NEWS    MERL researchers presenting workshop papers at NeurIPS 2022

Date:

December 2, 2022 - December 8, 2022

Description:

In addition to 5 papers in recent news (https://www.merl.com/news/news-20221129-1450), MERL researchers presented 2 papers at the NeurIPS Conference Workshop, which was held Dec. 2-8. NeurIPS is one of the most prestigious and competitive international conferences in machine learning.

- “Optimal control of PDEs using physics-informed neural networks” by Saviz Mowlavi and Saleh Nabi

Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) have recently become a popular method for solving forward and inverse problems governed by partial differential equations (PDEs). By incorporating the residual of the PDE into the loss function of a neural network-based surrogate model for the unknown state, PINNs can seamlessly blend measurement data with physical constraints. Here, we extend this framework to PDE-constrained optimal control problems, for which the governing PDE is fully known and the goal is to find a control variable that minimizes a desired cost objective. We validate the performance of the PINN framework by comparing it to state-of-the-art adjoint-based optimization, which performs gradient descent on the discretized control variable while satisfying the discretized PDE.

- “Learning with noisy labels using low-dimensional model trajectory” by Vasu Singla, Shuchin Aeron, Toshiaki Koike-Akino, Matthew E. Brand, Kieran Parsons, Ye Wang

Noisy annotations in real-world datasets pose a challenge for training deep neural networks (DNNs), detrimentally impacting generalization performance as incorrect labels may be memorized. In this work, we probe the observations that early stopping and low-dimensional subspace learning can help address this issue. First, we show that a prior method is sensitive to the early stopping hyper-parameter. Second, we investigate the effectiveness of PCA, for approximating the optimization trajectory under noisy label information. We propose to estimate the low-rank subspace through robust and structured variants of PCA, namely Robust PCA, and Sparse PCA. We find that the subspace estimated through these variants can be less sensitive to early stopping, and can outperform PCA to achieve better test error when trained on noisy labels.

- In addition, new MERL researcher, Jing Liu, also presented a paper entitled “CoPur: Certifiably Robust Collaborative Inference via Feature Purification" based on his previous work before joining MERL. His paper was elected as a spotlight paper to be highlighted in lightening talks and featured paper panel.

External Link:

https://neurips.cc/virtual/2022/events/workshop

Research Areas:

Artificial Intelligence, Control, Dynamical Systems, Machine Learning, Signal Processing

• Related Publications

   Mowlavi, S., Nabi, S., "Optimal Control of PDEs Using Physics-Informed Neural Networks", Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) workshop, December 2022.

  BibTeX TR2022-163 PDF

  • @inproceedings{Mowlavi2022dec,
  • author = {Mowlavi, Saviz and Nabi, Saleh},
  • title = {Optimal Control of PDEs Using Physics-Informed Neural Networks},
  • booktitle = {Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) workshop},
  • year = 2022,
  • month = dec,
  • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2022-163}
  • }

   Singla, V., Aeron, S., Koike-Akino, T., Parsons, K., Brand, M., Wang, Y., "Learning with noisy labels using low-dimensional model trajectory", NeurIPS 2022 Workshop on Distribution Shifts (DistShift), December 2022.

  BibTeX TR2022-156 PDF

  • @inproceedings{Singla2022dec,
  • author = {Singla, Vasu and Aeron, Shuchin and Koike-Akino, Toshiaki and Parsons, Kieran and Brand, Matthew and Wang, Ye},
  • title = {Learning with noisy labels using low-dimensional model trajectory},
  • booktitle = {NeurIPS 2022 Workshop on Distribution Shifts: Connecting Methods and Applications},
  • year = 2022,
  • month = dec,
  • publisher = {OpenReview},
  • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2022-156}
  • }