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At least 109 records · Page 6

Optimizing the optimizer for physics-informed neural networks and Kolmogorov-Arnold networks

Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) have revolutionized the computation of PDE solutions by integrating partial differential equations (PDEs) into the neural network’s training process as soft constraints, becoming an important component of the scientific machine learning (SciML) ecosystem. More recently, physics-informed Kolmogorv-Arnold networks (PIKANs) have also shown to be effective and comparable in accuracy with PINNs. In their current implementation, both PINNs and PIKANs are mainly optimized using first-order methods like Adam, as well as quasi-Newton methods such as BFGS and its low-memory variant, L-BFGS. However, these optimizers often struggle with highly nonlinear and non-convex loss landscapes, leading to challenges such as slow convergence, local minima entrapment, and (non)degenerate saddle points. In this study, we investigate the performance of Self- Scaled BFGS (SSBFGS), Self-Scaled Broyden (SSBroyden) methods and other advanced quasi-Newton schemes, including BFGS and L-BFGS with different line search strategies. These methods dynamically rescale updates based on historical gradient information, thus enhancing training efficiency and accuracy. We systematically compare these optimizers – using both PINNs and PIKANs – on key challenging PDEs, including the Burgers, Allen-Cahn, Kuramoto-Sivashinsky, Ginzburg-Landau, and Stokes equations. Additionally, we evaluate the performance of SSBFGS and SSBroyden for Deep Operator Network (DeepONet) architectures, demonstrating their effectiveness for data-driven operator learning. Our findings provide state-of-the-art results with orders-of-magnitude accuracy improvements without the use of adaptive weights or any other enhancements typically employed in PINNs. More broadly, our work reveal insights into the effectiveness of quasi-Newton optimization strategies in significantly improving the convergence and accurate generalization of PINNs and PIKANs.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Uncertainty quantification of graph convolution neural network models of evolving processes

The application of neural network models to scientific machine learning tasks has proliferated in recent years. In particular, neural networks have proved to be adept at modeling processes with spatial–temporal complexity. Nevertheless, these highly parameterized models have garnered skepticism in their ability to produce outputs with quantified error bounds over the regimes of interest. Hence there is a need to find uncertainty quantification methods that are suitable for neural networks. In this work we present comparisons of the parametric uncertainty quantification of neural networks modeling complex spatial–temporal processes with Hamiltonian Monte Carlo and Stein variational gradient descent and its projected variant. Specifically we apply these methods to graph convolutional neural network models of evolving systems modeled with recurrent neural network and neural ordinary differential equations architectures. We show that Stein variational inference is a viable alternative to Monte Carlo methods with some clear advantages for complex neural network models. For our exemplars, Stein variational interference gave similar pushed forward uncertainty profiles through time compared to Hamiltonian Monte Carlo, albeit with generally more generous variance. As a result, projected Stein variational gradient descent also produced similar uncertainty profiles to the non-projected counterpart, but large reductions in the active weight space were confounded by the stability of the neural network predictions and the convoluted likelihood landscape.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

A comprehensive study of non-adaptive and residual-based adaptive sampling for physics-informed neural networks

Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) have shown to be effective tools for solving both forward and inverse problems of partial differential equations (PDEs). PINNs embed the PDEs into the loss of the neural network using automatic differentiation, and this PDE loss is evaluated at a set of scattered spatio-temporal points (called residual points). The location and distribution of these residual points are highly important to the performance of PINNs. However, in the existing studies on PINNs, only a few simple residual point sampling methods have mainly been used. Here, we present a comprehensive study of two categories of sampling for PINNs: non-adaptive uniform sampling and adaptive nonuniform sampling. We consider six uniform sampling methods, including (1) equispaced uniform grid, (2) uniformly random sampling, (3) Latin hypercube sampling, (4) Halton sequence, (5) Hammersley sequence, and (6) Sobol sequence. We also consider a resampling strategy for uniform sampling. To improve the sampling efficiency and the accuracy of PINNs, we propose two new residual-based adaptive sampling methods: residual-based adaptive distribution (RAD) and residual-based adaptive refinement with distribution (RAR-D), which dynamically improve the distribution of residual points based on the PDE residuals during training. Hence, we have considered a total of 10 different sampling methods, including six non-adaptive uniform sampling, uniform sampling with resampling, two proposed adaptive sampling, and an existing adaptive sampling. We extensively tested the performance of these sampling methods for four forward problems and two inverse problems in many setups. Our numerical results presented in this study are summarized from more than 6000 simulations of PINNs. Here, we show that the proposed adaptive sampling methods of RAD and RAR-D significantly improve the accuracy of PINNs with fewer residual points for both forward and inverse problems. Furthermore, the results obtained in this study can also be used as a practical guideline in choosing sampling methods.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Industrial control system device classification using network traffic features and neural network embeddings

Characterization of modern cyber–physical Industrial Control System (ICS) devices is critical to the evaluation of their security posture and an understanding of the underlying industrial processes with which they interact. In this work, we address two related ICS device identification tasks: (1) separating ICS from non-ICS devices and (2) identifying specific ICS device types. We propose two distinct methods (one based on the existing IP2Vec method, and a novel traffic-features-based method) for achieving the first task. For transferability of the first task between two datasets, the traffic-features-based method performs significantly better (75% overall accuracy) compared to IP2Vec (22.5% overall accuracy). We further propose a novel method called DNP2Vec to address the second task. DNP2Vec is evaluated on two different datasets and achieves perfect multi-class classification accuracy (100%) for both datasets.

