A Gauss-Newton Approach for Min-Max Optimization in Generative Adversarial Networks

A novel first-order method is proposed for training generative adversarial networks (GANs). It modifies the Gauss-Newton method to approximate the min-max Hessian and uses the Sherman-Morrison inversion formula to calculate the inverse. The method corresponds to a fixed-point method that ensures necessary contraction. To evaluate its effectiveness, numerical experiments are conducted on various datasets commonly used in image generation tasks, such as MNIST, Fashion MNIST, CIFAR10, FFHQ, and LSUN. Our method is capable of generating high-fidelity images with greater diversity across multiple datasets. It also achieves the highest inception score for CIFAR10 among all compared methods, including state-of-the-art second-order methods. Additionally, its execution time is comparable to that of first-order min-max methods.

Alpha Elimination: Using Deep Reinforcement Learning to Reduce Fill-In during Sparse Matrix Decomposition

A large number of computational and scientific methods commonly require decomposing a sparse matrix into triangular factors as LU decomposition. A common problem faced during this decomposition is that even though the given matrix may be very sparse, the decomposition may lead to a denser triangular factors due to fill-in. A significant fill-in may lead to prohibitively larger computational costs and memory requirement during decomposition as well as during the solve phase. To this end, several heuristic sparse matrix reordering methods have been proposed to reduce fill-in before the decomposition. However, finding an optimal reordering algorithm that leads to minimal fill-in during such decomposition is known to be a NP-hard problem. A reinforcement learning based approach is proposed for this problem. The sparse matrix reordering problem is formulated as a single player game. More specifically, Monte-Carlo tree search in combination with neural network is used as a decision making algorithm to search for the best move in our game. The proposed method, alphaElimination is found to produce significantly lesser non-zeros in the LU decomposition as compared to existing state-of-the-art heuristic algorithms with little to no increase in overall running time of the algorithm. The code for the project will be publicly available here\footnote{\url{https://github.com/misterpawan/alphaEliminationPaper}}.

Enhancing ML model accuracy for Digital VLSI circuits using diffusion models: A study on synthetic data generation

Generative AI has seen remarkable growth over the past few years, with diffusion models being state-of-the-art for image generation. This study investigates the use of diffusion models in generating artificial data generation for electronic circuits for enhancing the accuracy of subsequent machine learning models in tasks such as performance assessment, design, and testing when training data is usually known to be very limited. We utilize simulations in the HSPICE design environment with 22nm CMOS technology nodes to obtain representative real training data for our proposed diffusion model. Our results demonstrate the close resemblance of synthetic data using diffusion model to real data. We validate the quality of generated data, and demonstrate that data augmentation certainly effective in predictive analysis of VLSI design for digital circuits.

Reinforcement Learning Based Sensor Optimization for Bio-markers

Radio frequency (RF) biosensors, in particular those based on inter-digitated capacitors (IDCs), are pivotal in areas like biomedical diagnosis, remote sensing, and wireless communication. Despite their advantages of low cost and easy fabrication, their sensitivity can be hindered by design imperfections, environmental factors, and circuit noise. This paper investigates enhancing the sensitivity of IDC-based RF sensors using novel reinforcement learning based Binary Particle Swarm Optimization (RLBPSO), and it is compared to Ant Colony Optimization (ACO), and other state-of-the-art methods. By focusing on optimizing design parameters like electrode design and finger width, the proposed study found notable improvements in sensor sensitivity. The proposed RLBPSO method shows best optimized design for various frequency ranges when compared to current state-of-the-art methods.

Explainable machine learning to enable high-throughput electrical conductivity optimization of doped conjugated polymers

The combination of high-throughput experimentation techniques and machine learning (ML) has recently ushered in a new era of accelerated material discovery, enabling the identification of materials with cutting-edge properties. However, the measurement of certain physical quantities remains challenging to automate. Specifically, meticulous process control, experimentation and laborious measurements are required to achieve optimal electrical conductivity in doped polymer materials. We propose a ML approach, which relies on readily measured absorbance spectra, to accelerate the workflow associated with measuring electrical conductivity. The first ML model (classification model), accurately classifies samples with a conductivity >~25 to 100 S/cm, achieving a maximum of 100% accuracy rate. For the subset of highly conductive samples, we employed a second ML model (regression model), to predict their conductivities, yielding an impressive test R2 value of 0.984. To validate the approach, we showed that the models, neither trained on the samples with the two highest conductivities of 498 and 506 S/cm, were able to, in an extrapolative manner, correctly classify and predict them at satisfactory levels of errors. The proposed ML workflow results in an improvement in the efficiency of the conductivity measurements by 89% of the maximum achievable using our experimental techniques. Furthermore, our approach addressed the common challenge of the lack of explainability in ML models by exploiting bespoke mathematical properties of the descriptors and ML model, allowing us to gain corroborated insights into the spectral influences on conductivity. Through this study, we offer an accelerated pathway for optimizing the properties of doped polymer materials while showcasing the valuable insights that can be derived from purposeful utilization of ML in experimental science.

