Deep learning surrogate models are being increasingly used in accelerating scientific simulations as a replacement for costly conventional numerical techniques. However, their use remains a significant challenge when dealing with real-world complex examples. In this work, we demonstrate three types of neural network architectures for efficient learning of highly non-linear deformations of solid bodies. The first two architectures are based on the recently proposed CNN U-NET and MAgNET (graph U-NET) frameworks which have shown promising performance for learning on mesh-based data. The third architecture is Perceiver IO, a very recent architecture that belongs to the family of attention-based neural networks--a class that has revolutionised diverse engineering fields and is still unexplored in computational mechanics. We study and compare the performance of all three networks on two benchmark examples, and show their capabilities to accurately predict the non-linear mechanical responses of soft bodies.
Due to its ability to generate millions of particles, massively detailed scenes and confusing artificial illumination with reality, the version 5 of Unreal Engine promises unprecedented industrial applications. The paradigms and aims of Unreal Engine contrast with the industrial simulators typically used by the scientific community. The visual quality and performance of its rendering engine increase the opportunities, especially for industries and simulation business: where interoperability and scalability are required. The study of the following issue `` Which architecture should we implement to integrate real-world data, in an Unreal Engine 5 simulator and in a mixed-reality environment? '' offers a point of view. The topic is reexamined in an innovative and conceptual way, such as the generalization of mixedreality technologies, Internet of Things, digital twins, Big Data but providing a solution for simple and actual use cases. This paper gives a detailed analysis of the issue, at both theoretical and operational level. Then, the document goes deep into Unreal Engine's operation in order to extract the vanilla capabilities. Next, the C++ Plugin system is reviewed in details as well as the third-party library integration: pitfalls to be avoided are shown. Finally, the last chapter proposes a generic architecture, useful in large-scale industrial 3D applications, such as collaborative work or hyper-connected simulators. This document might be of interest to an Unreal Engine expert who would like to discover about server architectures. Conversely, it could be relevant for an expert in backend servers who wants to learn about Unreal Engine capabilities. This research concludes that Unreal Engine's modularity enables integration with almost any protocol. The features to integrate external real data are numerous but depend on use cases. Distributed systems for Big Data require a scalable architecture, possibly without the use of the Unreal Engine dedicated server. Environments, which require sub-second latency need to implement direct connections, bypassing any intermediate servers.
Deep spiking neural networks (SNNs) have drawn much attention in recent years because of their low power consumption, biological rationality and event-driven property. However, state-of-the-art deep SNNs (including Spikformer and Spikingformer) suffer from a critical challenge related to the imprecise gradient backpropagation. This problem arises from the improper design of downsampling modules in these networks, and greatly hampering the overall model performance. In this paper, we propose ConvBN-MaxPooling-LIF (CML), an SNN-optimized downsampling with precise gradient backpropagation. We prove that CML can effectively overcome the imprecision of gradient backpropagation from a theoretical perspective. In addition, we evaluate CML on ImageNet, CIFAR10, CIFAR100, CIFAR10-DVS, DVS128-Gesture datasets, and show state-of-the-art performance on all these datasets with significantly enhanced performances compared with Spikingformer. For instance, our model achieves 77.64 $\%$ on ImageNet, 96.04 $\%$ on CIFAR10, 81.4$\%$ on CIFAR10-DVS, with + 1.79$\%$ on ImageNet, +1.16$\%$ on CIFAR100 compared with Spikingformer.
Backpropagation (BP) is the most important gradient estimation method for training neural networks in deep learning. However, the literature shows that neural networks trained by BP are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. We develop the likelihood ratio (LR) method, a new gradient estimation method, for training a broad range of neural network architectures, including convolutional neural networks, recurrent neural networks, graph neural networks, and spiking neural networks, without recursive gradient computation. We propose three methods to efficiently reduce the variance of the gradient estimation in the neural network training process. Our experiments yield numerical results for training different neural networks on several datasets. All results demonstrate that the LR method is effective for training various neural networks and significantly improves the robustness of the neural networks under adversarial attacks relative to the BP method.
High-throughput sequencing (HTS) technologies have revolutionized the field of genomics, enabling rapid and cost-effective genome analysis for various applications. However, the increasing volume of genomic data generated by HTS technologies presents significant challenges for computational techniques to effectively analyze genomes. To address these challenges, several algorithm-architecture co-design works have been proposed, targeting different steps of the genome analysis pipeline. These works explore emerging technologies to provide fast, accurate, and low-power genome analysis. This paper provides a brief review of the recent advancements in accelerating genome analysis, covering the opportunities and challenges associated with the acceleration of the key steps of the genome analysis pipeline. Our analysis highlights the importance of integrating multiple steps of genome analysis using suitable architectures to unlock significant performance improvements and reduce data movement and energy consumption. We conclude by emphasizing the need for novel strategies and techniques to address the growing demands of genomic data generation and analysis.
