Computational fluctuating hydrodynamics aims at understanding the impact of thermal fluctuations on fluid motions at small scales through numerical exploration. These fluctuations are modeled as stochastic flux terms and incorporated into the classical Navier-Stokes equations, which need to be solved numerically. In this paper, we present a novel projection-based method for solving the incompressible fluctuating hydrodynamics equations. By analyzing the equilibrium structure factor spectrum of the velocity field, we investigate how the inherent splitting errors affect the numerical solution of the stochastic partial differential equations in the presence of non-periodic boundary conditions, and how iterative corrections can reduce these errors. Our computational examples demonstrate both the capability of our approach to reproduce correctly stochastic properties of fluids at small scales as well as its potential use in the simulations of multi-physics problems.
Approximations of optimization problems arise in computational procedures and sensitivity analysis. The resulting effect on solutions can be significant, with even small approximations of components of a problem translating into large errors in the solutions. We specify conditions under which approximations are well behaved in the sense of minimizers, stationary points, and level-sets and this leads to a framework of consistent approximations. The framework is developed for a broad class of composite problems, which are neither convex nor smooth. We demonstrate the framework using examples from stochastic optimization, neural-network based machine learning, distributionally robust optimization, penalty and augmented Lagrangian methods, interior-point methods, homotopy methods, smoothing methods, extended nonlinear programming, difference-of-convex programming, and multi-objective optimization. An enhanced proximal method illustrates the algorithmic possibilities. A quantitative analysis supplements the development by furnishing rates of convergence.
High-order implicit shock tracking is a new class of numerical methods to approximate solutions of conservation laws with non-smooth features. These methods align elements of the computational mesh with non-smooth features to represent them perfectly, allowing high-order basis functions to approximate smooth regions of the solution without the need for nonlinear stabilization, which leads to accurate approximations on traditionally coarse meshes. The hallmark of these methods is the underlying optimization formulation whose solution is a feature-aligned mesh and the corresponding high-order approximation to the flow; the key challenge is robustly solving the central optimization problem. In this work, we develop a robust optimization solver for high-order implicit shock tracking methods so they can be reliably used to simulate complex, high-speed, compressible flows in multiple dimensions. The proposed method integrates practical robustness measures into a sequential quadratic programming method, including dimension- and order-independent simplex element collapses, mesh smoothing, and element-wise solution re-initialization, which prove to be necessary to reliably track complex discontinuity surfaces, such as curved and reflecting shocks, shock formation, and shock-shock interaction. A series of nine numerical experiments -- including two- and three-dimensional compressible flows with complex discontinuity surfaces -- are used to demonstrate: 1) the robustness of the solver, 2) the meshes produced are high-quality and track continuous, non-smooth features in addition to discontinuities, 3) the method achieves the optimal convergence rate of the underlying discretization even for flows containing discontinuities, and 4) the method produces highly accurate solutions on extremely coarse meshes relative to approaches based on shock capturing.
We develop two adaptive discretization algorithms for convex semi-infinite optimization, which terminate after finitely many iterations at approximate solutions of arbitrary precision. In particular, they terminate at a feasible point of the considered optimization problem. Compared to the existing finitely feasible algorithms for general semi-infinite optimization problems, our algorithms work with considerably smaller discretizations and are thus computationally favorable. Also, our algorithms terminate at approximate solutions of arbitrary precision, while for general semi-infinite optimization problems the best possible approximate-solution precision can be arbitrarily bad. All occurring finite optimization subproblems in our algorithms have to be solved only approximately, and continuity is the only regularity assumption on our objective and constraint functions. Applications to parametric and non-parametric regression problems under shape constraints are discussed.
We develop an essentially optimal finite element approach for solving ergodic stochastic two-scale elliptic equations whose two-scale coefficient may depend also on the slow variable. We solve the limiting stochastic two-scale homogenized equation obtained from the stochastic two-scale convergence in the mean (A. Bourgeat, A. Mikelic and S. Wright, J. reine angew. Math, Vol. 456, 1994), whose solution comprises of the solution to the homogenized equation and the corrector, by truncating the infinite domain of the fast variable and using the sparse tensor product finite elements. We show that the convergence rate in terms of the truncation level is equivalent to that for solving the cell problems in the same truncated domain. Solving this equation, we obtain the solution to the homogenized equation and the corrector at the same time, using only a number of degrees of freedom that is essentially equivalent to that required for solving one cell problem. Optimal complexity is obtained when the corrector possesses sufficient regularity with respect to both the fast and the slow variables. Although the regularity norm of the corrector depends on the size of the truncated domain, we show that the convergence rate of the approximation for the solution to the homogenized equation is independent of the size of the truncated domain. With the availability of an analytic corrector, we construct a numerical corrector for the solution of the original stochastic two-scale equation from the finite element solution to the truncated stochastic two-scale homogenized equation. Numerical examples of quasi-periodic two-scale equations, and a stochastic two-scale equation of the checker board type, whose coefficient is discontinuous, confirm the theoretical results.
