This paper addresses the challenges of optimally placing a finite number of sensors to detect Poisson-distributed targets in a bounded domain. We seek to rigorously account for uncertainty in the target arrival model throughout the problem. Sensor locations are selected to maximize the probability that no targets are missed. While this objective function is well-suited to applications where failure to detect targets is highly undesirable, it does not lead to a computationally efficient optimization problem. We propose an approximation of the objective function that is non-negative, submodular, and monotone and for which greedy selection of sensor locations works well. We also characterize the gap between the desired objective function and our approximation. For numerical illustrations, we consider the case of the detection of ship traffic using sensors mounted on the seafloor.
This paper presents the error analysis of numerical methods on graded meshes for stochastic Volterra equations with weakly singular kernels. We first prove a novel regularity estimate for the exact solution via analyzing the associated convolution structure. This reveals that the exact solution exhibits an initial singularity in the sense that its H\"older continuous exponent on any neighborhood of $t=0$ is lower than that on every compact subset of $(0,T]$. Motivated by the initial singularity, we then construct the Euler--Maruyama method, fast Euler--Maruyama method, and Milstein method based on graded meshes. By establishing their pointwise-in-time error estimates, we give the grading exponents of meshes to attain the optimal uniform-in-time convergence orders, where the convergence orders improve those of the uniform mesh case. Numerical experiments are finally reported to confirm the sharpness of theoretical findings.
This paper examines the distribution of order statistics taken from simple-random-sampling without replacement (SRSWOR) from a finite population with values 1,...,N. This distribution is a shifted version of the beta-binomial distribution, parameterised in a particular way. We derive the distribution and show how it relates to the distribution of order statistics under IID sampling from a uniform distribution over the unit interval. We examine properties of the distribution, including moments and asymptotic results. We also generalise the distribution to sampling without replacement of order statistics from an arbitrary finite population. We examine the properties of the order statistics for inference about an unknown population size (called the German tank problem) and we derive relevant estimation results based on observation of an arbitrary set of order statistics. We also introduce an algorithm that simulates sampling without replacement of order statistics from an arbitrary finite population without having to generate the entire sample.
Model order reduction provides low-complexity high-fidelity surrogate models that allow rapid and accurate solutions of parametric differential equations. The development of reduced order models for parametric nonlinear Hamiltonian systems is still challenged by several factors: (i) the geometric structure encoding the physical properties of the dynamics; (ii) the slowly decaying Kolmogorov $n$-width of conservative dynamics; (iii) the gradient structure of the nonlinear flow velocity; (iv) high variations in the numerical rank of the state as a function of time and parameters. We propose to address these aspects via a structure-preserving adaptive approach that combines symplectic dynamical low-rank approximation with adaptive gradient-preserving hyper-reduction and parameters sampling. Additionally, we propose to vary in time the dimensions of both the reduced basis space and the hyper-reduction space by monitoring the quality of the reduced solution via an error indicator related to the projection error of the Hamiltonian vector field. The resulting adaptive hyper-reduced models preserve the geometric structure of the Hamiltonian flow, do not rely on prior information on the dynamics, and can be solved at a cost that is linear in the dimension of the full order model and linear in the number of test parameters. Numerical experiments demonstrate the improved performances of the resulting fully adaptive models compared to the original and reduced order models.
This paper develops a new vascular respiratory motion compensation algorithm, Motion-Related Compensation (MRC), to conduct vascular respiratory motion compensation by extrapolating the correlation between invisible vascular and visible non-vascular. Robot-assisted vascular intervention can significantly reduce the radiation exposure of surgeons. In robot-assisted image-guided intervention, blood vessels are constantly moving/deforming due to respiration, and they are invisible in the X-ray images unless contrast agents are injected. The vascular respiratory motion compensation technique predicts 2D vascular roadmaps in live X-ray images. When blood vessels are visible after contrast agents injection, vascular respiratory motion compensation is conducted based on the sparse Lucas-Kanade feature tracker. An MRC model is trained to learn the correlation between vascular and non-vascular motions. During the intervention, the invisible blood vessels are predicted with visible tissues and the trained MRC model. Moreover, a Gaussian-based outlier filter is adopted for refinement. Experiments on in-vivo data sets show that the proposed method can yield vascular respiratory motion compensation in 0.032 sec, with an average error 1.086 mm. Our real-time and accurate vascular respiratory motion compensation approach contributes to modern vascular intervention and surgical robots.
