Sparsifying dimensionality reduction of PDE solution data with Bregman learning

Classical model reduction techniques project the governing equations onto a linear subspace of the original state space. More recent data-driven techniques use neural networks to enable nonlinear projections. Whilst those often enable stronger compression, they may have redundant parameters and lead to suboptimal latent dimensionality. To overcome these, we propose a multistep algorithm that induces sparsity in the encoder-decoder networks for effective reduction in the number of parameters and additional compression of the latent space. This algorithm starts with sparsely initialized a network and training it using linearized Bregman iterations. These iterations have been very successful in computer vision and compressed sensing tasks, but have not yet been used for reduced-order modelling. After the training, we further compress the latent space dimensionality by using a form of proper orthogonal decomposition. Last, we use a bias propagation technique to change the induced sparsity into an effective reduction of parameters. We apply this algorithm to three representative PDE models: 1D diffusion, 1D advection, and 2D reaction-diffusion. Compared to conventional training methods like Adam, the proposed method achieves similar accuracy with 30% less parameters and a significantly smaller latent space.

Learning a Sparse Representation of Barron Functions with the Inverse Scale Space Flow

This paper presents a method for finding a sparse representation of Barron functions. Specifically, given an $L^2$ function $f$, the inverse scale space flow is used to find a sparse measure $\mu$ minimising the $L^2$ loss between the Barron function associated to the measure $\mu$ and the function $f$. The convergence properties of this method are analysed in an ideal setting and in the cases of measurement noise and sampling bias. In an ideal setting the objective decreases strictly monotone in time to a minimizer with $\mathcal{O}(1/t)$, and in the case of measurement noise or sampling bias the optimum is achieved up to a multiplicative or additive constant. This convergence is preserved on discretization of the parameter space, and the minimizers on increasingly fine discretizations converge to the optimum on the full parameter space.

Embeddings between Barron spaces with higher order activation functions

The approximation properties of infinitely wide shallow neural networks heavily depend on the choice of the activation function. To understand this influence, we study embeddings between Barron spaces with different activation functions. These embeddings are proven by providing push-forward maps on the measures $\mu$ used to represent functions $f$. An activation function of particular interest is the rectified power unit ($\operatorname{RePU}$) given by $\operatorname{RePU}_s(x)=\max(0,x)^s$. For many commonly used activation functions, the well-known Taylor remainder theorem can be used to construct a push-forward map, which allows us to prove the embedding of the associated Barron space into a Barron space with a $\operatorname{RePU}$ as activation function. Moreover, the Barron spaces associated with the $\operatorname{RePU}_s$ have a hierarchical structure similar to the Sobolev spaces $H^m$.

Duality for Neural Networks through Reproducing Kernel Banach Spaces

Reproducing Kernel Hilbert spaces (RKHS) have been a very successful tool in various areas of machine learning. Recently, Barron spaces have been used to prove bounds on the generalisation error for neural networks. Unfortunately, Barron spaces cannot be understood in terms of RKHS due to the strong nonlinear coupling of the weights. We show that this can be solved by using the more general Reproducing Kernel Banach spaces (RKBS). This class of integral RKBS can be understood as an infinite union of RKHS spaces. As the RKBS is not a Hilbert space, it is not its own dual space. However, we show that its dual space is again an RKBS where the roles of the data and parameters are interchanged, forming an adjoint pair of RKBSs including a reproducing property in the dual space. This allows us to construct the saddle point problem for neural networks, which can be used in the whole field of primal-dual optimisation.