Understanding natural symmetries is key to making sense of our complex and ever-changing world. Recent work has shown that neural networks can learn such symmetries directly from data using Hamiltonian Neural Networks (HNNs). But HNNs struggle when trained on datasets where energy is not conserved. In this paper, we ask whether it is possible to identify and decompose conservative and dissipative dynamics simultaneously. We propose Dissipative Hamiltonian Neural Networks (D-HNNs), which parameterize both a Hamiltonian and a Rayleigh dissipation function. Taken together, they represent an implicit Helmholtz decomposition which can separate dissipative effects such as friction from symmetries such as conservation of energy. We train our model to decompose a damped mass-spring system into its friction and inertial terms and then show that this decomposition can be used to predict dynamics for unseen friction coefficients. Then we apply our model to real world data including a large, noisy ocean current dataset where decomposing the velocity field yields useful scientific insights.
The approximate uniform sampling of graph realizations with a given degree sequence is an everyday task in several social science, computer science, engineering etc. projects. One approach is using Markov chains. The best available current result about the well-studied switch Markov chain is that it is rapidly mixing on P-stable degree sequences (see DOI:10.1016/j.ejc.2021.103421). The switch Markov chain does not change any degree sequence. However, there are cases where degree intervals are specified rather than a single degree sequence. (A natural scenario where this problem arises is in hypothesis testing on social networks that are only partially observed.) Rechner, Strowick, and M\"uller-Hannemann introduced in 2018 the notion of degree interval Markov chain which uses three (separately well-studied) local operations (switch, hinge-flip and toggle), and employing on degree sequence realizations where any two sequences under scrutiny have very small coordinate-wise distance. Recently Amanatidis and Kleer published a beautiful paper (arXiv:2110.09068), showing that the degree interval Markov chain is rapidly mixing if the sequences are coming from a system of very thin intervals which are centered not far from a regular degree sequence. In this paper we extend substantially their result, showing that the degree interval Markov chain is rapidly mixing if the intervals are centred at P-stable degree sequences.
Among the infinite number of possible movements that can be produced, humans are commonly assumed to choose those that optimize criteria such as minimizing movement time, subject to certain movement constraints like signal-dependent and constant motor noise. While so far these assumptions have only been evaluated for simplified point-mass or planar models, we address the question of whether they can predict reaching movements in a full skeletal model of the human upper extremity. We learn a control policy using a motor babbling approach as implemented in reinforcement learning, using aimed movements of the tip of the right index finger towards randomly placed 3D targets of varying size. We use a state-of-the-art biomechanical model, which includes seven actuated degrees of freedom. To deal with the curse of dimensionality, we use a simplified second-order muscle model, acting at each degree of freedom instead of individual muscles. The results confirm that the assumptions of signal-dependent and constant motor noise, together with the objective of movement time minimization, are sufficient for a state-of-the-art skeletal model of the human upper extremity to reproduce complex phenomena of human movement, in particular Fitts' Law and the 2/3 Power Law. This result supports the notion that control of the complex human biomechanical system can plausibly be determined by a set of simple assumptions and can easily be learned.
In this paper we present a deep learning method to predict the temporal evolution of dissipative dynamic systems. We propose using both geometric and thermodynamic inductive biases to improve accuracy and generalization of the resulting integration scheme. The first is achieved with Graph Neural Networks, which induces a non-Euclidean geometrical prior with permutation invariant node and edge update functions. The second bias is forced by learning the GENERIC structure of the problem, an extension of the Hamiltonian formalism, to model more general non-conservative dynamics. Several examples are provided in both Eulerian and Lagrangian description in the context of fluid and solid mechanics respectively, achieving relative mean errors of less than 3% in all the tested examples. Two ablation studies are provided based on recent works in both physics-informed and geometric deep learning.
The Monge-Amp\`ere equation is a fully nonlinear partial differential equation (PDE) of fundamental importance in analysis, geometry and in the applied sciences. In this paper we solve the Dirichlet problem associated with the Monge-Amp\`ere equation using neural networks and we show that an ansatz using deep input convex neural networks can be used to find the unique convex solution. As part of our analysis we study the effect of singularities, discontinuities and noise in the source function, we consider nontrivial domains, and we investigate how the method performs in higher dimensions. We also compare this method to an alternative approach in which standard feed-forward networks are used together with a loss function which penalizes lack of convexity.
Present-day atomistic simulations generate long trajectories of ever more complex systems. Analyzing these data, discovering metastable states, and uncovering their nature is becoming increasingly challenging. In this paper, we first use the variational approach to conformation dynamics to discover the slowest dynamical modes of the simulations. This allows the different metastable states of the system to be located and organized hierarchically. The physical descriptors that characterize metastable states are discovered by means of a machine learning method. We show in the cases of two proteins, Chignolin and Bovine Pancreatic Trypsin Inhibitor, how such analysis can be effortlessly performed in a matter of seconds. Another strength of our approach is that it can be applied to the analysis of both unbiased and biased simulations.