Nonnegative Low-Rank Tensor Completion via Dual Formulation with Applications to Image and Video Completion

Recent approaches to the tensor completion problem have often overlooked the nonnegative structure of the data. We consider the problem of learning a nonnegative low-rank tensor, and using duality theory, we propose a novel factorization of such tensors. The factorization decouples the nonnegative constraints from the low-rank constraints. The resulting problem is an optimization problem on manifolds, and we propose a variant of Riemannian conjugate gradients to solve it. We test the proposed algorithm across various tasks such as colour image inpainting, video completion, and hyperspectral image completion. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms many state-of-the-art tensor completion algorithms.

Structured Low-Rank Tensor Learning

We consider the problem of learning low-rank tensors from partial observations with structural constraints, and propose a novel factorization of such tensors, which leads to a simpler optimization problem. The resulting problem is an optimization problem on manifolds. We develop first-order and second-order Riemannian optimization algorithms to solve it. The duality gap for the resulting problem is derived, and we experimentally verify the correctness of the proposed algorithm. We demonstrate the algorithm on nonnegative constraints and Hankel constraints.

Angle based dynamic learning rate for gradient descent

In our work, we propose a novel yet simple approach to obtain an adaptive learning rate for gradient-based descent methods on classification tasks. Instead of the traditional approach of selecting adaptive learning rates via the decayed expectation of gradient-based terms, we use the angle between the current gradient and the new gradient: this new gradient is computed from the direction orthogonal to the current gradient, which further helps us in determining a better adaptive learning rate based on angle history, thereby, leading to relatively better accuracy compared to the existing state-of-the-art optimizers. On a wide variety of benchmark datasets with prominent image classification architectures such as ResNet, DenseNet, EfficientNet, and VGG, we find that our method leads to the highest accuracy in most of the datasets. Moreover, we prove that our method is convergent.

Adaptive Consensus Optimization Method for GANs

We propose a second order gradient based method with ADAM and RMSprop for the training of generative adversarial networks. The proposed method is fastest to obtain similar accuracy when compared to prominent second order methods. Unlike state-of-the-art recent methods, it does not require solving a linear system, or it does not require additional mixed second derivative terms. We derive the fixed point iteration corresponding to proposed method, and show that the proposed method is convergent. The proposed method produces better or comparable inception scores, and comparable quality of images compared to other recently proposed state-of-the-art second order methods. Compared to first order methods such as ADAM, it produces significantly better inception scores. The proposed method is compared and validated on popular datasets such as FFHQ, LSUN, CIFAR10, MNIST, and Fashion MNIST for image generation tasks\footnote{Accepted in IJCNN 2023}. Codes: \url{https://github.com/misterpawan/acom}

Light-weight Deep Extreme Multilabel Classification

Extreme multi-label (XML) classification refers to the task of supervised multi-label learning that involves a large number of labels. Hence, scalability of the classifier with increasing label dimension is an important consideration. In this paper, we develop a method called LightDXML which modifies the recently developed deep learning based XML framework by using label embeddings instead of feature embedding for negative sampling and iterating cyclically through three major phases: (1) proxy training of label embeddings (2) shortlisting of labels for negative sampling and (3) final classifier training using the negative samples. Consequently, LightDXML also removes the requirement of a re-ranker module, thereby, leading to further savings on time and memory requirements. The proposed method achieves the best of both worlds: while the training time, model size and prediction times are on par or better compared to the tree-based methods, it attains much better prediction accuracy that is on par with the deep learning based methods. Moreover, the proposed approach achieves the best tail-label prediction accuracy over most state-of-the-art XML methods on some of the large datasets\footnote{accepted in IJCNN 2023, partial funding from MAPG grant and IIIT Seed grant at IIIT, Hyderabad, India. Code: \url{https://github.com/misterpawan/LightDXML}