Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) have proven a suitable mathematical scaffold for solving inverse ordinary (ODE) and partial differential equations (PDE). Typical inverse PINNs are formulated as soft-constrained multi-objective optimization problems with several hyperparameters. In this work, we demonstrate that inverse PINNs can be framed in terms of maximum-likelihood estimators (MLE) to allow explicit error propagation from interpolation to the physical model space through Taylor expansion, without the need of hyperparameter tuning. We explore its application to high-dimensional coupled ODEs constrained by differential algebraic equations that are common in transient chemical and biological kinetics. Furthermore, we show that singular-value decomposition (SVD) of the ODE coupling matrices (reaction stoichiometry matrix) provides reduced uncorrelated subspaces in which PINNs solutions can be represented and over which residuals can be projected. Finally, SVD bases serve as preconditioners for the inversion of covariance matrices in this hyperparameter-free robust application of MLE to ``kinetics-informed neural networks''.
We propose $\textit{iterative inversion}$ -- an algorithm for learning an inverse function without input-output pairs, but only with samples from the desired output distribution and access to the forward function. The key challenge is a $\textit{distribution shift}$ between the desired outputs and the outputs of an initial random guess, and we prove that iterative inversion can steer the learning correctly, under rather strict conditions on the function. We apply iterative inversion to learn control. Our input is a set of demonstrations of desired behavior, given as video embeddings of trajectories (without actions), and our method iteratively learns to imitate trajectories generated by the current policy, perturbed by random exploration noise. Our approach does not require rewards, and only employs supervised learning, which can be easily scaled to use state-of-the-art trajectory embedding techniques and policy representations. Indeed, with a VQ-VAE embedding, and a transformer-based policy, we demonstrate non-trivial continuous control on several tasks. Further, we report an improved performance on imitating diverse behaviors compared to reward based methods.
We introduce a sum-of-squares SDP hierarchy approximating the ground-state energy from below for quantum many-body problems, with a natural quantum embedding interpretation. We establish the connections between our approach and other variational methods for lower bounds, including the variational embedding, the RDM method in quantum chemistry, and the Anderson bounds. Additionally, inspired by the quantum information theory, we propose efficient strategies for optimizing cluster selection to tighten SDP relaxations while staying within a computational budget. Numerical experiments are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of our strategy. As a byproduct of our investigation, we find that quantum entanglement has the potential to capture the underlying graph of the many-body Hamiltonian.
Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are a popular formulation to train generative models for complex high dimensional data. The standard method for training GANs involves a gradient descent-ascent (GDA) procedure on a minimax optimization problem. This procedure is hard to analyze in general due to the nonlinear nature of the dynamics. We study the local dynamics of GDA for training a GAN with a kernel-based discriminator. This convergence analysis is based on a linearization of a non-linear dynamical system that describes the GDA iterations, under an \textit{isolated points model} assumption from [Becker et al. 2022]. Our analysis brings out the effect of the learning rates, regularization, and the bandwidth of the kernel discriminator, on the local convergence rate of GDA. Importantly, we show phase transitions that indicate when the system converges, oscillates, or diverges. We also provide numerical simulations that verify our claims.
Deep models have achieved impressive progress in solving partial differential equations (PDEs). A burgeoning paradigm is learning neural operators to approximate the input-output mappings of PDEs. While previous deep models have explored the multiscale architectures and various operator designs, they are limited to learning the operators as a whole in the coordinate space. In real physical science problems, PDEs are complex coupled equations with numerical solvers relying on discretization into high-dimensional coordinate space, which cannot be precisely approximated by a single operator nor efficiently learned due to the curse of dimensionality. We present Latent Spectral Models (LSM) toward an efficient and precise solver for high-dimensional PDEs. Going beyond the coordinate space, LSM enables an attention-based hierarchical projection network to reduce the high-dimensional data into a compact latent space in linear time. Inspired by classical spectral methods in numerical analysis, we design a neural spectral block to solve PDEs in the latent space that approximates complex input-output mappings via learning multiple basis operators, enjoying nice theoretical guarantees for convergence and approximation. Experimentally, LSM achieves consistent state-of-the-art and yields a relative gain of 11.5% averaged on seven benchmarks covering both solid and fluid physics. Code is available at //github.com/thuml/Latent-Spectral-Models.
Regression analysis under the assumption of monotonicity is a well-studied statistical problem and has been used in a wide range of applications. However, there remains a lack of a broadly applicable methodology that permits information borrowing, for efficiency gains, when jointly estimating multiple monotonic regression functions. We introduce such a methodology by extending the isotonic regression problem presented in the article "The isotonic regression problem and its dual" (Barlow and Brunk, 1972). The presented approach can be applied to both fixed and random designs and any number of explanatory variables (regressors). Our framework penalizes pairwise differences in the values (levels) of the monotonic function estimates, with the weight of penalty being determined based on a statistical test, which results in information being shared across data sets if similarities in the regression functions exist. Function estimates are subsequently derived using an iterative optimization routine that uses existing solution algorithms for the isotonic regression problem. Simulation studies for normally and binomially distributed response data illustrate that function estimates are consistently improved if similarities between functions exist, and are not oversmoothed otherwise. We further apply our methodology to analyse two public health data sets: neonatal mortality data for Porto Alegre, Brazil, and stroke patient data for North West England.
