This article presents a three-step framework for learning and solving partial differential equations (PDEs) using kernel methods. Given a training set consisting of pairs of noisy PDE solutions and source/boundary terms on a mesh, kernel smoothing is utilized to denoise the data and approximate derivatives of the solution. This information is then used in a kernel regression model to learn the algebraic form of the PDE. The learned PDE is then used within a kernel based solver to approximate the solution of the PDE with a new source/boundary term, thereby constituting an operator learning framework. Numerical experiments compare the method to state-of-the-art algorithms and demonstrate its competitive performance.
Operator convex functions defined on the positive half-line play a prominent role in the theory of quantum information, where they are used to define quantum $f$-divergences. Such functions admit integral representations in terms of rational functions. Obtaining high-quality rational approximants of operator convex functions is particularly useful for solving optimization problems involving quantum $f$-divergences using semidefinite programming. In this paper we study the quality of rational approximations of operator convex (and operator monotone) functions. Our main theoretical results are precise global bounds on the error of local Pad\'e-like approximants, as well as minimax approximants, with respect to different weight functions. While the error of Pad\'e-like approximants depends inverse polynomially on the degree of the approximant, the error of minimax approximants has root exponential dependence and we give detailed estimates of the exponents in both cases. We also explain how minimax approximants can be obtained in practice using the differential correction algorithm.
Pre-training datasets are critical for building state-of-the-art machine learning models, motivating rigorous study on their impact on downstream tasks. In this work, we study the impact of the trade-off between the intra-class diversity (the number of samples per class) and the inter-class diversity (the number of classes) of a supervised pre-training dataset. Empirically, we found that with the size of the pre-training dataset fixed, the best downstream performance comes with a balance on the intra-/inter-class diversity. To understand the underlying mechanism, we show theoretically that the downstream performance depends monotonically on both types of diversity. Notably, our theory reveals that the optimal class-to-sample ratio (#classes / #samples per class) is invariant to the size of the pre-training dataset, which motivates an application of predicting the optimal number of pre-training classes. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this application by an improvement of around 2 points on the downstream tasks when using ImageNet as the pre-training dataset.
In this letter we introduce the non-linear partial differential equation (PDE) $\partial^2_{\tau} \pi \propto (\vec\nabla \pi)^2$ showing a new type of instability. Such equations appear in the effective field theory (EFT) of dark energy for the $k$-essence model as well as in many other theories based on the EFT formalism. We demonstrate the occurrence of instability in the cosmological context using a relativistic $N$-body code, and we study it mathematically in 3+1 dimensions within spherical symmetry. We show that this term dominates for the low speed of sound limit where some important linear terms are suppressed.
For solving linear inverse problems, particularly of the type that appear in tomographic imaging and compressive sensing, this paper develops two new approaches. The first approach is an iterative algorithm that minimizers a regularized least squares objective function where the regularization is based on a compound Gaussian prior distribution. The Compound Gaussian prior subsumes many of the commonly used priors in image reconstruction, including those of sparsity-based approaches. The developed iterative algorithm gives rise to the paper's second new approach, which is a deep neural network that corresponds to an "unrolling" or "unfolding" of the iterative algorithm. Unrolled deep neural networks have interpretable layers and outperform standard deep learning methods. This paper includes a detailed computational theory that provides insight into the construction and performance of both algorithms. The conclusion is that both algorithms outperform other state-of-the-art approaches to tomographic image formation and compressive sensing, especially in the difficult regime of low training.
Understanding causality helps to structure interventions to achieve specific goals and enables predictions under interventions. With the growing importance of learning causal relationships, causal discovery tasks have transitioned from using traditional methods to infer potential causal structures from observational data to the field of pattern recognition involved in deep learning. The rapid accumulation of massive data promotes the emergence of causal search methods with brilliant scalability. Existing summaries of causal discovery methods mainly focus on traditional methods based on constraints, scores and FCMs, there is a lack of perfect sorting and elaboration for deep learning-based methods, also lacking some considers and exploration of causal discovery methods from the perspective of variable paradigms. Therefore, we divide the possible causal discovery tasks into three types according to the variable paradigm and give the definitions of the three tasks respectively, define and instantiate the relevant datasets for each task and the final causal model constructed at the same time, then reviews the main existing causal discovery methods for different tasks. Finally, we propose some roadmaps from different perspectives for the current research gaps in the field of causal discovery and point out future research directions.