The adaptive processing of structured data is a long-standing research topic in machine learning that investigates how to automatically learn a mapping from a structured input to outputs of various nature. Recently, there has been an increasing interest in the adaptive processing of graphs, which led to the development of different neural network-based methodologies. In this thesis, we take a different route and develop a Bayesian Deep Learning framework for graph learning. The dissertation begins with a review of the principles over which most of the methods in the field are built, followed by a study on graph classification reproducibility issues. We then proceed to bridge the basic ideas of deep learning for graphs with the Bayesian world, by building our deep architectures in an incremental fashion. This framework allows us to consider graphs with discrete and continuous edge features, producing unsupervised embeddings rich enough to reach the state of the art on several classification tasks. Our approach is also amenable to a Bayesian nonparametric extension that automatizes the choice of almost all model's hyper-parameters. Two real-world applications demonstrate the efficacy of deep learning for graphs. The first concerns the prediction of information-theoretic quantities for molecular simulations with supervised neural models. After that, we exploit our Bayesian models to solve a malware-classification task while being robust to intra-procedural code obfuscation techniques. We conclude the dissertation with an attempt to blend the best of the neural and Bayesian worlds together. The resulting hybrid model is able to predict multimodal distributions conditioned on input graphs, with the consequent ability to model stochasticity and uncertainty better than most works. Overall, we aim to provide a Bayesian perspective into the articulated research field of deep learning for graphs.
This book develops an effective theory approach to understanding deep neural networks of practical relevance. Beginning from a first-principles component-level picture of networks, we explain how to determine an accurate description of the output of trained networks by solving layer-to-layer iteration equations and nonlinear learning dynamics. A main result is that the predictions of networks are described by nearly-Gaussian distributions, with the depth-to-width aspect ratio of the network controlling the deviations from the infinite-width Gaussian description. We explain how these effectively-deep networks learn nontrivial representations from training and more broadly analyze the mechanism of representation learning for nonlinear models. From a nearly-kernel-methods perspective, we find that the dependence of such models' predictions on the underlying learning algorithm can be expressed in a simple and universal way. To obtain these results, we develop the notion of representation group flow (RG flow) to characterize the propagation of signals through the network. By tuning networks to criticality, we give a practical solution to the exploding and vanishing gradient problem. We further explain how RG flow leads to near-universal behavior and lets us categorize networks built from different activation functions into universality classes. Altogether, we show that the depth-to-width ratio governs the effective model complexity of the ensemble of trained networks. By using information-theoretic techniques, we estimate the optimal aspect ratio at which we expect the network to be practically most useful and show how residual connections can be used to push this scale to arbitrary depths. With these tools, we can learn in detail about the inductive bias of architectures, hyperparameters, and optimizers.
Deep learning is usually described as an experiment-driven field under continuous criticizes of lacking theoretical foundations. This problem has been partially fixed by a large volume of literature which has so far not been well organized. This paper reviews and organizes the recent advances in deep learning theory. The literature is categorized in six groups: (1) complexity and capacity-based approaches for analyzing the generalizability of deep learning; (2) stochastic differential equations and their dynamic systems for modelling stochastic gradient descent and its variants, which characterize the optimization and generalization of deep learning, partially inspired by Bayesian inference; (3) the geometrical structures of the loss landscape that drives the trajectories of the dynamic systems; (4) the roles of over-parameterization of deep neural networks from both positive and negative perspectives; (5) theoretical foundations of several special structures in network architectures; and (6) the increasingly intensive concerns in ethics and security and their relationships with generalizability.
Humans and animals have the ability to continually acquire, fine-tune, and transfer knowledge and skills throughout their lifespan. This ability, referred to as lifelong learning, is mediated by a rich set of neurocognitive mechanisms that together contribute to the development and specialization of our sensorimotor skills as well as to long-term memory consolidation and retrieval. Consequently, lifelong learning capabilities are crucial for autonomous agents interacting in the real world and processing continuous streams of information. However, lifelong learning remains a long-standing challenge for machine learning and neural network models since the continual acquisition of incrementally available information from non-stationary data distributions generally leads to catastrophic forgetting or interference. This limitation represents a major drawback for state-of-the-art deep neural network models that typically learn representations from stationary batches of training data, thus without accounting for situations in which information becomes incrementally available over time. In this review, we critically summarize the main challenges linked to lifelong learning for artificial learning systems and compare existing neural network approaches that alleviate, to different extents, catastrophic forgetting. We discuss well-established and emerging research motivated by lifelong learning factors in biological systems such as structural plasticity, memory replay, curriculum and transfer learning, intrinsic motivation, and multisensory integration.
Image-to-image translation aims to learn the mapping between two visual domains. There are two main challenges for many applications: 1) the lack of aligned training pairs and 2) multiple possible outputs from a single input image. In this work, we present an approach based on disentangled representation for producing diverse outputs without paired training images. To achieve diversity, we propose to embed images onto two spaces: a domain-invariant content space capturing shared information across domains and a domain-specific attribute space. Our model takes the encoded content features extracted from a given input and the attribute vectors sampled from the attribute space to produce diverse outputs at test time. To handle unpaired training data, we introduce a novel cross-cycle consistency loss based on disentangled representations. Qualitative results show that our model can generate diverse and realistic images on a wide range of tasks without paired training data. For quantitative comparisons, we measure realism with user study and diversity with a perceptual distance metric. We apply the proposed model to domain adaptation and show competitive performance when compared to the state-of-the-art on the MNIST-M and the LineMod datasets.