Measuring the predictability and complexity of time series using entropy is essential tool de-signing and controlling a nonlinear system. However, the existing methods have some drawbacks related to the strong dependence of entropy on the parameters of the methods. To overcome these difficulties, this study proposes a new method for estimating the entropy of a time series using the LogNNet neural network model. The LogNNet reservoir matrix is filled with time series elements according to our algorithm. The accuracy of the classification of images from the MNIST-10 database is considered as the entropy measure and denoted by NNetEn. The novelty of entropy calculation is that the time series is involved in mixing the input information in the res-ervoir. Greater complexity in the time series leads to a higher classification accuracy and higher NNetEn values. We introduce a new time series characteristic called time series learning inertia that determines the learning rate of the neural network. The robustness and efficiency of the method is verified on chaotic, periodic, random, binary, and constant time series. The comparison of NNetEn with other methods of entropy estimation demonstrates that our method is more robust and accurate and can be widely used in practice.
In this study, we analyze the efficiency of a protocol with discrete modulation of continuous variable non-Gaussian states, the coherent states having one photon added and then one photon subtracted (PASCS). We calculate the secure key generation rate against collective attacks using the fact that Eve's information can be bounded based on the protocol with Gaussian modulation, which in turn is unconditionally secure. Our results for a four-state protocol show that the PASCS always outperforms the equivalent coherent states protocol under the same environmental conditions. Interestingly, we find that for the protocol using discrete-modulated PASCS, the noisier the line, the better will be its performance compared to the protocol using coherent states. Thus, our proposal proves to be advantageous for performing quantum key distribution in non-ideal situations.
We propose a novel approach to disentangle the generative factors of variation underlying a given set of observations. Our method builds upon the idea that the (unknown) low-dimensional manifold underlying the data space can be explicitly modeled as a product of submanifolds. This gives rise to a new definition of disentanglement, and to a novel weakly-supervised algorithm for recovering the unknown explanatory factors behind the data. At training time, our algorithm only requires pairs of non i.i.d. data samples whose elements share at least one, possibly multidimensional, generative factor of variation. We require no knowledge on the nature of these transformations, and do not make any limiting assumption on the properties of each subspace. Our approach is easy to implement, and can be successfully applied to different kinds of data (from images to 3D surfaces) undergoing arbitrary transformations. In addition to standard synthetic benchmarks, we showcase our method in challenging real-world applications, where we compare favorably with the state of the art.
Interpretation of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) training as an optimal control problem with nonlinear dynamical systems has received considerable attention recently, yet the algorithmic development remains relatively limited. In this work, we make an attempt along this line by reformulating the training procedure from the trajectory optimization perspective. We first show that most widely-used algorithms for training DNNs can be linked to the Differential Dynamic Programming (DDP), a celebrated second-order trajectory optimization algorithm rooted in the Approximate Dynamic Programming. In this vein, we propose a new variant of DDP that can accept batch optimization for training feedforward networks, while integrating naturally with the recent progress in curvature approximation. The resulting algorithm features layer-wise feedback policies which improve convergence rate and reduce sensitivity to hyper-parameter over existing methods. We show that the algorithm is competitive against state-ofthe-art first and second order methods. Our work opens up new avenues for principled algorithmic design built upon the optimal control theory.
We introduce a new family of deep neural network models. Instead of specifying a discrete sequence of hidden layers, we parameterize the derivative of the hidden state using a neural network. The output of the network is computed using a black-box differential equation solver. These continuous-depth models have constant memory cost, adapt their evaluation strategy to each input, and can explicitly trade numerical precision for speed. We demonstrate these properties in continuous-depth residual networks and continuous-time latent variable models. We also construct continuous normalizing flows, a generative model that can train by maximum likelihood, without partitioning or ordering the data dimensions. For training, we show how to scalably backpropagate through any ODE solver, without access to its internal operations. This allows end-to-end training of ODEs within larger models.
Network embedding has attracted considerable research attention recently. However, the existing methods are incapable of handling billion-scale networks, because they are computationally expensive and, at the same time, difficult to be accelerated by distributed computing schemes. To address these problems, we propose RandNE, a novel and simple billion-scale network embedding method. Specifically, we propose a Gaussian random projection approach to map the network into a low-dimensional embedding space while preserving the high-order proximities between nodes. To reduce the time complexity, we design an iterative projection procedure to avoid the explicit calculation of the high-order proximities. Theoretical analysis shows that our method is extremely efficient, and friendly to distributed computing schemes without any communication cost in the calculation. We demonstrate the efficacy of RandNE over state-of-the-art methods in network reconstruction and link prediction tasks on multiple datasets with different scales, ranging from thousands to billions of nodes and edges.