Energy
Advances in 3D Neural Stylization: A Survey
Chen, Yingshu, Shao, Guocheng, Shum, Ka Chun, Hua, Binh-Son, Yeung, Sai-Kit
Modern artificial intelligence provides a novel way of producing digital art in styles. The expressive power of neural networks enables the realm of visual style transfer methods, which can be used to edit images, videos, and 3D data to make them more artistic and diverse. This paper reports on recent advances in neural stylization for 3D data. We provide a taxonomy for neural stylization by considering several important design choices, including scene representation, guidance data, optimization strategies, and output styles. Building on such taxonomy, our survey first revisits the background of neural stylization on 2D images, and then provides in-depth discussions on recent neural stylization methods for 3D data, where we also provide a mini-benchmark on artistic stylization methods. Based on the insights gained from the survey, we then discuss open challenges, future research, and potential applications and impacts of neural stylization.
Learning Radio Environments by Differentiable Ray Tracing
Hoydis, Jakob, Aoudia, Fayçal Aït, Cammerer, Sebastian, Euchner, Florian, Nimier-David, Merlin, Brink, Stephan ten, Keller, Alexander
Ray tracing (RT) is instrumental in 6G research in order to generate spatially-consistent and environment-specific channel impulse responses (CIRs). While acquiring accurate scene geometries is now relatively straightforward, determining material characteristics requires precise calibration using channel measurements. We therefore introduce a novel gradient-based calibration method, complemented by differentiable parametrizations of material properties, scattering and antenna patterns. Our method seamlessly integrates with differentiable ray tracers that enable the computation of derivatives of CIRs with respect to these parameters. Essentially, we approach field computation as a large computational graph wherein parameters are trainable akin to weights of a neural network (NN). We have validated our method using both synthetic data and real-world indoor channel measurements, employing a distributed multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channel sounder.
Fast ODE-based Sampling for Diffusion Models in Around 5 Steps
Zhou, Zhenyu, Chen, Defang, Wang, Can, Chen, Chun
Sampling from diffusion models can be treated as solving the corresponding ordinary differential equations (ODEs), with the aim of obtaining an accurate solution with as few number of function evaluations (NFE) as possible. Recently, various fast samplers utilizing higher-order ODE solvers have emerged and achieved better performance than the initial first-order one. However, these numerical methods inherently result in certain approximation errors, which significantly degrades sample quality with extremely small NFE (e.g., around 5). In contrast, based on the geometric observation that each sampling trajectory almost lies in a two-dimensional subspace embedded in the ambient space, we propose Approximate MEan-Direction Solver (AMED-Solver) that eliminates truncation errors by directly learning the mean direction for fast diffusion sampling. Besides, our method can be easily used as a plugin to further improve existing ODE-based samplers. Extensive experiments on image synthesis with the resolution ranging from 32 to 256 demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. With only 5 NFE, we achieve 7.14 FID on CIFAR-10, 13.75 FID on ImageNet 64$\times$64, and 12.79 FID on LSUN Bedroom. Our code is available at https://github.com/zhyzhouu/amed-solver.
Textual-Knowledge-Guided Numerical Feature Discovery Method for Power Demand Forecasting
Power demand forecasting is a crucial and challenging task for new power system and integrated energy system. However, as public feature databases and the theoretical mechanism of power demand changes are unavailable, the known features of power demand fluctuation are much limited. Recently, multimodal learning approaches have shown great vitality in machine learning and AIGC. In this paper, we interact two modal data and propose a textual-knowledge-guided numerical feature discovery (TKNFD) method for short-term power demand forecasting. TKNFD extensively accumulates qualitative textual knowledge, expands it into a candidate feature-type set, collects numerical data of these features, and eventually builds four-dimensional multivariate source-tracking databases (4DM-STDs). Next, TKNFD presents a two-level quantitative feature identification strategy independent of forecasting models, finds 43-48 features, and systematically analyses feature contribution and dependency correlation. Benchmark experiments in two different regions around the world demonstrate that the forecasting accuracy of TKNFD-discovered features reliably outperforms that of SoTA feature schemes by 16.84% to 36.36% MAPE. In particular, TKNFD reveals many unknown features, especially several dominant features in the unknown energy and astronomical dimensions, which extend the knowledge on the origin of strong randomness and non-linearity in power demand fluctuation. Besides, 4DM-STDs can serve as public baseline databases.
The Stochastic Dynamic Post-Disaster Inventory Allocation Problem with Trucks and UAVs
van Steenbergen, Robert, van Heeswijk, Wouter, Mes, Martijn
Humanitarian logistics operations face increasing difficulties due to rising demands for aid in disaster areas. This paper investigates the dynamic allocation of scarce relief supplies across multiple affected districts over time. It introduces a novel stochastic dynamic post-disaster inventory allocation problem with trucks and unmanned aerial vehicles delivering relief goods under uncertain supply and demand. The relevance of this humanitarian logistics problem lies in the importance of considering the inter-temporal social impact of deliveries. We achieve this by incorporating deprivation costs when allocating scarce supplies. Furthermore, we consider the inherent uncertainties of disaster areas and the potential use of cargo UAVs to enhance operational efficiency. This study proposes two anticipatory solution methods based on approximate dynamic programming, specifically decomposed linear value function approximation and neural network value function approximation to effectively manage uncertainties in the dynamic allocation process. We compare DL-VFA and NN-VFA with various state-of-the-art methods (exact re-optimization, PPO) and results show a 6-8% improvement compared to the best benchmarks. NN-VFA provides the best performance and captures nonlinearities in the problem, whereas DL-VFA shows excellent scalability against a minor performance loss. The experiments reveal that consideration of deprivation costs results in improved allocation of scarce supplies both across affected districts and over time. Finally, results show that deploying UAVs can play a crucial role in the allocation of relief goods, especially in the first stages after a disaster. The use of UAVs reduces transportation- and deprivation costs together by 16-20% and reduces maximum deprivation times by 19-40%, while maintaining similar levels of demand coverage, showcasing efficient and effective operations.
