This work addresses optimal control problems governed by a linear time-dependent partial differential equation (PDE) as well as integer constraints on the control. Moreover, partial observations are assumed in the objective function. The resulting problem poses several numerical challenges due to the mixture of combinatorial aspects, induced by integer variables, and large scale linear algebra issues, arising from the PDE discretization. Since classical solution approaches such as the branch-and-bound framework are typically overwhelmed by such large-scale problems, this work extends an improved penalty algorithm proposed by the authors, to the time-dependent setting. The main contribution is a novel combination of an interior point method, preconditioning, and model order reduction yielding a tailored local optimization solver at the heart of the overall solution procedure. A thorough numerical investigation is carried out both for a Poisson problem as well as a convection-diffusion problem demonstrating the versatility of the approach.
There are several challenges associated with inverse problems in which we seek to reconstruct a piecewise constant field, and which we model using multiple level sets. Adopting a Bayesian viewpoint, we impose prior distributions on both the level set functions that determine the piecewise constant regions as well as the parameters that determine their magnitudes. We develop a Gauss-Newton approach with a backtracking line search to efficiently compute the maximum a priori (MAP) estimate as a solution to the inverse problem. We use the Gauss-Newton Laplace approximation to construct a Gaussian approximation of the posterior distribution and use preconditioned Krylov subspace methods to sample from the resulting approximation. To visualize the uncertainty associated with the parameter reconstructions we compute the approximate posterior variance using a matrix-free Monte Carlo diagonal estimator, which we develop in this paper. We will demonstrate the benefits of our approach and solvers on synthetic test problems (photoacoustic and hydraulic tomography, respectively a linear and nonlinear inverse problem) as well as an application to X-ray imaging with real data.
The minimum sum-of-squares clustering (MSSC), or k-means type clustering, is traditionally considered an unsupervised learning task. In recent years, the use of background knowledge to improve the cluster quality and promote interpretability of the clustering process has become a hot research topic at the intersection of mathematical optimization and machine learning research. The problem of taking advantage of background information in data clustering is called semi-supervised or constrained clustering. In this paper, we present a new branch-and-bound algorithm for semi-supervised MSSC, where background knowledge is incorporated as pairwise must-link and cannot-link constraints. For the lower bound procedure, we solve the semidefinite programming relaxation of the MSSC discrete optimization model, and we use a cutting-plane procedure for strengthening the bound. For the upper bound, instead, by using integer programming tools, we propose an adaptation of the k-means algorithm to the constrained case. For the first time, the proposed global optimization algorithm efficiently manages to solve real-world instances up to 800 data points with different combinations of must-link and cannot-link constraints and with a generic number of features. This problem size is about four times larger than the one of the instances solved by state-of-the-art exact algorithms.
Two types of second-order in time partial differential equations (PDEs), namely semilinear wave equations and semilinear beam equations are considered. To solve these equations with exponential integrators, we present an approach to compute efficiently the action of the matrix exponential as well as those of related matrix functions. Various numerical simulations are presented that illustrate this approach.
The Bayesian solution to a statistical inverse problem can be summarised by a mode of the posterior distribution, i.e. a MAP estimator. The MAP estimator essentially coincides with the (regularised) variational solution to the inverse problem, seen as minimisation of the Onsager-Machlup functional of the posterior measure. An open problem in the stability analysis of inverse problems is to establish a relationship between the convergence properties of solutions obtained by the variational approach and by the Bayesian approach. To address this problem, we propose a general convergence theory for modes that is based on the $\Gamma$-convergence of Onsager-Machlup functionals, and apply this theory to Bayesian inverse problems with Gaussian and edge-preserving Besov priors. Part II of this paper considers more general prior distributions.
In this paper, we propose a semigroup method for solving high-dimensional elliptic partial differential equations (PDEs) and the associated eigenvalue problems based on neural networks. For the PDE problems, we reformulate the original equations as variational problems with the help of semigroup operators and then solve the variational problems with neural network (NN) parameterization. The main advantages are that no mixed second-order derivative computation is needed during the stochastic gradient descent training and that the boundary conditions are taken into account automatically by the semigroup operator. Unlike popular methods like PINN \cite{raissi2019physics} and Deep Ritz \cite{weinan2018deep} where the Dirichlet boundary condition is enforced solely through penalty functions and thus changes the true solution, the proposed method is able to address the boundary conditions without penalty functions and it gives the correct true solution even when penalty functions are added, thanks to the semigroup operator. For eigenvalue problems, a primal-dual method is proposed, efficiently resolving the constraint with a simple scalar dual variable and resulting in a faster algorithm compared with the BSDE solver \cite{han2020solving} in certain problems such as the eigenvalue problem associated with the linear Schr\"odinger operator. Numerical results are provided to demonstrate the performance of the proposed methods.
In this paper a class of optimization problems with uncertain linear constraints is discussed. It is assumed that the constraint coefficients are random vectors whose probability distributions are only partially known. Possibility theory is used to model the imprecise probabilities. In one of the interpretations, a possibility distribution (a membership function of a fuzzy set) in the set of coefficient realizations induces a necessity measure, which in turn defines a family of probability distributions in this set. The distributionally robust approach is then used to transform the imprecise constraints into deterministic counterparts. Namely, the uncertain left-had side of each constraint is replaced with the expected value with respect to the worst probability distribution that can occur. It is shown how to represent the resulting problem by using linear or second order cone constraints. This leads to problems which are computationally tractable for a wide class of optimization models, in particular for linear programming.
Recent advances in implicit neural representations show great promise when it comes to generating numerical solutions to partial differential equations. Compared to conventional alternatives, such representations employ parameterized neural networks to define, in a mesh-free manner, signals that are highly-detailed, continuous, and fully differentiable. In this work, we present a novel machine learning approach for topology optimization -- an important class of inverse problems with high-dimensional parameter spaces and highly nonlinear objective landscapes. To effectively leverage neural representations in the context of mesh-free topology optimization, we use multilayer perceptrons to parameterize both density and displacement fields. Our experiments indicate that our method is highly competitive for minimizing structural compliance objectives, and it enables self-supervised learning of continuous solution spaces for topology optimization problems.
This article deals with an inverse problem of identifying the fractional order in the 1D time fractional diffusion equation (TFDE in short) using the measurement at one space-time point. Based on the expression of the solution to the forward problem, the inverse problem is transformed to a nonlinear algebraic equation. By choosing suitable initial values and the measured point, the nonlinear equation has a unique solution by the monotonicity of the Mittag-Lellfer function. Theoretical testifications are presented to demonstrate the unique solvability of the inverse problem.
A fractal mobile-immobile (MIM in short) solute transport model in porous media is set forth, and an inverse problem of determining the fractional orders by the additional measurements at one interior point is investigated by Laplace transform. The unique existence of the solution to the forward problem is obtained based on the inverse Laplace transform, and the uniqueness of the inverse problem is proved in the real-space of Laplace transform by the maximum principle, and numerical inversions with noisy data are presented to demonstrate a numerical stability of the inverse problem.
The use of orthogonal projections on high-dimensional input and target data in learning frameworks is studied. First, we investigate the relations between two standard objectives in dimension reduction, maximizing variance and preservation of pairwise relative distances. The derivation of their asymptotic correlation and numerical experiments tell that a projection usually cannot satisfy both objectives. In a standard classification problem we determine projections on the input data that balance them and compare subsequent results. Next, we extend our application of orthogonal projections to deep learning frameworks. We introduce new variational loss functions that enable integration of additional information via transformations and projections of the target data. In two supervised learning problems, clinical image segmentation and music information classification, the application of the proposed loss functions increase the accuracy.