A data-driven model augmentation framework, referred to as Weakly-coupled Integrated Inference and Machine Learning (IIML), is presented to improve the predictive accuracy of physical models. In contrast to parameter calibration, this work seeks corrections to the structure of the model by a) inferring augmentation fields that are consistent with the underlying model, and b) transforming these fields into corrective model forms. The proposed approach couples the inference and learning steps in a weak sense via an alternating optimization approach. This coupling ensures that the augmentation fields remain learnable and maintain consistent functional relationships with local modeled quantities across the training dataset. An iterative solution procedure is presented in this paper, removing the need to embed the augmentation function during the inference process. This framework is used to infer an augmentation introduced within a Polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) model using a small amount of training data (from only 14 training cases.) These training cases belong to a dataset consisting of high-fidelity simulation data obtained from a high-fidelity model of a first generation Toyota Mirai. All cases in this dataset are characterized by different inflow and outflow conditions on the same geometry. When tested on 1224 different configurations, the inferred augmentation significantly improves the predictive accuracy for a wide range of physical conditions. Predictions and available data for the current density distribution are also compared to demonstrate the predictive capability of the model for quantities of interest which were not involved in the inference process. The results demonstrate that the weakly-coupled IIML framework offers sophisticated and robust model augmentation capabilities without requiring extensive changes to the numerical solver.
The age of information metric fails to correctly describe the intrinsic semantics of a status update. In an intelligent reflecting surface-aided cooperative relay communication system, we propose the age of semantics (AoS) for measuring semantics freshness of the status updates. Specifically, we focus on the status updating from a source node (SN) to the destination, which is formulated as a Markov decision process (MDP). The objective of the SN is to maximize the expected satisfaction of AoS and energy consumption under the maximum transmit power constraint. To seek the optimal control policy, we first derive an online deep actor-critic (DAC) learning scheme under the on-policy temporal difference learning framework. However, implementing the online DAC in practice poses the key challenge in infinitely repeated interactions between the SN and the system, which can be dangerous particularly during the exploration. We then put forward a novel offline DAC scheme, which estimates the optimal control policy from a previously collected dataset without any further interactions with the system. Numerical experiments verify the theoretical results and show that our offline DAC scheme significantly outperforms the online DAC scheme and the most representative baselines in terms of mean utility, demonstrating strong robustness to dataset quality.
The use of neural networks has been very successful in a wide variety of applications. However, it has recently been observed that it is difficult to generalize the performance of neural networks under the condition of distributional shift. Several efforts have been made to identify potential out-of-distribution inputs. Although existing literature has made significant progress with regard to images and textual data, finance has been overlooked. The aim of this paper is to investigate the distribution shift in the credit scoring problem, one of the most important applications of finance. For the potential distribution shift problem, we propose a novel two-stage model. Using the out-of-distribution detection method, data is first separated into confident and unconfident sets. As a second step, we utilize the domain knowledge with a mean-variance optimization in order to provide reliable bounds for unconfident samples. Using empirical results, we demonstrate that our model offers reliable predictions for the vast majority of datasets. It is only a small portion of the dataset that is inherently difficult to judge, and we leave them to the judgment of human beings. Based on the two-stage model, highly confident predictions have been made and potential risks associated with the model have been significantly reduced.
Recently, Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) has shown promising performances on reconstructing 3D scenes and synthesizing novel views from a sparse set of 2D images. Albeit effective, the performance of NeRF is highly influenced by the quality of training samples. With limited posed images from the scene, NeRF fails to generalize well to novel views and may collapse to trivial solutions in unobserved regions. This makes NeRF impractical under resource-constrained scenarios. In this paper, we present a novel learning framework, ActiveNeRF, aiming to model a 3D scene with a constrained input budget. Specifically, we first incorporate uncertainty estimation into a NeRF model, which ensures robustness under few observations and provides an interpretation of how NeRF understands the scene. On this basis, we propose to supplement the existing training set with newly captured samples based on an active learning scheme. By evaluating the reduction of uncertainty given new inputs, we select the samples that bring the most information gain. In this way, the quality of novel view synthesis can be improved with minimal additional resources. Extensive experiments validate the performance of our model on both realistic and synthetic scenes, especially with scarcer training data. Code will be released at \url{//github.com/LeapLabTHU/ActiveNeRF}.
Electric vehicles (EVs) play critical roles in autonomous mobility-on-demand (AMoD) systems, but their unique charging patterns increase the model uncertainties in AMoD systems (e.g. state transition probability). Since there usually exists a mismatch between the training and test (true) environments, incorporating model uncertainty into system design is of critical importance in real-world applications. However, model uncertainties have not been considered explicitly in EV AMoD system rebalancing by existing literature yet and remain an urgent and challenging task. In this work, we design a robust and constrained multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) framework with transition kernel uncertainty for the EV rebalancing and charging problem. We then propose a robust and constrained MARL algorithm (ROCOMA) that trains a robust EV rebalancing policy to balance the supply-demand ratio and the charging utilization rate across the whole city under state transition uncertainty. Experiments show that the ROCOMA can learn an effective and robust rebalancing policy. It outperforms non-robust MARL methods when there are model uncertainties. It increases the system fairness by 19.6% and decreases the rebalancing costs by 75.8%.
