Self-Consistency Training for Hamiltonian Prediction

Hamiltonian prediction is a versatile formulation to leverage machine learning for solving molecular science problems. Yet, its applicability is limited by insufficient labeled data for training. In this work, we highlight that Hamiltonian prediction possesses a self-consistency principle, based on which we propose an exact training method that does not require labeled data. This merit addresses the data scarcity difficulty, and distinguishes the task from other property prediction formulations with unique benefits: (1) self-consistency training enables the model to be trained on a large amount of unlabeled data, hence substantially enhances generalization; (2) self-consistency training is more efficient than labeling data with DFT for supervised training, since it is an amortization of DFT calculation over a set of molecular structures. We empirically demonstrate the better generalization in data-scarce and out-of-distribution scenarios, and the better efficiency from the amortization. These benefits push forward the applicability of Hamiltonian prediction to an ever larger scale.

AI Agent as Urban Planner: Steering Stakeholder Dynamics in Urban Planning via Consensus-based Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

In urban planning, land use readjustment plays a pivotal role in aligning land use configurations with the current demands for sustainable urban development. However, present-day urban planning practices face two main issues. Firstly, land use decisions are predominantly dependent on human experts. Besides, while resident engagement in urban planning can promote urban sustainability and livability, it is challenging to reconcile the diverse interests of stakeholders. To address these challenges, we introduce a Consensus-based Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning framework for real-world land use readjustment. This framework serves participatory urban planning, allowing diverse intelligent agents as stakeholder representatives to vote for preferred land use types. Within this framework, we propose a novel consensus mechanism in reward design to optimize land utilization through collective decision making. To abstract the structure of the complex urban system, the geographic information of cities is transformed into a spatial graph structure and then processed by graph neural networks. Comprehensive experiments on both traditional top-down planning and participatory planning methods from real-world communities indicate that our computational framework enhances global benefits and accommodates diverse interests, leading to improved satisfaction across different demographic groups. By integrating Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning, our framework ensures that participatory urban planning decisions are more dynamic and adaptive to evolving community needs and provides a robust platform for automating complex real-world urban planning processes.

LordNet: Learning to Solve Parametric Partial Differential Equations without Simulated Data

Neural operators, as a powerful approximation to the non-linear operators between infinite-dimensional function spaces, have proved to be promising in accelerating the solution of partial differential equations (PDE). However, it requires a large amount of simulated data which can be costly to collect, resulting in a chicken-egg dilemma and limiting its usage in solving PDEs. To jump out of the dilemma, we propose a general data-free paradigm where the neural network directly learns physics from the mean squared residual (MSR) loss constructed by the discretized PDE. We investigate the physical information in the MSR loss and identify the challenge that the neural network must have the capacity to model the long range entanglements in the spatial domain of the PDE, whose patterns vary in different PDEs. Therefore, we propose the low-rank decomposition network (LordNet) which is tunable and also efficient to model various entanglements. Specifically, LordNet learns a low-rank approximation to the global entanglements with simple fully connected layers, which extracts the dominant pattern with reduced computational cost. The experiments on solving Poisson's equation and Navier-Stokes equation demonstrate that the physical constraints by the MSR loss can lead to better accuracy and generalization ability of the neural network. In addition, LordNet outperforms other modern neural network architectures in both PDEs with the fewest parameters and the fastest inference speed. For Navier-Stokes equation, the learned operator is over 50 times faster than the finite difference solution with the same computational resources.

Cooperative Policy Learning with Pre-trained Heterogeneous Observation Representations

Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has been increasingly explored to learn the cooperative policy towards maximizing a certain global reward. Many existing studies take advantage of graph neural networks (GNN) in MARL to propagate critical collaborative information over the interaction graph, built upon inter-connected agents. Nevertheless, the vanilla GNN approach yields substantial defects in dealing with complex real-world scenarios since the generic message passing mechanism is ineffective between heterogeneous vertices and, moreover, simple message aggregation functions are incapable of accurately modeling the combinational interactions from multiple neighbors. While adopting complex GNN models with more informative message passing and aggregation mechanisms can obviously benefit heterogeneous vertex representations and cooperative policy learning, it could, on the other hand, increase the training difficulty of MARL and demand more intense and direct reward signals compared to the original global reward. To address these challenges, we propose a new cooperative learning framework with pre-trained heterogeneous observation representations. Particularly, we employ an encoder-decoder based graph attention to learn the intricate interactions and heterogeneous representations that can be more easily leveraged by MARL. Moreover, we design a pre-training with local actor-critic algorithm to ease the difficulty in cooperative policy learning. Extensive experiments over real-world scenarios demonstrate that our new approach can significantly outperform existing MARL baselines as well as operational research solutions that are widely-used in industry.