximal point method for nonconvex problems also seem to be new in the literature.
Motivated by applications in reinforcement learning (RL), we study a nonlinear stochastic approximation (SA) algorithm under Markovian noise, and establish its finite-sample convergence bounds under various stepsizes. Specifically, we show that when using constant stepsize (i.e., $\alpha_k\equiv \alpha$), the algorithm achieves exponential fast convergence to a neighborhood (with radius $O(\alpha\log(1/\alpha))$) around the desired limit point. When using diminishing stepsizes with appropriate decay rate, the algorithm converges with rate $O(\log(k)/k)$. Our proof is based on Lyapunov drift arguments, and to handle the Markovian noise, we exploit the fast mixing of the underlying Markov chain. To demonstrate the generality of our theoretical results on Markovian SA, we use it to derive the finite-sample bounds of the popular $Q$-learning with linear function approximation algorithm, under a condition on the behavior policy. Importantly, we do not need to make the assumption that the samples are i.i.d., and do not require an artificial projection step in the algorithm to maintain the boundedness of the iterates. Numerical simulations corroborate our theoretical results.
We introduce an algebraic multiscale method for two--dimensional problems. The method uses the generalized multiscale finite element method based on the quadrilateral nonconforming finite element spaces. Differently from the one--dimensional algebraic multiscale method, we apply the dimension reduction techniques to construct multiscale basis functions. Also moment functions are considered to impose continuity between local basis functions. Some representative numerical results are presented.
It is nowadays widely acknowledged that optimal structural design should be robust with respect to the uncertainties in loads and material parameters. However, there are several alternatives to consider such uncertainties in structural optimization problems. This paper presents a comprehensive comparison between the results of three different approaches to topology optimization under uncertain loading, considering stress constraints: 1) the robust formulation, which requires only the mean and standard deviation of stresses at each element; 2) the reliability-based formulation, which imposes a reliability constraint on computed stresses; 3) the non-probabilistic formulation, which considers a worst-case scenario for the stresses caused by uncertain loads. The information required by each method, regarding the uncertain loads, and the uncertainty propagation approach used in each case is quite different. The robust formulation requires only mean and standard deviation of uncertain loads; stresses are computed via a first-order perturbation approach. The reliability-based formulation requires full probability distributions of random loads, reliability constraints are computed via a first-order performance measure approach. The non-probabilistic formulation is applicable for bounded uncertain loads; only lower and upper bounds are used, and worst-case stresses are computed via a nested optimization with anti-optimization. The three approaches are quite different in the handling of uncertainties; however, the basic topology optimization framework is the same: the traditional density approach is employed for material parameterization, while the augmented Lagrangian method is employed to solve the resulting problem, in order to handle the large number of stress constraints.
We develop a novel procedure for estimating the optimizer of general convex stochastic optimization problems of the form $\min_{x\in\mathcal{X}} \mathbb{E}[F(x,\xi)]$, when the given data is a finite independent sample selected according to $\xi$. The procedure is based on a median-of-means tournament, and is the first procedure that exhibits the optimal statistical performance in heavy tailed situations: we recover the asymptotic rates dictated by the central limit theorem in a non-asymptotic manner once the sample size exceeds some explicitly computable threshold. Additionally, our results apply in the high-dimensional setup, as the threshold sample size exhibits the optimal dependence on the dimension (up to a logarithmic factor). The general setting allows us to recover recent results on multivariate mean estimation and linear regression in heavy-tailed situations and to prove the first sharp, non-asymptotic results for the portfolio optimization problem.
In analyzing large scale structures it is necessary to take into account the fine scale heterogeneity for accurate failure prediction. Resolving fine scale features in the numerical model drastically increases the number of degrees of freedom, thus making full fine-scale simulations infeasible, especially in cases where the model needs to be evaluated many times. In this paper, a methodology for fine scale modeling of large scale structures is proposed, which combines the variational multiscale method, domain decomposition and model order reduction. Addressing applications where the assumption of scale separation does not hold, the influence of the fine scale on the coarse scale is modelled directly by the use of an additive split of the displacement field. Possible coarse and fine scale solutions are exploited for a representative volume element (RVE) to construct local approximation spaces. The local spaces are designed such that local contributions of RVE subdomains can be coupled in a conforming way. Therefore, the resulting global system of equations takes the effect of the fine scale on the coarse scale into account, is sparse and reduced in size compared to the full order model. Several numerical experiments show the accuracy and efficiency of the method.
Numerical solving differential equations with fractional derivatives requires elimination of the singularity which is inherent in the standard definition of fractional derivatives. The method of integration by parts to eliminate this singularity is well known. It allows to solve some equations but increases the order of the equation and sometimes leads to wrong numerical results or instability. We suggest another approach: the elimination of singularity by substitution. It does not increase the order of equation and its numerical implementation provides the opportunity to define fractional derivative as the limit of discretization. We present a sufficient condition for the substitution-generated difference approximation to be well-conditioned. We demonstrate how some equations can be solved using this method with full confidence that the solution is accurate with at least second order of approximation.
In this paper, we propose a novel Feature Decomposition and Reconstruction Learning (FDRL) method for effective facial expression recognition. We view the expression information as the combination of the shared information (expression similarities) across different expressions and the unique information (expression-specific variations) for each expression. More specifically, FDRL mainly consists of two crucial networks: a Feature Decomposition Network (FDN) and a Feature Reconstruction Network (FRN). In particular, FDN first decomposes the basic features extracted from a backbone network into a set of facial action-aware latent features to model expression similarities. Then, FRN captures the intra-feature and inter-feature relationships for latent features to characterize expression-specific variations, and reconstructs the expression feature. To this end, two modules including an intra-feature relation modeling module and an inter-feature relation modeling module are developed in FRN. Experimental results on both the in-the-lab databases (including CK+, MMI, and Oulu-CASIA) and the in-the-wild databases (including RAF-DB and SFEW) show that the proposed FDRL method consistently achieves higher recognition accuracy than several state-of-the-art methods. This clearly highlights the benefit of feature decomposition and reconstruction for classifying expressions.