For the first time, a nonlinear interface problem on an unbounded domain with nonmonotone set-valued transmission conditions is analyzed. The investigated problem involves a nonlinear monotone partial differential equation in the interior domain and the Laplacian in the exterior domain. Such a scalar interface problem models nonmonotone frictional contact of elastic infinite media. The variational formulation of the interface problem leads to a hemivariational inequality, which lives on the unbounded domain, and so cannot be treated numerically in a direct way. By boundary integral methods the problem is transformed and a novel hemivariational inequality (HVI) is obtained that lives on the interior domain and on the coupling boundary, only. Thus for discretization the coupling of finite elements and boundary elements is the method of choice. In addition smoothing techniques of nondifferentiable optimization are adapted and the nonsmooth part in the HVI is regularized. Thus we reduce the original variational problem to a finite dimensional problem that can be solved by standard optimization tools. We establish not only convergence results for the total approximation procedure, but also an asymptotic error estimate for the regularized HVI.
Time series classification is an important problem in real world. Due to its non-stationary property that the distribution changes over time, it remains challenging to build models for generalization to unseen distributions. In this paper, we propose to view the time series classification problem from the distribution perspective. We argue that the temporal complexity attributes to the unknown latent distributions within. To this end, we propose DIVERSIFY to learn generalized representations for time series classification. DIVERSIFY takes an iterative process: it first obtains the worst-case distribution scenario via adversarial training, then matches the distributions of the obtained sub-domains. We also present some theoretical insights. We conduct experiments on gesture recognition, speech commands recognition, wearable stress and affect detection, and sensor-based human activity recognition with a total of seven datasets in different settings. Results demonstrate that DIVERSIFY significantly outperforms other baselines and effectively characterizes the latent distributions by qualitative and quantitative analysis.
Deep learning has shown great potential for modeling the physical dynamics of complex particle systems such as fluids (in Lagrangian descriptions). Existing approaches, however, require the supervision of consecutive particle properties, including positions and velocities. In this paper, we consider a partially observable scenario known as fluid dynamics grounding, that is, inferring the state transitions and interactions within the fluid particle systems from sequential visual observations of the fluid surface. We propose a differentiable two-stage network named NeuroFluid. Our approach consists of (i) a particle-driven neural renderer, which involves fluid physical properties into the volume rendering function, and (ii) a particle transition model optimized to reduce the differences between the rendered and the observed images. NeuroFluid provides the first solution to unsupervised learning of particle-based fluid dynamics by training these two models jointly. It is shown to reasonably estimate the underlying physics of fluids with different initial shapes, viscosity, and densities. It is a potential alternative approach to understanding complex fluid mechanics, such as turbulence, that are difficult to model using traditional methods of mathematical physics.
Unsupervised domain adaptation has recently emerged as an effective paradigm for generalizing deep neural networks to new target domains. However, there is still enormous potential to be tapped to reach the fully supervised performance. In this paper, we present a novel active learning strategy to assist knowledge transfer in the target domain, dubbed active domain adaptation. We start from an observation that energy-based models exhibit free energy biases when training (source) and test (target) data come from different distributions. Inspired by this inherent mechanism, we empirically reveal that a simple yet efficient energy-based sampling strategy sheds light on selecting the most valuable target samples than existing approaches requiring particular architectures or computation of the distances. Our algorithm, Energy-based Active Domain Adaptation (EADA), queries groups of targe data that incorporate both domain characteristic and instance uncertainty into every selection round. Meanwhile, by aligning the free energy of target data compact around the source domain via a regularization term, domain gap can be implicitly diminished. Through extensive experiments, we show that EADA surpasses state-of-the-art methods on well-known challenging benchmarks with substantial improvements, making it a useful option in the open world. Code is available at //github.com/BIT-DA/EADA.
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.
With the rapid increase of large-scale, real-world datasets, it becomes critical to address the problem of long-tailed data distribution (i.e., a few classes account for most of the data, while most classes are under-represented). Existing solutions typically adopt class re-balancing strategies such as re-sampling and re-weighting based on the number of observations for each class. In this work, we argue that as the number of samples increases, the additional benefit of a newly added data point will diminish. We introduce a novel theoretical framework to measure data overlap by associating with each sample a small neighboring region rather than a single point. The effective number of samples is defined as the volume of samples and can be calculated by a simple formula $(1-\beta^{n})/(1-\beta)$, where $n$ is the number of samples and $\beta \in [0,1)$ is a hyperparameter. We design a re-weighting scheme that uses the effective number of samples for each class to re-balance the loss, thereby yielding a class-balanced loss. Comprehensive experiments are conducted on artificially induced long-tailed CIFAR datasets and large-scale datasets including ImageNet and iNaturalist. Our results show that when trained with the proposed class-balanced loss, the network is able to achieve significant performance gains on long-tailed datasets.