MaD-Scientist: AI-based Scientist solving Convection-Diffusion-Reaction Equations Using Massive PINN-Based Prior Data

Large language models (LLMs), like ChatGPT, have shown that even trained with noisy prior data, they can generalize effectively to new tasks through in-context learning (ICL) and pre-training techniques. Motivated by this, we explore whether a similar approach can be applied to scientific foundation models (SFMs). Our methodology is structured as follows: (i) we collect low-cost physics-informed neural network (PINN)-based approximated prior data in the form of solutions to partial differential equations (PDEs) constructed through an arbitrary linear combination of mathematical dictionaries; (ii) we utilize Transformer architectures with self and cross-attention mechanisms to predict PDE solutions without knowledge of the governing equations in a zero-shot setting; (iii) we provide experimental evidence on the one-dimensional convection-diffusion-reaction equation, which demonstrate that pre-training remains robust even with approximated prior data, with only marginal impacts on test accuracy. Notably, this finding opens the path to pre-training SFMs with realistic, low-cost data instead of (or in conjunction with) numerical high-cost data. These results support the conjecture that SFMs can improve in a manner similar to LLMs, where fully cleaning the vast set of sentences crawled from the Internet is nearly impossible.

FastLRNR and Sparse Physics Informed Backpropagation

We introduce Sparse Physics Informed Backpropagation (SPInProp), a new class of methods for accelerating backpropagation for a specialized neural network architecture called Low Rank Neural Representation (LRNR). The approach exploits the low rank structure within LRNR and constructs a reduced neural network approximation that is much smaller in size. We call the smaller network FastLRNR. We show that backpropagation of FastLRNR can be substituted for that of LRNR, enabling a significant reduction in complexity. We apply SPInProp to a physics informed neural networks framework and demonstrate how the solution of parametrized partial differential equations is accelerated.

Latent Space Energy-based Neural ODEs

This paper introduces a novel family of deep dynamical models designed to represent continuous-time sequence data. This family of models generates each data point in the time series by a neural emission model, which is a non-linear transformation of a latent state vector. The trajectory of the latent states is implicitly described by a neural ordinary differential equation (ODE), with the initial state following an informative prior distribution parameterized by an energy-based model. Furthermore, we can extend this model to disentangle dynamic states from underlying static factors of variation, represented as time-invariant variables in the latent space. We train the model using maximum likelihood estimation with Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) in an end-to-end manner, without requiring additional assisting components such as an inference network. Our experiments on oscillating systems, videos and real-world state sequences (MuJoCo) illustrate that ODEs with the learnable energy-based prior outperform existing counterparts, and can generalize to new dynamic parameterization, enabling long-horizon predictions.

Parameterized Physics-informed Neural Networks for Parameterized PDEs

Complex physical systems are often described by partial differential equations (PDEs) that depend on parameters such as the Reynolds number in fluid mechanics. In applications such as design optimization or uncertainty quantification, solutions of those PDEs need to be evaluated at numerous points in the parameter space. While physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) have emerged as a new strong competitor as a surrogate, their usage in this scenario remains underexplored due to the inherent need for repetitive and time-consuming training. In this paper, we address this problem by proposing a novel extension, parameterized physics-informed neural networks (P$^2$INNs). P$^2$INNs enable modeling the solutions of parameterized PDEs via explicitly encoding a latent representation of PDE parameters. With the extensive empirical evaluation, we demonstrate that P$^2$INNs outperform the baselines both in accuracy and parameter efficiency on benchmark 1D and 2D parameterized PDEs and are also effective in overcoming the known "failure modes".

Efficiently Parameterized Neural Metriplectic Systems

Metriplectic systems are learned from data in a way that scales quadratically in both the size of the state and the rank of the metriplectic data. Besides being provably energy conserving and entropy stable, the proposed approach comes with approximation results demonstrating its ability to accurately learn metriplectic dynamics from data as well as an error estimate indicating its potential for generalization to unseen timescales when approximation error is low. Examples are provided which illustrate performance in the presence of both full state information as well as when entropic variables are unknown, confirming that the proposed approach exhibits superior accuracy and scalability without compromising on model expressivity.

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.