Given their ability to effectively learn non-linear mappings and perform fast inference, deep neural networks (NNs) have been proposed as a viable alternative to traditional simulation-driven approaches for solving high-dimensional eigenvalue equations (HDEs), which are the foundation for many scientific applications. Unfortunately, for the learned models in these scientific applications to achieve generalization, a large, diverse, and preferably annotated dataset is typically needed and is computationally expensive to obtain. Furthermore, the learned models tend to be memory- and compute-intensive primarily due to the size of the output layer. While generalization, especially extrapolation, with scarce data has been attempted by imposing physical constraints in the form of physics loss, the problem of model scalability has remained. In this paper, we alleviate the compute bottleneck in the output layer by using physics knowledge to decompose the complex regression task of predicting the high-dimensional eigenvectors into multiple simpler sub-tasks, each of which are learned by a simple "expert" network. We call the resulting architecture of specialized experts Physics-Guided Mixture-of-Experts (PG-MoE). We demonstrate the efficacy of such physics-guided problem decomposition for the case of the Schr\"{o}dinger's Equation in Quantum Mechanics. Our proposed PG-MoE model predicts the ground-state solution, i.e., the eigenvector that corresponds to the smallest possible eigenvalue. The model is 150x smaller than the network trained to learn the complex task while being competitive in generalization. To improve the generalization of the PG-MoE, we also employ a physics-guided loss function based on variational energy, which by quantum mechanics principles is minimized iff the output is the ground-state solution.
Stochastic partial differential equations (SPDEs) are the mathematical tool of choice for modelling spatiotemporal PDE-dynamics under the influence of randomness. Based on the notion of mild solution of an SPDE, we introduce a novel neural architecture to learn solution operators of PDEs with (possibly stochastic) forcing from partially observed data. The proposed Neural SPDE model provides an extension to two popular classes of physics-inspired architectures. On the one hand, it extends Neural CDEs and variants -- continuous-time analogues of RNNs -- in that it is capable of processing incoming sequential information arriving irregularly in time and observed at arbitrary spatial resolutions. On the other hand, it extends Neural Operators -- generalizations of neural networks to model mappings between spaces of functions -- in that it can parameterize solution operators of SPDEs depending simultaneously on the initial condition and a realization of the driving noise. By performing operations in the spectral domain, we show how a Neural SPDE can be evaluated in two ways, either by calling an ODE solver (emulating a spectral Galerkin scheme), or by solving a fixed point problem. Experiments on various semilinear SPDEs, including the stochastic Navier-Stokes equations, demonstrate how the Neural SPDE model is capable of learning complex spatiotemporal dynamics in a resolution-invariant way, with better accuracy and lighter training data requirements compared to alternative models, and up to 3 orders of magnitude faster than traditional solvers.
Population dynamics is the study of temporal and spatial variation in the size of populations of organisms and is a major part of population ecology. One of the main difficulties in analyzing population dynamics is that we can only obtain observation data with coarse time intervals from fixed-point observations due to experimental costs or other constraints. Recently, modeling population dynamics by using continuous normalizing flows (CNFs) and dynamic optimal transport has been proposed to infer the expected trajectory of samples from a fixed-point observed population. While the sample behavior in CNF is deterministic, the actual sample in biological systems moves in an essentially random yet directional manner. Moreover, when a sample moves from point A to point B in dynamical systems, its trajectory is such that the corresponding action has the smallest possible value, known as the principle of least action. To satisfy these requirements of the sample trajectories, we formulate the Lagrangian Schr\"odinger bridge (LSB) problem and propose to solve it approximately using neural SDE with regularization. We also develop a model architecture that enables faster computation. Our experiments show that our solution to the LSB problem can approximate the dynamics at the population level and that using the prior knowledge introduced by the Lagrangian enables us to estimate the trajectories of individual samples with stochastic behavior.
