Energy
Evidence of Replica Symmetry Breaking under the Nishimori conditions in epidemic inference on graphs
Braunstein, Alfredo, Budzynski, Louise, Mariani, Matteo, Ricci-Tersenghi, Federico
In Bayesian inference, computing the posterior distribution from the data is typically a non-trivial problem, which usually requires approximations such as mean-field approaches or numerical methods, like the Monte Carlo Markov Chain. Being a high-dimensional distribution over a set of correlated variables, the posterior distribution can undergo the notorious replica symmetry breaking transition. When it happens, several mean-field methods and virtually every Monte Carlo scheme can not provide a reasonable approximation to the posterior and its marginals. Replica symmetry is believed to be guaranteed whenever the data is generated with known prior and likelihood distributions, namely under the so-called Nishimori conditions. In this paper, we break this belief, by providing a counter-example showing that, under the Nishimori conditions, replica symmetry breaking arises. Introducing a simple, geometrical model that can be thought of as a patient zero retrieval problem in a highly infectious regime of the epidemic Susceptible-Infectious model, we show that under the Nishimori conditions, there is evidence of replica symmetry breaking. We achieve this result by computing the instability of the replica symmetric cavity method toward the one step replica symmetry broken phase. The origin of this phenomenon -- replica symmetry breaking under the Nishimori conditions -- is likely due to the correlated disorder appearing in the epidemic models.
Gabor-Enhanced Physics-Informed Neural Networks for Fast Simulations of Acoustic Wavefields
Abedi, Mohammad Mahdi, Pardo, David, Alkhalifah, Tariq
Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) have gained increasing attention for solving partial differential equations, including the Helmholtz equation, due to their flexibility and mesh-free formulation. However, their low-frequency bias limits their accuracy and convergence speed for high-frequency wavefield simulations. To alleviate these problems, we propose a simplified PINN framework that incorporates Gabor functions, designed to capture the oscillatory and localized nature of wavefields more effectively. Unlike previous attempts that rely on auxiliary networks to learn Gabor parameters, we redefine the network's task to map input coordinates to a custom Gabor coordinate system, simplifying the training process without increasing the number of trainable parameters compared to a simple PINN. We validate the proposed method across multiple velocity models, including the complex Marmousi and Overthrust models, and demonstrate its superior accuracy, faster convergence, and better robustness features compared to both traditional PINNs and earlier Gabor-based PINNs. Additionally, we propose an efficient integration of a Perfectly Matched Layer (PML) to enhance wavefield behavior near the boundaries. These results suggest that our approach offers an efficient and accurate alternative for scattered wavefield modeling and lays the groundwork for future improvements in PINN-based seismic applications.
DeepSolution: Boosting Complex Engineering Solution Design via Tree-based Exploration and Bi-point Thinking
Li, Zhuoqun, Yu, Haiyang, Chen, Xuanang, Lin, Hongyu, Lu, Yaojie, Huang, Fei, Han, Xianpei, Li, Yongbin, Sun, Le
Designing solutions for complex engineering challenges is crucial in human production activities. However, previous research in the retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) field has not sufficiently addressed tasks related to the design of complex engineering solutions. To fill this gap, we introduce a new benchmark, SolutionBench, to evaluate a system's ability to generate complete and feasible solutions for engineering problems with multiple complex constraints. To further advance the design of complex engineering solutions, we propose a novel system, SolutionRAG, that leverages the tree-based exploration and bi-point thinking mechanism to generate reliable solutions. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that SolutionRAG achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on the SolutionBench, highlighting its potential to enhance the automation and reliability of complex engineering solution design in real-world applications.
