Recent advances in practical quantum computing have led to a variety of cloud-based quantum computing platforms that allow researchers to evaluate their algorithms on noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices. A common property of quantum computers is that they can exhibit instances of true randomness as opposed to pseudo-randomness obtained from classical systems. Investigating the effects of such true quantum randomness in the context of machine learning is appealing, and recent results vaguely suggest that benefits can indeed be achieved from the use of quantum random numbers. To shed some more light on this topic, we empirically study the effects of hardware-biased quantum random numbers on the initialization of artificial neural network weights in numerical experiments. We find no statistically significant difference in comparison with unbiased quantum random numbers as well as biased and unbiased random numbers from a classical pseudo-random number generator. The quantum random numbers for our experiments are obtained from real quantum hardware.
When generating in-silico clinical electrophysiological outputs, such as electrocardiograms (ECGs) and body surface potential maps (BSPMs), mathematical models have relied on single physics, i.e. of the cardiac electrophysiology (EP), neglecting the role of the heart motion. Since the heart is the most powerful source of electrical activity in the human body, its motion dynamically shifts the position of the principal electrical sources in the torso, influencing electrical potential distribution and potentially altering the EP outputs. In this work, we propose a computational model for the simulation of ECGs and BSPMs by coupling a cardiac electromechanical model with a model that simulates the propagation of the EP signal in the torso, thanks to a flexible numerical approach, that simulates the torso domain deformation induced by the myocardial displacement. Our model accounts for the major mechano-electrical feedbacks, along with unidirectional displacement and potential couplings from the heart to the surrounding body. For the numerical discretization, we employ a versatile intergrid transfer operator that allows for the use of different Finite Element spaces to be used in the cardiac and torso domains. Our numerical results are obtained on a realistic 3D biventricular-torso geometry, and cover both cases of sinus rhythm and ventricular tachycardia (VT), solving both the electromechanical-torso model in dynamical domains, and the classical electrophysiology-torso model in static domains. By comparing standard 12-lead ECG and BSPMs, we highlight the non-negligible effects of the myocardial contraction on the EP-outputs, especially in pathological conditions, such as the VT.
The deformed energy method has shown to be a good option for dimensional synthesis of mechanisms. In this paper the introduction of some new features to such approach is proposed. First, constraints fixing dimensions of certain links are introduced in the error function of the synthesis problem. Second, requirements on distances between determinate nodes are included in the error function for the analysis of the deformed position problem. Both the overall synthesis error function and the inner analysis error function are optimized using a Sequential Quadratic Problem (SQP) approach. This also reduces the probability of branch or circuit defects. In the case of the inner function analytical derivatives are used, while in the synthesis optimization approximate derivatives have been introduced. Furthermore, constraints are analyzed under two formulations, the Euclidean distance and an alternative approach that uses the previous raised to the power of two. The latter approach is often used in kinematics, and simplifies the computation of derivatives. Some examples are provided to show the convergence order of the error function and the fulfilment of the constraints in both formulations studied under different topological situations or achieved energy levels.
Motivated by applications to the study of depth functions for tree-indexed random variables generated by point processes, we describe functional limit theorems for the intensity measure of point processes. Specifically, we establish uniform laws of large numbers and uniform central limit theorems over a class of bounded measurable functions for estimates of the intensity measure. Using these results, we derive the uniform asymptotic properties of half-space depth and, as corollaries, obtain the asymptotic behavior of medians and other quantiles of the standardized intensity measure. Additionally, we obtain uniform concentration upper bound for the estimator of half-space depth. As a consequence of our results, we also derive uniform consistency and uniform asymptotic normality of Lotka-Nagaev and Harris-type estimators for the Laplace transform of the point processes in a branching random walk.
We propose a novel white-box approach to hyper-parameter optimization. Motivated by recent work establishing a relationship between flat minima and generalization, we first establish a relationship between the strong convexity of the loss and its flatness. Based on this, we seek to find hyper-parameter configurations that improve flatness by minimizing the strong convexity of the loss. By using the structure of the underlying neural network, we derive closed-form equations to approximate the strong convexity parameter, and attempt to find hyper-parameters that minimize it in a randomized fashion. Through experiments on 14 classification datasets, we show that our method achieves strong performance at a fraction of the runtime.
