PAC-FNO: Parallel-Structured All-Component Fourier Neural Operators for Recognizing Low-Quality Images

A standard practice in developing image recognition models is to train a model on a specific image resolution and then deploy it. However, in real-world inference, models often encounter images different from the training sets in resolution and/or subject to natural variations such as weather changes, noise types and compression artifacts. While traditional solutions involve training multiple models for different resolutions or input variations, these methods are computationally expensive and thus do not scale in practice. To this end, we propose a novel neural network model, parallel-structured and all-component Fourier neural operator (PAC-FNO), that addresses the problem. Unlike conventional feed-forward neural networks, PAC-FNO operates in the frequency domain, allowing it to handle images of varying resolutions within a single model. We also propose a two-stage algorithm for training PAC-FNO with a minimal modification to the original, downstream model. Moreover, the proposed PAC-FNO is ready to work with existing image recognition models. Extensively evaluating methods with seven image recognition benchmarks, we show that the proposed PAC-FNO improves the performance of existing baseline models on images with various resolutions by up to 77.1% and various types of natural variations in the images at inference.

Learning Flexible Body Collision Dynamics with Hierarchical Contact Mesh Transformer

Recently, many mesh-based graph neural network (GNN) models have been proposed for modeling complex high-dimensional physical systems. Remarkable achievements have been made in significantly reducing the solving time compared to traditional numerical solvers. These methods are typically designed to i) reduce the computational cost in solving physical dynamics and/or ii) propose techniques to enhance the solution accuracy in fluid and rigid body dynamics. However, it remains under-explored whether they are effective in addressing the challenges of flexible body dynamics, where instantaneous collisions occur within a very short timeframe. In this paper, we present Hierarchical Contact Mesh Transformer (HCMT), which uses hierarchical mesh structures and can learn long-range dependencies (occurred by collisions) among spatially distant positions of a body -- two close positions in a higher-level mesh corresponds to two distant positions in a lower-level mesh. HCMT enables long-range interactions, and the hierarchical mesh structure quickly propagates collision effects to faraway positions. To this end, it consists of a contact mesh Transformer and a hierarchical mesh Transformer (CMT and HMT, respectively). Lastly, we propose a flexible body dynamics dataset, consisting of trajectories that reflect experimental settings frequently used in the display industry for product designs. We also compare the performance of several baselines using well-known benchmark datasets. Our results show that HCMT provides significant performance improvements over existing methods.

Operator-learning-inspired Modeling of Neural Ordinary Differential Equations

Neural ordinary differential equations (NODEs), one of the most influential works of the differential equation-based deep learning, are to continuously generalize residual networks and opened a new field. They are currently utilized for various downstream tasks, e.g., image classification, time series classification, image generation, etc. Its key part is how to model the time-derivative of the hidden state, denoted dh(t)/dt. People have habitually used conventional neural network architectures, e.g., fully-connected layers followed by non-linear activations. In this paper, however, we present a neural operator-based method to define the time-derivative term. Neural operators were initially proposed to model the differential operator of partial differential equations (PDEs). Since the time-derivative of NODEs can be understood as a special type of the differential operator, our proposed method, called branched Fourier neural operator (BFNO), makes sense. In our experiments with general downstream tasks, our method significantly outperforms existing methods.

Graph Convolutions Enrich the Self-Attention in Transformers!

Transformers, renowned for their self-attention mechanism, have achieved state-of-the-art performance across various tasks in natural language processing, computer vision, time-series modeling, etc. However, one of the challenges with deep Transformer models is the oversmoothing problem, where representations across layers converge to indistinguishable values, leading to significant performance degradation. We interpret the original self-attention as a simple graph filter and redesign it from a graph signal processing (GSP) perspective. We propose graph-filter-based self-attention (GFSA) to learn a general yet effective one, whose complexity, however, is slightly larger than that of the original self-attention mechanism. We demonstrate that GFSA improves the performance of Transformers in various fields, including computer vision, natural language processing, graph pattern classification, speech recognition, and code classification.

Reduced-order modeling for parameterized PDEs via implicit neural representations

We present a new data-driven reduced-order modeling approach to efficiently solve parametrized partial differential equations (PDEs) for many-query problems. This work is inspired by the concept of implicit neural representation (INR), which models physics signals in a continuous manner and independent of spatial/temporal discretization. The proposed framework encodes PDE and utilizes a parametrized neural ODE (PNODE) to learn latent dynamics characterized by multiple PDE parameters. PNODE can be inferred by a hypernetwork to reduce the potential difficulties in learning PNODE due to a complex multilayer perceptron (MLP). The framework uses an INR to decode the latent dynamics and reconstruct accurate PDE solutions. Further, a physics-informed loss is also introduced to correct the prediction of unseen parameter instances. Incorporating the physics-informed loss also enables the model to be fine-tuned in an unsupervised manner on unseen PDE parameters. A numerical experiment is performed on a two-dimensional Burgers equation with a large variation of PDE parameters. We evaluate the proposed method at a large Reynolds number and obtain up to speedup of O(10^3) and ~1% relative error to the ground truth values.

