Masked Autoencoders are PDE Learners

Neural solvers for partial differential equations (PDEs) have great potential, yet their practicality is currently limited by their generalizability. PDEs evolve over broad scales and exhibit diverse behaviors; predicting these phenomena will require learning representations across a wide variety of inputs, which may encompass different coefficients, geometries, or equations. As a step towards generalizable PDE modeling, we adapt masked pretraining for PDEs. Through self-supervised learning across PDEs, masked autoencoders can learn useful latent representations for downstream tasks. In particular, masked pretraining can improve coefficient regression and timestepping performance of neural solvers on unseen equations. We hope that masked pretraining can emerge as a unifying method across large, unlabeled, and heterogeneous datasets to learn latent physics at scale.

FaultFormer: Transformer-based Prediction of Bearing Faults

The growth of deep learning in the past decade has motivated important applications to smart manufacturing and machine health monitoring. In particular, vibration data offers a rich and reliable source to provide meaningful insights into machine health and predictive maintenance. In this work, we present a Transformer based framework for analyzing vibration signals to predict different types of bearing faults (FaultFormer). In particular, we process signal data using data augmentations and extract their Fourier modes to train a transformer encoder to achieve state of the art accuracies. The attention mechanism as well as model outputs were analyzed to confirm the transformer's ability to automatically extract features within signals and learn both global and local relationships to make classifications. Lastly, two pretraining strategies were proposed to pave the way for large, generalizable transformers that could adapt to new data, situations, or machinery on the production floor.