This paper deals with the following important research question. Traditionally, the neural network employs non-linear activation functions concatenated with linear operators to approximate a given physical phenomenon. They "fill the space" with the concatenations of the activation functions and linear operators and adjust their coefficients to approximate the physical phenomena. We claim that it is better to "fill the space" with linear combinations of smooth higher-order B-splines base functions as employed by isogeometric analysis and utilize the neural networks to adjust the coefficients of linear combinations. In other words, the possibilities of using neural networks for approximating the B-spline base functions' coefficients and by approximating the solution directly are evaluated. Solving differential equations with neural networks has been proposed by Maziar Raissi et al. in 2017 by introducing Physics-informed Neural Networks (PINN), which naturally encode underlying physical laws as prior information. Approximation of coefficients using a function as an input leverages the well-known capability of neural networks being universal function approximators. In essence, in the PINN approach the network approximates the value of the given field at a given point. We present an alternative approach, where the physcial quantity is approximated as a linear combination of smooth B-spline basis functions, and the neural network approximates the coefficients of B-splines. This research compares results from the DNN approximating the coefficients of the linear combination of B-spline basis functions, with the DNN approximating the solution directly. We show that our approach is cheaper and more accurate when approximating smooth physical fields.
The perfectly matched layer (PML) formulation is a prominent way of handling radiation problems in unbounded domain and has gained interest due to its simple implementation in finite element codes. However, its simplicity can be advanced further using the isogeometric framework. This work presents a spline based PML formulation which avoids additional coordinate transformation as the formulation is based on the same space in which the numerical solution is sought. The procedure can be automated for any convex artificial boundary. This removes restrictions on the domain construction using PML and can therefore reduce computational cost and improve mesh quality. The usage of spline basis functions with higher continuity also improves the accuracy of the numerical solution.
Safety is critical in autonomous robotic systems. A safe control law ensures forward invariance of a safe set (a subset in the state space). It has been extensively studied regarding how to derive a safe control law with a control-affine analytical dynamic model. However, in complex environments and tasks, it is challenging and time-consuming to obtain a principled analytical model of the system. In these situations, data-driven learning is extensively used and the learned models are encoded in neural networks. How to formally derive a safe control law with Neural Network Dynamic Models (NNDM) remains unclear due to the lack of computationally tractable methods to deal with these black-box functions. In fact, even finding the control that minimizes an objective for NNDM without any safety constraint is still challenging. In this work, we propose MIND-SIS (Mixed Integer for Neural network Dynamic model with Safety Index Synthesis), the first method to derive safe control laws for NNDM. The method includes two parts: 1) SIS: an algorithm for the offline synthesis of the safety index (also called as barrier function), which uses evolutionary methods and 2) MIND: an algorithm for online computation of the optimal and safe control signal, which solves a constrained optimization using a computationally efficient encoding of neural networks. It has been theoretically proved that MIND-SIS guarantees forward invariance and finite convergence. And it has been numerically validated that MIND-SIS achieves safe and optimal control of NNDM. From our experiments, the optimality gap is less than $10^{-8}$, and the safety constraint violation is $0$.
Approximate-message passing (AMP) algorithms have become an important element of high-dimensional statistical inference, mostly due to their adaptability and concentration properties, the state evolution (SE) equations. This is demonstrated by the growing number of new iterations proposed for increasingly complex problems, ranging from multi-layer inference to low-rank matrix estimation with elaborate priors. In this paper, we address the following questions: is there a structure underlying all AMP iterations that unifies them in a common framework? Can we use such a structure to give a modular proof of state evolution equations, adaptable to new AMP iterations without reproducing each time the full argument ? We propose an answer to both questions, showing that AMP instances can be generically indexed by an oriented graph. This enables to give a unified interpretation of these iterations, independent from the problem they solve, and a way of composing them arbitrarily. We then show that all AMP iterations indexed by such a graph admit rigorous SE equations, extending the reach of previous proofs, and proving a number of recent heuristic derivations of those equations. Our proof naturally includes non-separable functions and we show how existing refinements, such as spatial coupling or matrix-valued variables, can be combined with our framework.