We propose gradient-enhanced PINNs based on transfer learning (TL-gPINNs) for inverse problems of the function coefficient discovery in order to overcome deficiency of the discrete characterization of the PDE loss in neural networks and improve accuracy of function feature description, which offers a new angle of view for gPINNs. The TL-gPINN algorithm is applied to infer the unknown variable coefficients of various forms (the polynomial, trigonometric function, hyperbolic function and fractional polynomial) and multiple variable coefficients simultaneously with abundant soliton solutions for the well-known variable coefficient nonlinear Schr\"{o}odinger equation. Compared with the PINN and gPINN, TL-gPINN yields considerable improvement in accuracy. Moreover, our method leverages the advantage of the transfer learning technique, which can help to mitigate the problem of inefficiency caused by extra loss terms of the gradient. Numerical results fully demonstrate the effectiveness of the TL-gPINN method in significant accuracy enhancement, and it also outperforms gPINN in efficiency even when the training data was corrupted with different levels of noise or hyper-parameters of neural networks are arbitrarily changed.
With its powerful capability to deal with graph data widely found in practical applications, graph neural networks (GNNs) have received significant research attention. However, as societies become increasingly concerned with data privacy, GNNs face the need to adapt to this new normal. This has led to the rapid development of federated graph neural networks (FedGNNs) research in recent years. Although promising, this interdisciplinary field is highly challenging for interested researchers to enter into. The lack of an insightful survey on this topic only exacerbates this problem. In this paper, we bridge this gap by offering a comprehensive survey of this emerging field. We propose a unique 3-tiered taxonomy of the FedGNNs literature to provide a clear view into how GNNs work in the context of Federated Learning (FL). It puts existing works into perspective by analyzing how graph data manifest themselves in FL settings, how GNN training is performed under different FL system architectures and degrees of graph data overlap across data silo, and how GNN aggregation is performed under various FL settings. Through discussions of the advantages and limitations of existing works, we envision future research directions that can help build more robust, dynamic, efficient, and interpretable FedGNNs.
Normalization is known to help the optimization of deep neural networks. Curiously, different architectures require specialized normalization methods. In this paper, we study what normalization is effective for Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). First, we adapt and evaluate the existing methods from other domains to GNNs. Faster convergence is achieved with InstanceNorm compared to BatchNorm and LayerNorm. We provide an explanation by showing that InstanceNorm serves as a preconditioner for GNNs, but such preconditioning effect is weaker with BatchNorm due to the heavy batch noise in graph datasets. Second, we show that the shift operation in InstanceNorm results in an expressiveness degradation of GNNs for highly regular graphs. We address this issue by proposing GraphNorm with a learnable shift. Empirically, GNNs with GraphNorm converge faster compared to GNNs using other normalization. GraphNorm also improves the generalization of GNNs, achieving better performance on graph classification benchmarks.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have been shown to be effective models for different predictive tasks on graph-structured data. Recent work on their expressive power has focused on isomorphism tasks and countable feature spaces. We extend this theoretical framework to include continuous features - which occur regularly in real-world input domains and within the hidden layers of GNNs - and we demonstrate the requirement for multiple aggregation functions in this context. Accordingly, we propose Principal Neighbourhood Aggregation (PNA), a novel architecture combining multiple aggregators with degree-scalers (which generalize the sum aggregator). Finally, we compare the capacity of different models to capture and exploit the graph structure via a novel benchmark containing multiple tasks taken from classical graph theory, alongside existing benchmarks from real-world domains, all of which demonstrate the strength of our model. With this work, we hope to steer some of the GNN research towards new aggregation methods which we believe are essential in the search for powerful and robust models.
Graphs, which describe pairwise relations between objects, are essential representations of many real-world data such as social networks. In recent years, graph neural networks, which extend the neural network models to graph data, have attracted increasing attention. Graph neural networks have been applied to advance many different graph related tasks such as reasoning dynamics of the physical system, graph classification, and node classification. Most of the existing graph neural network models have been designed for static graphs, while many real-world graphs are inherently dynamic. For example, social networks are naturally evolving as new users joining and new relations being created. Current graph neural network models cannot utilize the dynamic information in dynamic graphs. However, the dynamic information has been proven to enhance the performance of many graph analytical tasks such as community detection and link prediction. Hence, it is necessary to design dedicated graph neural networks for dynamic graphs. In this paper, we propose DGNN, a new {\bf D}ynamic {\bf G}raph {\bf N}eural {\bf N}etwork model, which can model the dynamic information as the graph evolving. In particular, the proposed framework can keep updating node information by capturing the sequential information of edges, the time intervals between edges and information propagation coherently. Experimental results on various dynamic graphs demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.
Image captioning is a challenging task that combines the field of computer vision and natural language processing. A variety of approaches have been proposed to achieve the goal of automatically describing an image, and recurrent neural network (RNN) or long-short term memory (LSTM) based models dominate this field. However, RNNs or LSTMs cannot be calculated in parallel and ignore the underlying hierarchical structure of a sentence. In this paper, we propose a framework that only employs convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to generate captions. Owing to parallel computing, our basic model is around 3 times faster than NIC (an LSTM-based model) during training time, while also providing better results. We conduct extensive experiments on MSCOCO and investigate the influence of the model width and depth. Compared with LSTM-based models that apply similar attention mechanisms, our proposed models achieves comparable scores of BLEU-1,2,3,4 and METEOR, and higher scores of CIDEr. We also test our model on the paragraph annotation dataset, and get higher CIDEr score compared with hierarchical LSTMs