42 ENGINEERING↗

Physically Interpretable Neural Networks for the Geosciences: Applications to Earth System Variability

Abstract Neural networks have become increasingly prevalent within the geosciences, although a common limitation of their usage has been a lack of methods to interpret what the networks learn and how they make decisions. As such, neural networks have often been used within the geosciences to most accurately identify a desired output given a set of inputs, with the interpretation of what the network learns used as a secondary metric to ensure the network is making the right decision for the right reason. Neural network interpretation techniques have become more advanced in recent years, however, and we therefore propose that the ultimate objective of using a neural network can also be the interpretation of what the network has learned rather than the output itself. We show that the interpretation of neural networks can enable the discovery of scientifically meaningful connections within geoscientific data. In particular, we use two methods for neural network interpretation called backward optimization and layerwise relevance propagation, both of which project the decision pathways of a network back onto the original input dimensions. To the best of our knowledge, LRP has not yet been applied to geoscientific research, and we believe it has great potential in this area. We show how these interpretation techniques can be used to reliably infer scientifically meaningful information from neural networks by applying them to common climate patterns. These results suggest that combining interpretable neural networks with novel scientific hypotheses will open the door to many new avenues in neural network‐related geoscience research.

58 GEOSCIENCES↗

On the use of neural networks for energy reconstruction in high-granularity calorimeters

We contrasted the performance of deep neural networks — Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Graph Neural Network (GNN) — to current state of the art energy regression methods in a finely 3D-segmented calorimeter simulated by GEANT4. This comparative benchmark gives us some insight to assess the particular latent signals neural network methods exploit to achieve superior resolution. A CNN trained solely on a pure sample of pions achieved substantial improvement in the energy resolution for both single pions and jets over the conventional approaches. It maintained good performance for electron and photon reconstruction. We also used the Graph Neural Network (GNN) with edge convolution to assess the importance of timing information in the shower development for improved energy reconstruction. We implement a simple simulation based correction to the energy sum derived from the fraction of energy deposited in the electromagnetic shower component. This serves as an approximate dual-readout analogue for our benchmark comparison. Although this study does not include the simulation of detector effects, such as electronic noise, the margin of improvement seems robust enough to suggest these benefits will endure in real-world application. We also find reason to infer that the CNN/GNN methods leverage latent features that concur with our current understanding of the physics of calorimeter measurement.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗

Reinforcement Learning via Gaussian Processes with Neural Network Dual Kernels

While deep neural networks (DNNs) and Gaussian Processes (GPs) are both popularly utilized to solve problems in reinforcement learning, both approaches feature undesirable drawbacks for challenging problems. DNNs learn complex non-linear embeddings, but do not naturally quantify uncertainty and are often data-inefficient to train. GPs infer posterior distributions over functions, but popular kernels exhibit limited expressivity on complex and high-dimensional data. Fortunately, recently discovered conjugate and neural tangent kernel functions encode the behavior of overparameterized neural networks in the kernel domain. We demonstrate that these kernels can be efficiently applied to regression and reinforcement learning problems by analyzing a baseline case study.We apply GPs with neural network dual kernels to solve reinforcement learning tasks for the first time. We demonstrate, using the well understood mountain-car problem, that GPs empowered with dual kernels perform at least as well as those using the conventional radial basis function kernel. Finally, we conjecture that by inheriting the probabilistic rigor of GPs and the powerful embedding properties of DNNs, GPs using NN dual kernels will empower future reinforcement learning models on difficult domains.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Galaxy deblending using residual dense neural networks

We present a new neural network approach for deblending galaxy images in astronomical data using Residual Dense Neural network (RDN) architecture. We train the network on synthetic galaxy images similar to the typical arrangements of field galaxies with a finite point spread function (PSF) and realistic noise levels. The main novelty of our approach is the usage of two distinct neural networks: i) a deblending network which isolates a single galaxy postage stamp from the composite and, ii) a classifier network which counts the remaining number of galaxies. The deblending proceeds by iteratively peeling one galaxy at a time from the composite until the image contains no further objects as determined by the classifier, or by other stopping criteria. By looking at the consistency in the outputs of the two networks, we can assess the quality of the deblending. Further, we characterize the flux and shape reconstructions in different quality bins and compare our deblender with the industry standard, SExtractor. We also discuss possible future extensions for the project with variable PSFs and noise levels.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

Enhancing Lattice Kinetic Schemes for Fluid Dynamics with Lattice-Equivariant Neural Networks