We extend the Deep Galerkin Method (DGM) introduced in Sirignano and Spiliopoulos (2018)} to solve a number of partial differential equations (PDEs) that arise in the context of optimal stochastic control and mean field games. First, we consider PDEs where the function is constrained to be positive and integrate to unity, as is the case with Fokker-Planck equations. Our approach involves reparameterizing the solution as the exponential of a neural network appropriately normalized to ensure both requirements are satisfied. This then gives rise to nonlinear a partial integro-differential equation (PIDE) where the integral appearing in the equation is handled by a novel application of importance sampling. Secondly, we tackle a number of Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman (HJB) equations that appear in stochastic optimal control problems. The key contribution is that these equations are approached in their unsimplified primal form which includes an optimization problem as part of the equation. We extend the DGM algorithm to solve for the value function and the optimal control \simultaneously by characterizing both as deep neural networks. Training the networks is performed by taking alternating stochastic gradient descent steps for the two functions, a technique inspired by the policy improvement algorithms (PIA).
In this work, we introduce a novel approach to formulating an artificial viscosity for shock capturing in nonlinear hyperbolic systems by utilizing the property that the solutions of hyperbolic conservation laws are not reversible in time in the vicinity of shocks. The proposed approach does not require any additional governing equations or a priori knowledge of the hyperbolic system in question, is independent of the mesh and approximation order, and requires the use of only one tunable parameter. The primary novelty is that the resulting artificial viscosity is unique for each component of the conservation law which is advantageous for systems in which some components exhibit discontinuities while others do not. The efficacy of the method is shown in numerical experiments of multi-dimensional hyperbolic conservation laws such as nonlinear transport, Euler equations, and ideal magnetohydrodynamics using a high-order discontinuous spectral element method on unstructured grids.
Collision avoidance is a widely investigated topic in robotic applications. When applying collision avoidance techniques to a mobile robot, how to deal with the spatial structure of the robot still remains a challenge. In this paper, we design a configuration-aware safe control law by solving a Quadratic Programming (QP) with designed Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) constraints, which can safely navigate a mobile robotic arm to a desired region while avoiding collision with environmental obstacles. The advantage of our approach is that it correctly and in an elegant way incorporates the spatial structure of the mobile robotic arm. This is achieved by merging geometric restrictions among mobile robotic arm links into CBFs constraints. Simulations on a rigid rod and the modeled mobile robotic arm are performed to verify the feasibility and time-efficiency of proposed method. Numerical results about the time consuming for different degrees of freedom illustrate that our method scales well with dimension.
There has been an arising trend of adopting deep learning methods to study partial differential equations (PDEs). This article is to propose a Deep Learning Galerkin Method (DGM) for the closed-loop geothermal system, which is a new coupled multi-physics PDEs and mainly consists of a framework of underground heat exchange pipelines to extract the geothermal heat from the geothermal reservoir. This method is a natural combination of Galerkin Method and machine learning with the solution approximated by a neural network instead of a linear combination of basis functions. We train the neural network by randomly sampling the spatiotemporal points and minimize loss function to satisfy the differential operators, initial condition, boundary and interface conditions. Moreover, the approximate ability of the neural network is proved by the convergence of the loss function and the convergence of the neural network to the exact solution in L^2 norm under certain conditions. Finally, some numerical examples are carried out to demonstrate the approximation ability of the neural networks intuitively.
We design the helicity-conservative physics-informed neural network model for the Navier-Stokes equation in the ideal case. The key is to provide an appropriate PDE model as loss function so that its neural network solutions produce helicity conservation. Physics-informed neural network model is based on the strong form of PDE. We show that the relevant helicity-conservative finite element method based on the weak formulation of PDE can be somewhat different. More precisely, we compares the PINN formulation and the finite element method based on the weak formulation for conserving helicity and argues that for the conservation, strong PDE is more natural. Our result is justified by theory as well. Furthermore, a couple of numerical calculations are demonstrated to confirm our theoretical finding.
Invertible neural networks (INNs) are neural network architectures with invertibility by design. Thanks to their invertibility and the tractability of Jacobian, INNs have various machine learning applications such as probabilistic modeling, generative modeling, and representation learning. However, their attractive properties often come at the cost of restricting the layer designs, which poses a question on their representation power: can we use these models to approximate sufficiently diverse functions? To answer this question, we have developed a general theoretical framework to investigate the representation power of INNs, building on a structure theorem of differential geometry. The framework simplifies the approximation problem of diffeomorphisms, which enables us to show the universal approximation properties of INNs. We apply the framework to two representative classes of INNs, namely Coupling-Flow-based INNs (CF-INNs) and Neural Ordinary Differential Equations (NODEs), and elucidate their high representation power despite the restrictions on their architectures.
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.