This paper addresses a mathematically tractable model of the Prisoner's Dilemma using the framework of active inference. In this work, we design pairs of Bayesian agents that are tracking the joint game state of their and their opponent's choices in an Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma game. The specification of the agents' belief architecture in the form of a partially-observed Markov decision process allows careful and rigourous investigation into the dynamics of two-player gameplay, including the derivation of optimal conditions for phase transitions that are required to achieve certain game-theoretic steady states. We show that the critical time points governing the phase transition are linearly related to each other as a function of learning rate and the reward function. We then investigate the patterns that emerge when varying the agents' learning rates, as well as the relationship between the stochastic and deterministic solutions to the two-agent system.
This paper addresses the problem of robotic cutting during disassembly of products for materials separation and recycling. Waste handling applications differ from milling in manufacturing processes, as they engender considerable variety and uncertainty in the parameters (e.g. hardness) of materials which the robot must cut. To address this challenge, we propose a learning-based approach incorporating elements of interaction control, in which the robot can adapt key parameters, such as feed rate, depth of cut, and mechanical compliance during task execution. We show how a mathematical model of cutting mechanics, embedded in a simulation environment, can be used to rapidly train the system without needing large amounts of data from physical cutting trials. The simulation approach was validated on a real robot setup based on four case study materials with varying structural and mechanical properties. We demonstrate the proposed method minimises process force and path deviations to a level similar to offline optimal planning methods, while the average time to complete a cutting task is within 25% of the optimum, at the expense of reduced volume of material removed per pass. A key advantage of our approach over similar works is that no prior knowledge about the material is required.
The limited memory steepest descent method (Fletcher, 2012) for unconstrained optimization problems stores a few past gradients to compute multiple stepsizes at once. We review this method and propose new variants. For strictly convex quadratic objective functions, we study the numerical behavior of different techniques to compute new stepsizes. In particular, we introduce a method to improve the use of harmonic Ritz values. We also show the existence of a secant condition associated with LMSD, where the approximating Hessian is projected onto a low-dimensional space. In the general nonlinear case, we propose two new alternatives to Fletcher's method: first, the addition of symmetry constraints to the secant condition valid for the quadratic case; second, a perturbation of the last differences between consecutive gradients, to satisfy multiple secant equations simultaneously. We show that Fletcher's method can also be interpreted from this viewpoint.
By a semi-Lagrangian change of coordinates, the hydrostatic Euler equations describing free-surface sheared flows is rewritten as a system of quasilinear equations, where stability conditions can be determined by the analysis of its hyperbolic structure. This new system can be written as a quasi linear system in time and horizontal variables and involves no more vertical derivatives. However, the coefficients in front of the horizontal derivatives include an integral operator acting on the new vertical variable. The spectrum of these operators is studied in detail, in particular it includes a continuous part. Riemann invariants are then determined as conserved quantities along the characteristic curves. Examples of solutions are provided, in particular stationary solutions and solutions blowing-up in finite time. Eventually, we propose an exact multi-layer $\mathbb{P}_0$-discretization, which could be used to solve numerically this semi-Lagrangian system, and analyze the eigenvalues of the corresponding discretized operator to investigate the hyperbolic nature of the approximated system.
Combining sum factorization, weighted quadrature, and row-based assembly enables efficient higher-order computations for tensor product splines. We aim to transfer these concepts to immersed boundary methods, which perform simulations on a regular background mesh cut by a boundary representation that defines the domain of interest. Therefore, we present a novel concept to divide the support of cut basis functions to obtain regular parts suited for sum factorization. These regions require special discontinuous weighted quadrature rules, while Gauss-like quadrature rules integrate the remaining support. Two linear elasticity benchmark problems confirm the derived estimate for the computational costs of the different integration routines and their combination. Although the presence of cut elements reduces the speed-up, its contribution to the overall computation time declines with h-refinement.
In large-scale systems there are fundamental challenges when centralised techniques are used for task allocation. The number of interactions is limited by resource constraints such as on computation, storage, and network communication. We can increase scalability by implementing the system as a distributed task-allocation system, sharing tasks across many agents. However, this also increases the resource cost of communications and synchronisation, and is difficult to scale. In this paper we present four algorithms to solve these problems. The combination of these algorithms enable each agent to improve their task allocation strategy through reinforcement learning, while changing how much they explore the system in response to how optimal they believe their current strategy is, given their past experience. We focus on distributed agent systems where the agents' behaviours are constrained by resource usage limits, limiting agents to local rather than system-wide knowledge. We evaluate these algorithms in a simulated environment where agents are given a task composed of multiple subtasks that must be allocated to other agents with differing capabilities, to then carry out those tasks. We also simulate real-life system effects such as networking instability. Our solution is shown to solve the task allocation problem to 6.7% of the theoretical optimal within the system configurations considered. It provides 5x better performance recovery over no-knowledge retention approaches when system connectivity is impacted, and is tested against systems up to 100 agents with less than a 9% impact on the algorithms' performance.