Hypernetwork-based Meta-Learning for Low-Rank Physics-Informed Neural Networks

In various engineering and applied science applications, repetitive numerical simulations of partial differential equations (PDEs) for varying input parameters are often required (e.g., aircraft shape optimization over many design parameters) and solvers are required to perform rapid execution. In this study, we suggest a path that potentially opens up a possibility for physics-informed neural networks (PINNs), emerging deep-learning-based solvers, to be considered as one such solver. Although PINNs have pioneered a proper integration of deep-learning and scientific computing, they require repetitive time-consuming training of neural networks, which is not suitable for many-query scenarios. To address this issue, we propose a lightweight low-rank PINNs containing only hundreds of model parameters and an associated hypernetwork-based meta-learning algorithm, which allows efficient approximation of solutions of PDEs for varying ranges of PDE input parameters. Moreover, we show that the proposed method is effective in overcoming a challenging issue, known as "failure modes" of PINNs.

Reversible and irreversible bracket-based dynamics for deep graph neural networks

Recent works have shown that physics-inspired architectures allow the training of deep graph neural networks (GNNs) without oversmoothing. The role of these physics is unclear, however, with successful examples of both reversible (e.g., Hamiltonian) and irreversible (e.g., diffusion) phenomena producing comparable results despite diametrically opposed mechanisms, and further complications arising due to empirical departures from mathematical theory. This work presents a series of novel GNN architectures based upon structure-preserving bracket-based dynamical systems, which are provably guaranteed to either conserve energy or generate positive dissipation with increasing depth. It is shown that the theoretically principled framework employed here allows for inherently explainable constructions, which contextualize departures from theory in current architectures and better elucidate the roles of reversibility and irreversibility in network performance.

Time Series Forecasting with Hypernetworks Generating Parameters in Advance

Forecasting future outcomes from recent time series data is not easy, especially when the future data are different from the past (i.e. time series are under temporal drifts). Existing approaches show limited performances under data drifts, and we identify the main reason: It takes time for a model to collect sufficient training data and adjust its parameters for complicated temporal patterns whenever the underlying dynamics change. To address this issue, we study a new approach; instead of adjusting model parameters (by continuously re-training a model on new data), we build a hypernetwork that generates other target models' parameters expected to perform well on the future data. Therefore, we can adjust the model parameters beforehand (if the hypernetwork is correct). We conduct extensive experiments with 6 target models, 6 baselines, and 4 datasets, and show that our HyperGPA outperforms other baselines.

Mining Causality from Continuous-time Dynamics Models: An Application to Tsunami Forecasting

Continuous-time dynamics models, such as neural ordinary differential equations, have enabled the modeling of underlying dynamics in time-series data and accurate forecasting. However, parameterization of dynamics using a neural network makes it difficult for humans to identify causal structures in the data. In consequence, this opaqueness hinders the use of these models in the domains where capturing causal relationships carries the same importance as accurate predictions, e.g., tsunami forecasting. In this paper, we address this challenge by proposing a mechanism for mining causal structures from continuous-time models. We train models to capture the causal structure by enforcing sparsity in the weights of the input layers of the dynamics models. We first verify the effectiveness of our method in the scenario where the exact causal-structures of time-series are known as a priori. We next apply our method to a real-world problem, namely tsunami forecasting, where the exact causal-structures are difficult to characterize. Experimental results show that the proposed method is effective in learning physically-consistent causal relationships while achieving high forecasting accuracy.

Parameter-varying neural ordinary differential equations with partition-of-unity networks

In this study, we propose parameter-varying neural ordinary differential equations (NODEs) where the evolution of model parameters is represented by partition-of-unity networks (POUNets), a mixture of experts architecture. The proposed variant of NODEs, synthesized with POUNets, learn a meshfree partition of space and represent the evolution of ODE parameters using sets of polynomials associated to each partition. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method for three important tasks: data-driven dynamics modeling of (1) hybrid systems, (2) switching linear dynamical systems, and (3) latent dynamics for dynamical systems with varying external forcing.