Learning to Substitute Components for Compositional Generalization
Li, Zhaoyi, Jiang, Gangwei, Wu, Chenwang, Wei, Ying, Lian, Defu, Chen, Enhong
Despite the rising prevalence of neural language models, recent empirical evidence suggests their deficiency in compositional generalization. One of the current de-facto solutions to this problem is compositional data augmentation, which aims to introduce additional compositional inductive bias. However, existing handcrafted augmentation strategies offer limited improvement when systematic generalization of neural language models requires multi-grained compositional bias (i.e., not limited to either lexical or structural biases alone) or when training sentences have an imbalanced difficulty distribution. To address these challenges, we first propose a novel compositional augmentation strategy called Component Substitution (CompSub), which enables multi-grained composition of substantial substructures across the entire training set. Furthermore, we introduce the Learning Component Substitution (LCS) framework. This framework empowers the learning of component substitution probabilities in CompSub in an end-to-end manner by maximizing the loss of neural language models, thereby prioritizing challenging compositions with elusive concepts and novel contexts. We extend the key ideas of CompSub and LCS to the recently emerging in-context learning scenarios of pre-trained large language models (LLMs), proposing the LCS-ICL algorithm to enhance the few-shot compositional generalization of state-of-the-art (SOTA) LLMs. Theoretically, we provide insights into why applying our algorithms to language models can improve compositional generalization performance. Empirically, our results on four standard compositional generalization benchmarks(SCAN, COGS, GeoQuery, and COGS-QL) demonstrate the superiority of CompSub, LCS, and LCS-ICL, with improvements of up to 66.5%, 10.3%, 1.4%, and 8.8%, respectively.
Beyond Demographics: Fine-tuning Large Language Models to Predict Individuals' Subjective Text Perceptions
Orlikowski, Matthias, Pei, Jiaxin, Röttger, Paul, Cimiano, Philipp, Jurgens, David, Hovy, Dirk
People naturally vary in their annotations for subjective questions and some of this variation is thought to be due to the person's sociodemographic characteristics. LLMs have also been used to label data, but recent work has shown that models perform poorly when prompted with sociodemographic attributes, suggesting limited inherent sociodemographic knowledge. Here, we ask whether LLMs can be trained to be accurate sociodemographic models of annotator variation. Using a curated dataset of five tasks with standardized sociodemographics, we show that models do improve in sociodemographic prompting when trained but that this performance gain is largely due to models learning annotator-specific behaviour rather than sociodemographic patterns. Across all tasks, our results suggest that models learn little meaningful connection between sociodemographics and annotation, raising doubts about the current use of LLMs for simulating sociodemographic variation and behaviour.
Large Language Models Are Innate Crystal Structure Generators
Gan, Jingru, Zhong, Peichen, Du, Yuanqi, Zhu, Yanqiao, Duan, Chenru, Wang, Haorui, Gomes, Carla P., Persson, Kristin A., Schwalbe-Koda, Daniel, Wang, Wei
Crystal structure generation is fundamental to materials discovery, enabling the prediction of novel materials with desired properties. While existing approaches leverage Large Language Models (LLMs) through extensive fine-tuning on materials databases, we show that pre-trained LLMs can inherently generate stable crystal structures without additional training. Our novel framework MatLLMSearch integrates pre-trained LLMs with evolutionary search algorithms, achieving a 78.38% metastable rate validated by machine learning interatomic potentials and 31.7% DFT-verified stability via quantum mechanical calculations, outperforming specialized models such as CrystalTextLLM. Beyond crystal structure generation, we further demonstrate that our framework can be readily adapted to diverse materials design tasks, including crystal structure prediction and multi-objective optimization of properties such as deformation energy and bulk modulus, all without fine-tuning. These results establish pre-trained LLMs as versatile and effective tools for materials discovery, opening up new venues for crystal structure generation with reduced computational overhead and broader accessibility.
AutoQML: A Framework for Automated Quantum Machine Learning
Roth, Marco, Kreplin, David A., Basilewitsch, Daniel, Bravo, João F., Klau, Dennis, Marinov, Milan, Pranjic, Daniel, Stuehler, Horst, Willmann, Moritz, Zöller, Marc-André
Automated Machine Learning (AutoML) has significantly advanced the efficiency of ML-focused software development by automating hyperparameter optimization and pipeline construction, reducing the need for manual intervention. Quantum Machine Learning (QML) offers the potential to surpass classical machine learning (ML) capabilities by utilizing quantum computing. However, the complexity of QML presents substantial entry barriers. We introduce \emph{AutoQML}, a novel framework that adapts the AutoML approach to QML, providing a modular and unified programming interface to facilitate the development of QML pipelines. AutoQML leverages the QML library sQUlearn to support a variety of QML algorithms. The framework is capable of constructing end-to-end pipelines for supervised learning tasks, ensuring accessibility and efficacy. We evaluate AutoQML across four industrial use cases, demonstrating its ability to generate high-performing QML pipelines that are competitive with both classical ML models and manually crafted quantum solutions.