We describe ACE0, a lightweight platform for evaluating the suitability and viability of AI methods for behaviour discovery in multiagent simulations. Specifically, ACE0 was designed to explore AI methods for multi-agent simulations used in operations research studies related to new technologies such as autonomous aircraft. Simulation environments used in production are often high-fidelity, complex, require significant domain knowledge and as a result have high R&D costs. Minimal and lightweight simulation environments can help researchers and engineers evaluate the viability of new AI technologies for behaviour discovery in a more agile and potentially cost effective manner. In this paper we describe the motivation for the development of ACE0.We provide a technical overview of the system architecture, describe a case study of behaviour discovery in the aerospace domain, and provide a qualitative evaluation of the system. The evaluation includes a brief description of collaborative research projects with academic partners, exploring different AI behaviour discovery methods.
Graph convolution networks (GCN) are increasingly popular in many applications, yet remain notoriously hard to train over large graph datasets. They need to compute node representations recursively from their neighbors. Current GCN training algorithms suffer from either high computational costs that grow exponentially with the number of layers, or high memory usage for loading the entire graph and node embeddings. In this paper, we propose a novel efficient layer-wise training framework for GCN (L-GCN), that disentangles feature aggregation and feature transformation during training, hence greatly reducing time and memory complexities. We present theoretical analysis for L-GCN under the graph isomorphism framework, that L-GCN leads to as powerful GCNs as the more costly conventional training algorithm does, under mild conditions. We further propose L^2-GCN, which learns a controller for each layer that can automatically adjust the training epochs per layer in L-GCN. Experiments show that L-GCN is faster than state-of-the-arts by at least an order of magnitude, with a consistent of memory usage not dependent on dataset size, while maintaining comparable prediction performance. With the learned controller, L^2-GCN can further cut the training time in half. Our codes are available at //github.com/Shen-Lab/L2-GCN.
Existing few-shot learning (FSL) methods assume that there exist sufficient training samples from source classes for knowledge transfer to target classes with few training samples. However, this assumption is often invalid, especially when it comes to fine-grained recognition. In this work, we define a new FSL setting termed few-shot fewshot learning (FSFSL), under which both the source and target classes have limited training samples. To overcome the source class data scarcity problem, a natural option is to crawl images from the web with class names as search keywords. However, the crawled images are inevitably corrupted by large amount of noise (irrelevant images) and thus may harm the performance. To address this problem, we propose a graph convolutional network (GCN)-based label denoising (LDN) method to remove the irrelevant images. Further, with the cleaned web images as well as the original clean training images, we propose a GCN-based FSL method. For both the LDN and FSL tasks, a novel adaptive aggregation GCN (AdarGCN) model is proposed, which differs from existing GCN models in that adaptive aggregation is performed based on a multi-head multi-level aggregation module. With AdarGCN, how much and how far information carried by each graph node is propagated in the graph structure can be determined automatically, therefore alleviating the effects of both noisy and outlying training samples. Extensive experiments show the superior performance of our AdarGCN under both the new FSFSL and the conventional FSL settings.
This paper presents SimCLR: a simple framework for contrastive learning of visual representations. We simplify recently proposed contrastive self-supervised learning algorithms without requiring specialized architectures or a memory bank. In order to understand what enables the contrastive prediction tasks to learn useful representations, we systematically study the major components of our framework. We show that (1) composition of data augmentations plays a critical role in defining effective predictive tasks, (2) introducing a learnable nonlinear transformation between the representation and the contrastive loss substantially improves the quality of the learned representations, and (3) contrastive learning benefits from larger batch sizes and more training steps compared to supervised learning. By combining these findings, we are able to considerably outperform previous methods for self-supervised and semi-supervised learning on ImageNet. A linear classifier trained on self-supervised representations learned by SimCLR achieves 76.5% top-1 accuracy, which is a 7% relative improvement over previous state-of-the-art, matching the performance of a supervised ResNet-50. When fine-tuned on only 1% of the labels, we achieve 85.8% top-5 accuracy, outperforming AlexNet with 100X fewer labels.
Transfer learning aims at improving the performance of target learners on target domains by transferring the knowledge contained in different but related source domains. In this way, the dependence on a large number of target domain data can be reduced for constructing target learners. Due to the wide application prospects, transfer learning has become a popular and promising area in machine learning. Although there are already some valuable and impressive surveys on transfer learning, these surveys introduce approaches in a relatively isolated way and lack the recent advances in transfer learning. As the rapid expansion of the transfer learning area, it is both necessary and challenging to comprehensively review the relevant studies. This survey attempts to connect and systematize the existing transfer learning researches, as well as to summarize and interpret the mechanisms and the strategies in a comprehensive way, which may help readers have a better understanding of the current research status and ideas. Different from previous surveys, this survey paper reviews over forty representative transfer learning approaches from the perspectives of data and model. The applications of transfer learning are also briefly introduced. In order to show the performance of different transfer learning models, twenty representative transfer learning models are used for experiments. The models are performed on three different datasets, i.e., Amazon Reviews, Reuters-21578, and Office-31. And the experimental results demonstrate the importance of selecting appropriate transfer learning models for different applications in practice.