Acceleron: A Tool to Accelerate Research Ideation

Several tools have recently been proposed for assisting researchers during various stages of the research life-cycle. However, these primarily concentrate on tasks such as retrieving and recommending relevant literature, reviewing and critiquing the draft, and writing of research manuscripts. Our investigation reveals a significant gap in availability of tools specifically designed to assist researchers during the challenging ideation phase of the research life-cycle. To aid with research ideation, we propose `Acceleron', a research accelerator for different phases of the research life cycle, and which is specially designed to aid the ideation process. Acceleron guides researchers through the formulation of a comprehensive research proposal, encompassing a novel research problem. The proposals motivation is validated for novelty by identifying gaps in the existing literature and suggesting a plausible list of techniques to solve the proposed problem. We leverage the reasoning and domain-specific skills of Large Language Models (LLMs) to create an agent-based architecture incorporating colleague and mentor personas for LLMs. The LLM agents emulate the ideation process undertaken by researchers, engaging researchers in an interactive fashion to aid in the development of the research proposal. Notably, our tool addresses challenges inherent in LLMs, such as hallucinations, implements a two-stage aspect-based retrieval to manage precision-recall trade-offs, and tackles issues of unanswerability. As evaluation, we illustrate the execution of our motivation validation and method synthesis workflows on proposals from the ML and NLP domain, given by 3 distinct researchers. Our observations and evaluations provided by the researchers illustrate the efficacy of the tool in terms of assisting researchers with appropriate inputs at distinct stages and thus leading to improved time efficiency.

Can Physics Informed Neural Operators Self Improve?

Self-training techniques have shown remarkable value across many deep learning models and tasks. However, such techniques remain largely unexplored when considered in the context of learning fast solvers for systems of partial differential equations (Eg: Neural Operators). In this work, we explore the use of self-training for Fourier Neural Operators (FNO). Neural Operators emerged as a data driven technique, however, data from experiments or traditional solvers is not always readily available. Physics Informed Neural Operators (PINO) overcome this constraint by utilizing a physics loss for the training, however the accuracy of PINO trained without data does not match the performance obtained by training with data. In this work we show that self-training can be used to close this gap in performance. We examine canonical examples, namely the 1D-Burgers and 2D-Darcy PDEs, to showcase the efficacy of self-training. Specifically, FNOs, when trained exclusively with physics loss through self-training, approach 1.07x for Burgers and 1.02x for Darcy, compared to FNOs trained with both data and physics loss. Furthermore, we discover that pseudo-labels can be used for self-training without necessarily training to convergence in each iteration. A consequence of this is that we are able to discover self-training schedules that improve upon the baseline performance of PINO in terms of accuracy as well as time.

How important are specialized transforms in Neural Operators?

Simulating physical systems using Partial Differential Equations (PDEs) has become an indispensible part of modern industrial process optimization. Traditionally, numerical solvers have been used to solve the associated PDEs, however recently Transform-based Neural Operators such as the Fourier Neural Operator and Wavelet Neural Operator have received a lot of attention for their potential to provide fast solutions for systems of PDEs. In this work, we investigate the importance of the transform layers to the reported success of transform based neural operators. In particular, we record the cost in terms of performance, if all the transform layers are replaced by learnable linear layers. Surprisingly, we observe that linear layers suffice to provide performance comparable to the best-known transform-based layers and seem to do so with a compute time advantage as well. We believe that this observation can have significant implications for future work on Neural Operators, and might point to other sources of efficiencies for these architectures.

HyperLoRA for PDEs

Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) have been widely used to develop neural surrogates for solutions of Partial Differential Equations. A drawback of PINNs is that they have to be retrained with every change in initial-boundary conditions and PDE coefficients. The Hypernetwork, a model-based meta learning technique, takes in a parameterized task embedding as input and predicts the weights of PINN as output. Predicting weights of a neural network however, is a high-dimensional regression problem, and hypernetworks perform sub-optimally while predicting parameters for large base networks. To circumvent this issue, we use a low ranked adaptation (LoRA) formulation to decompose every layer of the base network into low-ranked tensors and use hypernetworks to predict the low-ranked tensors. Despite the reduced dimensionality of the resulting weight-regression problem, LoRA-based Hypernetworks violate the underlying physics of the given task. We demonstrate that the generalization capabilities of LoRA-based hypernetworks drastically improve when trained with an additional physics-informed loss component (HyperPINN) to satisfy the governing differential equations. We observe that LoRA-based HyperPINN training allows us to learn fast solutions for parameterized PDEs like Burger's equation and Navier Stokes: Kovasznay flow, while having an 8x reduction in prediction parameters on average without compromising on accuracy when compared to all other baselines.

Adapt and Decompose: Efficient Generalization of Text-to-SQL via Domain Adapted Least-To-Most Prompting

Cross-domain and cross-compositional generalization of Text-to-SQL semantic parsing is a challenging task. Existing Large Language Model (LLM) based solutions rely on inference-time retrieval of few-shot exemplars from the training set to synthesize a run-time prompt for each Natural Language (NL) test query. In contrast, we devise an algorithm which performs offline sampling of a minimal set-of few-shots from the training data, with complete coverage of SQL clauses, operators and functions, and maximal domain coverage within the allowed token length. This allows for synthesis of a fixed Generic Prompt (GP), with a diverse set-of exemplars common across NL test queries, avoiding expensive test time exemplar retrieval. We further auto-adapt the GP to the target database domain (DA-GP), to better handle cross-domain generalization; followed by a decomposed Least-To-Most-Prompting (LTMP-DA-GP) to handle cross-compositional generalization. The synthesis of LTMP-DA-GP is an offline task, to be performed one-time per new database with minimal human intervention. Our approach demonstrates superior performance on the KaggleDBQA dataset, designed to evaluate generalizability for the Text-to-SQL task. We further showcase consistent performance improvement of LTMP-DA-GP over GP, across LLMs and databases of KaggleDBQA, highlighting the efficacy and model agnostic benefits of our prompt based adapt and decompose approach.