A new class of equivariant neural networks is presented, hereby dubbed lattice-equivariant neural networks (LENNs), designed to satisfy local symmetries of a lattice structure. The approach develops within a recently introduced framework aimed at learning neural network-based surrogate models’ lattice Boltzmann collision operators. Whenever neural networks are employed to model physical systems, respecting symmetries and equivariance properties has been shown to be key for accuracy, numerical stability, and performance. Here, hinging on ideas from group representation theory, trainable layers are defined whose algebraic structure is equivariant with respect to the symmetries of the lattice cell. In this work, the presented method naturally allows for efficient implementations, in terms of both memory usage and computational costs, supporting scalable training/testing for lattices in two spatial dimensions and higher (in which the size of symmetry group grows). The approach is validated and tested considering 2D and 3D flowing dynamics, both in laminar and turbulent regimes. It is compared with group-averaged-based symmetric networks and with plain, nonsymmetric, networks, showing how the presented approach unlocks the (a posteriori) accuracy and training stability of the former models and the train/inference speed of the latter networks. (LENNs are about one order of magnitude faster than group-averaged networks in 3D.) The work in this paper opens toward practical use of machine learning-augmented lattice Boltzmann CFD in real-world simulations.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

SNNVis: Visualizing Graph Embedding of Evolutionary Optimization for Spiking Neural Networks

While Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) show a lot of promise, it is difficult to optimize them because applying traditional gradient-based optimization techniques is difficult. Even though evolutionary algorithms (EAs) have been shown to promise to optimize SNNs, understanding the relationship between evolving the characteristics of SNNs and their performance to improve the optimization algorithm is challenging because of the complex characteristics and huge population size. We propose visual analytics with novel graph embedding for evolutionary SNNs to address the challenges. While existing graph embedding techniques have limitations in preserving the specific features of the nodes and edges, our approach maintains them. Also, we develop visual analytics for understanding the relationship between the network performance and the features of nodes and edges and exploring and analyzing the evolving SNNs to build insights into improving the EA.

Chae, Junghoon [ORNL] (ORCID:0000000206016746)↗

HGQ: High Granularity Quantization for Real-time Neural Networks on FPGAs

Neural networks with sub-microsecond inference latency are required by many critical applications. Targeting such applications deployed on FPGAs, we present High Granularity Quantization (HGQ), a quantization-aware training framework that optimizes parameter bit-widths through gradient descent. Unlike conventional methods, HGQ determines the optimal bit-width for each parameter independently, making it suitable for hardware platforms supporting heterogeneous arbitrary precision arithmetic. In our experiments, HGQ shows superior performance compared to existing network compression methods, achieving orders of magnitude reduction in resource consumption and latency while maintaining the accuracy on several benchmark tasks. These improvements enable the deployment of complex models previously infeasible due to resource or latency constraints. HGQ is open-source and is used for developing next-generation trigger systems at the CERN ATLAS and CMS experiments for particle physics, enabling the use of advanced machine learning models for real-time data selection with sub-microsecond latency.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗

Quantifying the generalization error in deep learning in terms of data distribution and neural network smoothness

We report the accuracy of deep learning, i.e., deep neural networks, can be characterized by dividing the total error into three main types: approximation error, optimization error, and generalization error. Whereas there are some satisfactory answers to the problems of approximation and optimization, much less is known about the theory of generalization. Most existing theoretical works for generalization fail to explain the performance of neural networks in practice. To derive a meaningful bound, we study the generalization error of neural networks for classification problems in terms of data distribution and neural network smoothness. We introduce the cover complexity (CC) to measure the difficulty of learning a data set and the inverse of the modulus of continuity to quantify neural network smoothness. A quantitative bound for expected accuracy/error is derived by considering both the CC and neural network smoothness. Although most of the analysis is general and not specific to neural networks, we validate our theoretical assumptions and results numerically for neural networks by several data sets of images. The numerical results confirm that the expected error of trained networks scaled with the square root of the number of classes has a linear relationship with respect to the CC. We also observe a clear consistency between test loss and neural network smoothness during the training process. In addition, we demonstrate empirically that the neural network smoothness decreases when the network size increases whereas the smoothness is insensitive to training dataset size.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

The Value of Hyperparameter Optimization in Phase-Picking Neural Networks

The effectiveness of neural networks for picking seismic phase arrival times has been demonstrated through several case studies, and seismic monitoring programs are starting to adopt the technology into their workflows. However, published models were designed and trained using rather arbitrary choices of hyperparameters, limiting their performance. In this study, we use phase picks from both routine and template-matching analyses from multiple regions (Ridgecrest, California; Kilauea, Hawaii; Yellowstone, Wyoming–Montana–Idaho) to test a hyperparameter optimization scheme for phase-picking neural networks and to evaluate their performance. We show that a published model, namely PhaseNet (Zhu and Beroza, 2019), can be simplified and improved with reasonable effort and there are preferred choices of hyperparameters that increase the performance. We also show that models optimized based on the arrival times reported in routine event catalogs consistently perform well when picking arrival times of smaller events, which is crucial for many tasks from microseismicity to explosion monitoring.

58 GEOSCIENCES↗