We introduce an approach which allows inferring causal relationships between variables for which the time evolution is available. Our method builds on the ideas of Granger Causality and Transfer Entropy, but overcomes most of their limitations. Specifically, our approach tests whether the predictability of a putative driven system Y can be improved by incorporating information from a potential driver system X, without making assumptions on the underlying dynamics and without the need to compute probability densities of the dynamic variables. Causality is assessed by a rigorous variational scheme based on the Information Imbalance of distance ranks, a recently developed statistical test capable of inferring the relative information content of different distance measures. This framework makes causality detection possible even for high-dimensional systems where only few of the variables are known or measured. Benchmark tests on coupled dynamical systems demonstrate that our approach outperforms other model-free causality detection methods, successfully handling both unidirectional and bidirectional couplings, and it is capable of detecting the arrow of time when present. We also show that the method can be used to robustly detect causality in electroencephalography data in humans.
This work proposes a solution for the problem of training physics informed networks under partial integro-differential equations. These equations require infinite or a large number of neural evaluations to construct a single residual for training. As a result, accurate evaluation may be impractical, and we show that naive approximations at replacing these integrals with unbiased estimates lead to biased loss functions and solutions. To overcome this bias, we investigate three types of solutions: the deterministic sampling approach, the double-sampling trick, and the delayed target method. We consider three classes of PDEs for benchmarking; one defining a Poisson problem with singular charges and weak solutions, another involving weak solutions on electro-magnetic fields and a Maxwell equation, and a third one defining a Smoluchowski coagulation problem. Our numerical results confirm the existence of the aforementioned bias in practice, and also show that our proposed delayed target approach can lead to accurate solutions with comparable quality to ones estimated with a large number of samples. Our implementation is open-source and available at //github.com/ehsansaleh/btspinn.
We present an exact Bayesian inference method for discrete statistical models, which can find exact solutions to many discrete inference problems, even with infinite support and continuous priors. To express such models, we introduce a probabilistic programming language that supports discrete and continuous sampling, discrete observations, affine functions, (stochastic) branching, and conditioning on events. Our key tool is probability generating functions: they provide a compact closed-form representation of distributions that are definable by programs, thus enabling the exact computation of posterior probabilities, expectation, variance, and higher moments. Our inference method is provably correct, fully automated and uses automatic differentiation (specifically, Taylor polynomials), but does not require computer algebra. Our experiments show that its performance on a range of real-world examples is competitive with approximate Monte Carlo methods, while avoiding approximation errors.
Partial differential equations (PDEs) that fit scientific data can represent physical laws with explainable mechanisms for various mathematically-oriented subjects, such as physics and finance. The data-driven discovery of PDEs from scientific data thrives as a new attempt to model complex phenomena in nature, but the effectiveness of current practice is typically limited by the scarcity of data and the complexity of phenomena. Especially, the discovery of PDEs with highly nonlinear coefficients from low-quality data remains largely under-addressed. To deal with this challenge, we propose a novel physics-guided learning method, which can not only encode observation knowledge such as initial and boundary conditions but also incorporate the basic physical principles and laws to guide the model optimization. We theoretically show that our proposed method strictly reduces the coefficient estimation error of existing baselines, and is also robust against noise. Extensive experiments show that the proposed method is more robust against data noise, and can reduce the estimation error by a large margin. Moreover, all the PDEs in the experiments are correctly discovered, and for the first time we are able to discover three-dimensional PDEs with highly nonlinear coefficients.
We analyze the dynamics of finite width effects in wide but finite feature learning neural networks. Starting from a dynamical mean field theory description of infinite width deep neural network kernel and prediction dynamics, we provide a characterization of the $\mathcal{O}(1/\sqrt{\text{width}})$ fluctuations of the DMFT order parameters over random initializations of the network weights. Our results, while perturbative in width, unlike prior analyses, are non-perturbative in the strength of feature learning. In the lazy limit of network training, all kernels are random but static in time and the prediction variance has a universal form. However, in the rich, feature learning regime, the fluctuations of the kernels and predictions are dynamically coupled with a variance that can be computed self-consistently. In two layer networks, we show how feature learning can dynamically reduce the variance of the final tangent kernel and final network predictions. We also show how initialization variance can slow down online learning in wide but finite networks. In deeper networks, kernel variance can dramatically accumulate through subsequent layers at large feature learning strengths, but feature learning continues to improve the signal-to-noise ratio of the feature kernels. In discrete time, we demonstrate that large learning rate phenomena such as edge of stability effects can be well captured by infinite width dynamics and that initialization variance can decrease dynamically. For CNNs trained on CIFAR-10, we empirically find significant corrections to both the bias and variance of network dynamics due to finite width.