No Arabic abstract
Here we present a machine learning framework and model implementation that can learn to simulate a wide variety of challenging physical domains, involving fluids, rigid solids, and deformable materials interacting with one another. Our framework---which we term Graph Network-based Simulators (GNS)---represents the state of a physical system with particles, expressed as nodes in a graph, and computes dynamics via learned message-passing. Our results show that our model can generalize from single-timestep predictions with thousands of particles during training, to different initial conditions, thousands of timesteps, and at least an order of magnitude more particles at test time. Our model was robust to hyperparameter choices across various evaluation metrics: the main determinants of long-term performance were the number of message-passing steps, and mitigating the accumulation of error by corrupting the training data with noise. Our GNS framework advances the state-of-the-art in learned physical simulation, and holds promise for solving a wide range of complex forward and inverse problems.
Simulation is a useful tool in situations where training data for machine learning models is costly to annotate or even hard to acquire. In this work, we propose a reinforcement learning-based method for automatically adjusting the parameters of any (non-differentiable) simulator, thereby controlling the distribution of synthesized data in order to maximize the accuracy of a model trained on that data. In contrast to prior art that hand-crafts these simulation parameters or adjusts only parts of the available parameters, our approach fully controls the simulator with the actual underlying goal of maximizing accuracy, rather than mimicking the real data distribution or randomly generating a large volume of data. We find that our approach (i) quickly converges to the optimal simulation parameters in controlled experiments and (ii) can indeed discover good sets of parameters for an image rendering simulator in actual computer vision applications.
Data assimilation for parameter and state estimation in subsurface transport problems remains a significant challenge due to the sparsity of measurements, the heterogeneity of porous media, and the high computational cost of forward numerical models. We present a physics-informed deep neural networks (DNNs) machine learning method for estimating space-dependent hydraulic conductivity, hydraulic head, and concentration fields from sparse measurements. In this approach, we employ individual DNNs to approximate the unknown parameters (e.g., hydraulic conductivity) and states (e.g., hydraulic head and concentration) of a physical system, and jointly train these DNNs by minimizing the loss function that consists of the governing equations residuals in addition to the error with respect to measurement data. We apply this approach to assimilate conductivity, hydraulic head, and concentration measurements for joint inversion of the conductivity, hydraulic head, and concentration fields in a steady-state advection--dispersion problem. We study the accuracy of the physics-informed DNN approach with respect to data size, number of variables (conductivity and head versus conductivity, head, and concentration), DNNs size, and DNN initialization during training. We demonstrate that the physics-informed DNNs are significantly more accurate than standard data-driven DNNs when the training set consists of sparse data. We also show that the accuracy of parameter estimation increases as additional variables are inverted jointly.
Simulating physical systems is a core component of scientific computing, encompassing a wide range of physical domains and applications. Recently, there has been a surge in data-driven methods to complement traditional numerical simulations methods, motivated by the opportunity to reduce computational costs and/or learn new physical models leveraging access to large collections of data. However, the diversity of problem settings and applications has led to a plethora of approaches, each one evaluated on a different setup and with different evaluation metrics. We introduce a set of benchmark problems to take a step towards unified benchmarks and evaluation protocols. We propose four representative physical systems, as well as a collection of both widely used classical time integrators and representative data-driven methods (kernel-based, MLP, CNN, nearest neighbors). Our framework allows evaluating objectively and systematically the stability, accuracy, and computational efficiency of data-driven methods. Additionally, it is configurable to permit adjustments for accommodating other learning tasks and for establishing a foundation for future developments in machine learning for scientific computing.
Data simulation engines like Unity are becoming an increasingly important data source that allows us to acquire ground truth labels conveniently. Moreover, we can flexibly edit the content of an image in the engine, such as objects (position, orientation) and environments (illumination, occlusion). When using simulated data as training sets, its editable content can be leveraged to mimic the distribution of real-world data, and thus reduce the content difference between the synthetic and real domains. This paper explores content adaptation in the context of semantic segmentation, where the complex street scenes are fully synthesized using 19 classes of virtual objects from a first person driver perspective and controlled by 23 attributes. To optimize the attribute values and obtain a training set of similar content to real-world data, we propose a scalable discretization-and-relaxation (SDR) approach. Under a reinforcement learning framework, we formulate attribute optimization as a random-to-optimized mapping problem using a neural network. Our method has three characteristics. 1) Instead of editing attributes of individual objects, we focus on global attributes that have large influence on the scene structure, such as object density and illumination. 2) Attributes are quantized to discrete values, so as to reduce search space and training complexity. 3) Correlated attributes are jointly optimized in a group, so as to avoid meaningless scene structures and find better convergence points. Experiment shows our system can generate reasonable and useful scenes, from which we obtain promising real-world segmentation accuracy compared with existing synthetic training sets.
We introduce an approach for imposing physically informed inductive biases in learned simulation models. We combine graph networks with a differentiable ordinary differential equation integrator as a mechanism for predicting future states, and a Hamiltonian as an internal representation. We find that our approach outperforms baselines without these biases in terms of predictive accuracy, energy accuracy, and zero-shot generalization to time-step sizes and integrator orders not experienced during training. This advances the state-of-the-art of learned simulation, and in principle is applicable beyond physical domains.