In this paper we get error bounds for fully discrete approximations of infinite horizon problems via the dynamic programming approach. It is well known that considering a time discretization with a positive step size $h$ an error bound of size $h$ can be proved for the difference between the value function (viscosity solution of the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation corresponding to the infinite horizon) and the value function of the discrete time problem. However, including also a spatial discretization based on elements of size $k$ an error bound of size $O(k/h)$ can be found in the literature for the error between the value functions of the continuous problem and the fully discrete problem. In this paper we revise the error bound of the fully discrete method and prove, under similar assumptions to those of the time discrete case, that the error of the fully discrete case is in fact $O(h+k)$ which gives first order in time and space for the method. This error bound matches the numerical experiments of many papers in the literature in which the behaviour $1/h$ from the bound $O(k/h)$ have not been observed.
In this work, we introduce a novel approach to formulating an artificial viscosity for shock capturing in nonlinear hyperbolic systems by utilizing the property that the solutions of hyperbolic conservation laws are not reversible in time in the vicinity of shocks. The proposed approach does not require any additional governing equations or a priori knowledge of the hyperbolic system in question, is independent of the mesh and approximation order, and requires the use of only one tunable parameter. The primary novelty is that the resulting artificial viscosity is unique for each component of the conservation law which is advantageous for systems in which some components exhibit discontinuities while others do not. The efficacy of the method is shown in numerical experiments of multi-dimensional hyperbolic conservation laws such as nonlinear transport, Euler equations, and ideal magnetohydrodynamics using a high-order discontinuous spectral element method on unstructured grids.
A High-dimensional and sparse (HiDS) matrix is frequently encountered in a big data-related application like an e-commerce system or a social network services system. To perform highly accurate representation learning on it is of great significance owing to the great desire of extracting latent knowledge and patterns from it. Latent factor analysis (LFA), which represents an HiDS matrix by learning the low-rank embeddings based on its observed entries only, is one of the most effective and efficient approaches to this issue. However, most existing LFA-based models perform such embeddings on a HiDS matrix directly without exploiting its hidden graph structures, thereby resulting in accuracy loss. To address this issue, this paper proposes a graph-incorporated latent factor analysis (GLFA) model. It adopts two-fold ideas: 1) a graph is constructed for identifying the hidden high-order interaction (HOI) among nodes described by an HiDS matrix, and 2) a recurrent LFA structure is carefully designed with the incorporation of HOI, thereby improving the representa-tion learning ability of a resultant model. Experimental results on three real-world datasets demonstrate that GLFA outperforms six state-of-the-art models in predicting the missing data of an HiDS matrix, which evidently supports its strong representation learning ability to HiDS data.
One of the most important problems in system identification and statistics is how to estimate the unknown parameters of a given model. Optimization methods and specialized procedures, such as Empirical Minimization (EM) can be used in case the likelihood function can be computed. For situations where one can only simulate from a parametric model, but the likelihood is difficult or impossible to evaluate, a technique known as the Two-Stage (TS) Approach can be applied to obtain reliable parametric estimates. Unfortunately, there is currently a lack of theoretical justification for TS. In this paper, we propose a statistical decision-theoretical derivation of TS, which leads to Bayesian and Minimax estimators. We also show how to apply the TS approach on models for independent and identically distributed samples, by computing quantiles of the data as a first step, and using a linear function as the second stage. The proposed method is illustrated via numerical simulations.
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.
We prove linear convergence of gradient descent to a global minimum for the training of deep residual networks with constant layer width and smooth activation function. We further show that the trained weights, as a function of the layer index, admits a scaling limit which is H\"older continuous as the depth of the network tends to infinity. The proofs are based on non-asymptotic estimates of the loss function and of norms of the network weights along the gradient descent path. We illustrate the relevance of our theoretical results to practical settings using detailed numerical experiments on supervised learning problems.
We recall some of the history of the information-theoretic approach to deriving core results in probability theory and indicate parts of the recent resurgence of interest in this area with current progress along several interesting directions. Then we give a new information-theoretic proof of a finite version of de Finetti's classical representation theorem for finite-valued random variables. We derive an upper bound on the relative entropy between the distribution of the first $k$ in a sequence of $n$ exchangeable random variables, and an appropriate mixture over product distributions. The mixing measure is characterised as the law of the empirical measure of the original sequence, and de Finetti's result is recovered as a corollary. The proof is nicely motivated by the Gibbs conditioning principle in connection with statistical mechanics, and it follows along an appealing sequence of steps. The technical estimates required for these steps are obtained via the use of a collection of combinatorial tools known within information theory as `the method of types.'
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.