Generative Models for Anomaly Detection and Design-Space Dimensionality Reduction in Shape Optimization
Our work presents a novel approach to shape optimization, with the twofold objective to improve the efficiency of global optimization algorithms while promoting the generation of high-quality designs during the optimization process free of geometrical anomalies. This is accomplished by reducing the number of the original design variables defining a new reduced subspace where the geometrical variance is maximized and modeling the underlying generative process of the data via probabilistic linear latent variable models such as factor analysis and probabilistic principal component analysis. We show that the data follows approximately a Gaussian distribution when the shape modification method is linear and the design variables are sampled uniformly at random, due to the direct application of the central limit theorem. The degree of anomalousness is measured in terms of Mahalanobis distance, and the paper demonstrates that abnormal designs tend to exhibit a high value of this metric. This enables the definition of a new optimization model where anomalous geometries are penalized and consequently avoided during the optimization loop. The procedure is demonstrated for hull shape optimization of the DTMB 5415 model, extensively used as an international benchmark for shape optimization problems. The global optimization routine is carried out using Bayesian optimization and the DIRECT algorithm. From the numerical results, the new framework improves the convergence of global optimization algorithms, while only designs with high-quality geometrical features are generated through the optimization routine thereby avoiding the wastage of precious computationally expensive simulations.
A machine-learning approach to thunderstorm forecasting through post-processing of simulation data
Yousefnia, Kianusch Vahid, Bölle, Tobias, Zöbisch, Isabella, Gerz, Thomas
Thunderstorms pose a major hazard to society and economy, which calls for reliable thunderstorm forecasts. In this work, we introduce SALAMA, a feedforward neural network model for identifying thunderstorm occurrence in numerical weather prediction (NWP) data. The model is trained on convection-resolving ensemble forecasts over Central Europe and lightning observations. Given only a set of pixel-wise input parameters that are extracted from NWP data and related to thunderstorm development, SALAMA infers the probability of thunderstorm occurrence in a reliably calibrated manner. For lead times up to eleven hours, we find a forecast skill superior to classification based only on NWP reflectivity. Varying the spatiotemporal criteria by which we associate lightning observations with NWP data, we show that the time scale for skillful thunderstorm predictions increases linearly with the spatial scale of the forecast.
Symbolic Learning for Material Discovery
Cunnington, Daniel, Cipcigan, Flaviu, Ferreira, Rodrigo Neumann Barros, Booth, Jonathan
Discovering new materials is essential to solve challenges in climate change, sustainability and healthcare. A typical task in materials discovery is to search for a material in a database which maximises the value of a function. That function is often expensive to evaluate, and can rely upon a simulation or an experiment. Here, we introduce SyMDis, a sample efficient optimisation method based on symbolic learning, that discovers near-optimal materials in a large database. SyMDis performs comparably to a state-of-the-art optimiser, whilst learning interpretable rules to aid physical and chemical verification. Furthermore, the rules learned by SyMDis generalise to unseen datasets and return high performing candidates in a zero-shot evaluation, which is difficult to achieve with other approaches.
Low latency optical-based mode tracking with machine learning deployed on FPGAs on a tokamak
Wei, Yumou, Forelli, Ryan F., Hansen, Chris, Levesque, Jeffrey P., Tran, Nhan, Agar, Joshua C., Di Guglielmo, Giuseppe, Mauel, Michael E., Navratil, Gerald A.
Active feedback control in magnetic confinement fusion devices is desirable to mitigate plasma instabilities and enable robust operation. Optical high-speed cameras provide a powerful, non-invasive diagnostic and can be suitable for these applications. In this study, we process fast camera data, at rates exceeding 100kfps, on $\textit{in situ}$ Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) hardware to track magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) mode evolution and generate control signals in real-time. Our system utilizes a convolutional neural network (CNN) model which predicts the $n$=1 MHD mode amplitude and phase using camera images with better accuracy than other tested non-deep-learning-based methods. By implementing this model directly within the standard FPGA readout hardware of the high-speed camera diagnostic, our mode tracking system achieves a total trigger-to-output latency of 17.6$\mu$s and a throughput of up to 120kfps. This study at the High Beta Tokamak-Extended Pulse (HBT-EP) experiment demonstrates an FPGA-based high-speed camera data acquisition and processing system, enabling application in real-time machine-learning-based tokamak diagnostic and control as well as potential applications in other scientific domains.
Combining deep generative models with extreme value theory for synthetic hazard simulation: a multivariate and spatially coherent approach
Climate hazards can cause major disasters when they occur simultaneously as compound hazards. To understand the distribution of climate risk and inform adaptation policies, scientists need to simulate a large number of physically realistic and spatially coherent events. Current methods are limited by computational constraints and the probabilistic spatial distribution of compound events is not given sufficient attention. The bottleneck in current approaches lies in modelling the dependence structure between variables, as inference on parametric models suffers from the curse of dimensionality. Generative adversarial networks (GANs) are well-suited to such a problem due to their ability to implicitly learn the distribution of data in high-dimensional settings. We employ a GAN to model the dependence structure for daily maximum wind speed, significant wave height, and total precipitation over the Bay of Bengal, combining this with traditional extreme value theory for controlled extrapolation of the tails. Once trained, the model can be used to efficiently generate thousands of realistic compound hazard events, which can inform climate risk assessments for climate adaptation and disaster preparedness. The method developed is flexible and transferable to other multivariate and spatial climate datasets.