Neuro-symbolic Zero-Shot Code Cloning with Cross-Language Intermediate Representation

In this paper, we define a neuro-symbolic approach to address the task of finding semantically similar clones for the codes of the legacy programming language COBOL, without training data. We define a meta-model that is instantiated to have an Intermediate Representation (IR) in the form of Abstract Syntax Trees (ASTs) common across codes in C and COBOL. We linearize the IRs using Structure Based Traversal (SBT) to create sequential inputs. We further fine-tune UnixCoder, the best-performing model for zero-shot cross-programming language code search, for the Code Cloning task with the SBT IRs of C code-pairs, available in the CodeNet dataset. This allows us to learn latent representations for the IRs of the C codes, which are transferable to the IRs of the COBOL codes. With this fine-tuned UnixCoder, we get a performance improvement of 12.85 MAP@2 over the pre-trained UniXCoder model, in a zero-shot setting, on the COBOL test split synthesized from the CodeNet dataset. This demonstrates the efficacy of our meta-model based approach to facilitate cross-programming language transfer.

DeepEpiSolver: Unravelling Inverse problems in Covid, HIV, Ebola and Disease Transmission

The spread of many infectious diseases is modeled using variants of the SIR compartmental model, which is a coupled differential equation. The coefficients of the SIR model determine the spread trajectories of disease, on whose basis proactive measures can be taken. Hence, the coefficient estimates must be both fast and accurate. Shaier et al. in the paper "Disease Informed Neural Networks" used Physics Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) to estimate the parameters of the SIR model. There are two drawbacks to this approach. First, the training time for PINNs is high, with certain diseases taking close to 90 hrs to train. Second, PINNs don't generalize for a new SIDR trajectory, and learning its corresponding SIR parameters requires retraining the PINN from scratch. In this work, we aim to eliminate both of these drawbacks. We generate a dataset between the parameters of ODE and the spread trajectories by solving the forward problem for a large distribution of parameters using the LSODA algorithm. We then use a neural network to learn the mapping between spread trajectories and coefficients of SIDR in an offline manner. This allows us to learn the parameters of a new spread trajectory without having to retrain, enabling generalization at test time. We observe a speed-up of 3-4 orders of magnitude with accuracy comparable to that of PINNs for 11 highly infectious diseases. Further finetuning of neural network inferred ODE coefficients using PINN further leads to 2-3 orders improvement of estimated coefficients.

Knowledge Transfer for Pseudo-code Generation from Low Resource Programming Language

Generation of pseudo-code descriptions of legacy source code for software maintenance is a manually intensive task. Recent encoder-decoder language models have shown promise for automating pseudo-code generation for high resource programming languages such as C++, but are heavily reliant on the availability of a large code-pseudocode corpus. Soliciting such pseudocode annotations for codes written in legacy programming languages (PL) is a time consuming and costly affair requiring a thorough understanding of the source PL. In this paper, we focus on transferring the knowledge acquired by the code-to-pseudocode neural model trained on a high resource PL (C++) using parallel code-pseudocode data. We aim to transfer this knowledge to a legacy PL (C) with no PL-pseudocode parallel data for training. To achieve this, we utilize an Iterative Back Translation (IBT) approach with a novel test-cases based filtration strategy, to adapt the trained C++-to-pseudocode model to C-to-pseudocode model. We observe an improvement of 23.27% in the success rate of the generated C codes through back translation, over the successive IBT iteration, illustrating the efficacy of our approach.

Symbolic Regression for PDEs using Pruned Differentiable Programs

Physics-informed Neural Networks (PINNs) have been widely used to obtain accurate neural surrogates for a system of Partial Differential Equations (PDE). One of the major limitations of PINNs is that the neural solutions are challenging to interpret, and are often treated as black-box solvers. While Symbolic Regression (SR) has been studied extensively, very few works exist which generate analytical expressions to directly perform SR for a system of PDEs. In this work, we introduce an end-to-end framework for obtaining mathematical expressions for solutions of PDEs. We use a trained PINN to generate a dataset, upon which we perform SR. We use a Differentiable Program Architecture (DPA) defined using context-free grammar to describe the space of symbolic expressions. We improve the interpretability by pruning the DPA in a depth-first manner using the magnitude of weights as our heuristic. On average, we observe a 95.3% reduction in parameters of DPA while maintaining accuracy at par with PINNs. Furthermore, on an average, pruning improves the accuracy of DPA by 7.81% . We demonstrate our framework outperforms the existing state-of-the-art SR solvers on systems of complex PDEs like Navier-Stokes: Kovasznay flow and Taylor-Green Vortex flow. Furthermore, we produce analytical expressions for a complex industrial use-case of an Air-Preheater, without suffering from performance loss viz-a-viz PINNs.