Reward Learning from Multiple Feedback Types
Metz, Yannick, Geiszl, András, Baur, Raphaël, El-Assady, Mennatallah
Learning rewards from preference feedback has become an important tool in the alignment of agentic models. Preference-based feedback, often implemented as a binary comparison between multiple completions, is an established method to acquire large-scale human feedback. However, human feedback in other contexts is often much more diverse. Such diverse feedback can better support the goals of a human annotator, and the simultaneous use of multiple sources might be mutually informative for the learning process or carry type-dependent biases for the reward learning process. Despite these potential benefits, learning from different feedback types has yet to be explored extensively. In this paper, we bridge this gap by enabling experimentation and evaluating multi-type feedback in a broad set of environments. We present a process to generate high-quality simulated feedback of six different types. Then, we implement reward models and downstream RL training for all six feedback types. Based on the simulated feedback, we investigate the use of types of feedback across ten RL environments and compare them to pure preference-based baselines. We show empirically that diverse types of feedback can be utilized and lead to strong reward modeling performance. This work is the first strong indicator of the potential of multi-type feedback for RLHF.
Microscopic Propagator Imaging (MPI) with Diffusion MRI
Zajac, Tommaso, Menegaz, Gloria, Pizzolato, Marco
We propose Microscopic Propagator Imaging (MPI) as a novel method to retrieve the indices of the microscopic propagator which is the probability density function of water displacements due to diffusion within the nervous tissue microstructures. Unlike the Ensemble Average Propagator indices or the Diffusion Tensor Imaging metrics, MPI indices are independent from the mesoscopic organization of the tissue such as the presence of multiple axonal bundle directions and orientation dispersion. As a consequence, MPI indices are more specific to the volumes, sizes, and types of microstructures, like axons and cells, that are present in the tissue. Thus, changes in MPI indices can be more directly linked to alterations in the presence and integrity of microstructures themselves. The methodology behind MPI is rooted on zonal modeling of spherical harmonics, signal simulation, and machine learning regression, and is demonstrated on both synthetic and Human Diffusion MRI data.
CurviTrack: Curvilinear Trajectory Tracking for High-speed Chase of a USV
Gupta, Parakh M., Procházka, Ondřej, Nascimento, Tiago, Saska, Martin
GUPT Aet al.: CURVITRACK: CURVILINEAR TRAJECTORY TRACKING FOR HIGH-SPEED CHASE OF A USV 3MPC Solver Fast Fourier Transform USV Motion Prediction Setpoint Generator UA V Model Reference Tracker Position/Attitude Controller Vision-based Detector Attitude rate Controller IMU UA V Actuators Onboard Sensors State Estimator Odometry & Localisation ˆ x [ b w] n = 1 ..M p r d, η d ˆ r d, ˆ η d χ d 100 Hz ω d T d 100 Hz a d τ d 1 kHz x 100 Hz initialisation only x, R, ω 100 Hz R, ω b UA V plant Pixhawk autopilot MPC Architecture USV Prediction Model UA V Prediction ModelFigure 1: The entire UA V control architecture; the MPC landing controller (red block) is integrated into the MRS system [20] (grey blocks) and supplies the desired reference (velocity r d = null x y z null T and heading rate η d). In the MRS system, the first layer containing a Reference tracker processes the desired reference and gives a full-state reference χ to the attitude controller. The feedback Position/Attitude controller produces the desired thrust and angular velocities ( T d, ω d) for the Pixhawk flight controller (Attitude rate controller). The State estimator fuses data from Odometry & localisation methods to create an estimate of the UA V translation and rotation ( x, R). The Vision-based Detector obtains the visual data from the camera and sends the pose information b of the USV to the MPC. The individual states are sent to their respective prediction models, and using these predictions, the MPC generates the desired control reference according to the cost function.