We perform a quantitative assessment of different strategies to compute the contribution due to surface tension in incompressible two-phase flows using a conservative level set (CLS) method. More specifically, we compare classical approaches, such as the direct computation of the curvature from the level set or the Laplace-Beltrami operator, with an evolution equation for the mean curvature recently proposed in literature. We consider the test case of a static bubble, for which an exact solution for the pressure jump across the interface is available, and the test case of an oscillating bubble, showing pros and cons of the different approaches.
We have developed an efficient and unconditionally energy-stable method for simulating droplet formation dynamics. Our approach involves a novel time-marching scheme based on the scalar auxiliary variable technique, specifically designed for solving the Cahn-Hilliard-Navier-Stokes phase field model with variable density and viscosity. We have successfully applied this method to simulate droplet formation in scenarios where a Newtonian fluid is injected through a vertical tube into another immiscible Newtonian fluid. To tackle the challenges posed by nonhomogeneous Dirichlet boundary conditions at the tube entrance, we have introduced additional nonlocal auxiliary variables and associated ordinary differential equations. These additions effectively eliminate the influence of boundary terms. Moreover, we have incorporated stabilization terms into the scheme to enhance its numerical effectiveness. Notably, our resulting scheme is fully decoupled, requiring the solution of only linear systems at each time step. We have also demonstrated the energy decaying property of the scheme, with suitable modifications. To assess the accuracy and stability of our algorithm, we have conducted extensive numerical simulations. Additionally, we have examined the dynamics of droplet formation and explored the impact of dimensionless parameters on the process. Overall, our work presents a refined method for simulating droplet formation dynamics, offering improved efficiency, energy stability, and accuracy.
The solution of linear inverse problems arising, for example, in signal and image processing is a challenging problem since the ill-conditioning amplifies, in the solution, the noise present in the data. Recently introduced algorithms based on deep learning overwhelm the more traditional model-based approaches in performance, but they typically suffer from instability with respect to data perturbation. In this paper, we theoretically analyze the trade-off between stability and accuracy of neural networks, when used to solve linear imaging inverse problems for not under-determined cases. Moreover, we propose different supervised and unsupervised solutions to increase the network stability and maintain a good accuracy, by means of regularization properties inherited from a model-based iterative scheme during the network training and pre-processing stabilizing operator in the neural networks. Extensive numerical experiments on image deblurring confirm the theoretical results and the effectiveness of the proposed deep learning-based approaches to handle noise on the data.
We consider nonparametric Bayesian inference in a multidimensional diffusion model with reflecting boundary conditions based on discrete high-frequency observations. We prove a general posterior contraction rate theorem in $L^2$-loss, which is applied to Gaussian priors. The resulting posteriors, as well as their posterior means, are shown to converge to the ground truth at the minimax optimal rate over H\"older smoothness classes in any dimension. Of independent interest and as part of our proofs, we show that certain frequentist penalized least squares estimators are also minimax optimal.
Collecting large quantities of high-quality data is often prohibitively expensive or impractical, and a crucial bottleneck in machine learning. One may instead augment a small set of $n$ data points from the target distribution with data from more accessible sources like public datasets, data collected under different circumstances, or synthesized by generative models. Blurring distinctions, we refer to such data as `surrogate data'. We define a simple scheme for integrating surrogate data into training and use both theoretical models and empirical studies to explore its behavior. Our main findings are: $(i)$ Integrating surrogate data can significantly reduce the test error on the original distribution; $(ii)$ In order to reap this benefit, it is crucial to use optimally weighted empirical risk minimization; $(iii)$ The test error of models trained on mixtures of real and surrogate data is well described by a scaling law. This can be used to predict the optimal weighting and the gain from surrogate data.
We hypothesize that due to the greedy nature of learning in multi-modal deep neural networks, these models tend to rely on just one modality while under-fitting the other modalities. Such behavior is counter-intuitive and hurts the models' generalization, as we observe empirically. To estimate the model's dependence on each modality, we compute the gain on the accuracy when the model has access to it in addition to another modality. We refer to this gain as the conditional utilization rate. In the experiments, we consistently observe an imbalance in conditional utilization rates between modalities, across multiple tasks and architectures. Since conditional utilization rate cannot be computed efficiently during training, we introduce a proxy for it based on the pace at which the model learns from each modality, which we refer to as the conditional learning speed. We propose an algorithm to balance the conditional learning speeds between modalities during training and demonstrate that it indeed addresses the issue of greedy learning. The proposed algorithm improves the model's generalization on three datasets: Colored MNIST, Princeton ModelNet40, and NVIDIA Dynamic Hand Gesture.