arXiv subjects

Lingxiao Li

Publications and source records attributed to Lingxiao Li.

53 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

arXiv2023

Sampling with Mollified Interaction Energy Descent

Sampling from a target measure whose density is only known up to a normalization constant is a fundamental problem in computational statistics and machine learning. In this paper, we present a new optimization-based method for sampling called mollified interaction energy descent (MIED). MIED minimizes a new class of energies on probability measures called mollified interaction energies (MIEs). These energies rely on mollifier functions -- smooth approximations of the Dirac delta originated from PDE theory. We show that as the mollifier approaches the Dirac delta, the MIE converges to the chi-square divergence with respect to the target measure and the gradient flow of the MIE agrees with that of the chi-square divergence. Optimizing this energy with proper discretization yields a practical first-order particle-based algorithm for sampling in both unconstrained and constrained domains. We show experimentally that for unconstrained sampling problems our algorithm performs on par with existing particle-based algorithms like SVGD, while for constrained sampling problems our method readily incorporates constrained optimization techniques to handle more flexible constraints with strong performance compared to alternatives.

stat.ML↗

arXiv2023

Wasserstein Iterative Networks for Barycenter Estimation

Wasserstein barycenters have become popular due to their ability to represent the average of probability measures in a geometrically meaningful way. In this paper, we present an algorithm to approximate the Wasserstein-2 barycenters of continuous measures via a generative model. Previous approaches rely on regularization (entropic/quadratic) which introduces bias or on input convex neural networks which are not expressive enough for large-scale tasks. In contrast, our algorithm does not introduce bias and allows using arbitrary neural networks. In addition, based on the celebrity faces dataset, we construct Ave, celeba! dataset which can be used for quantitative evaluation of barycenter algorithms by using standard metrics of generative models such as FID.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

A Conservative Finite Element Solver for MHD Kinematics equations: Vector Potential method and Constraint Preconditioning

A new conservative finite element solver for the three-dimensional steady magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) kinematics equations is presented.The solver utilizes magnetic vector potential and current density as solution variables, which are discretized by H(curl)-conforming edge-element and H(div)-conforming face element respectively. As a result, the divergence-free constraints of discrete current density and magnetic induction are both satisfied. Moreover the solutions also preserve the total magnetic helicity. The generated linear algebraic equation is a typical dual saddle-point problem that is ill-conditioned and indefinite. To efficiently solve it, we develop a block preconditioner based on constraint preconditioning framework and devise a preconditioned FGMRES solver. Numerical experiments verify the conservative properties, the convergence rate of the discrete solutions and the robustness of the preconditioner.

math.NA↗

arXiv2021

Block preconditioning methods for asymptotic preserving scheme arising in anisotropic elliptic problems

Efficient and robust iterative solvers for strong anisotropic elliptic equations are very challenging. In this paper a block preconditioning method is introduced to solve the linear algebraic systems of a class of micro-macro asymptotic-preserving (MMAP) scheme. MMAP method was developed by Degond {\it et al.} in 2012 where the discrete matrix has a $2\times2$ block structure. By the approximate Schur complement a series of block preconditioners are constructed. We first analyze a natural approximate Schur complement that is the coefficient matrix of the original non-AP discretization. However it tends to be singular for very small anisotropic parameters. We then improve it by using more suitable approximation for boundary rows of the exact Schur complement. With these block preconditioners, preconditioned GMRES iterative method is developed to solve the discrete equations. Several numerical tests show that block preconditioning methods can be a robust strategy with respect to grid refinement and the anisotropic strengths.

math.NA↗

arXiv2021

Large-Scale Wasserstein Gradient Flows

Wasserstein gradient flows provide a powerful means of understanding and solving many diffusion equations. Specifically, Fokker-Planck equations, which model the diffusion of probability measures, can be understood as gradient descent over entropy functionals in Wasserstein space. This equivalence, introduced by Jordan, Kinderlehrer and Otto, inspired the so-called JKO scheme to approximate these diffusion processes via an implicit discretization of the gradient flow in Wasserstein space. Solving the optimization problem associated to each JKO step, however, presents serious computational challenges. We introduce a scalable method to approximate Wasserstein gradient flows, targeted to machine learning applications. Our approach relies on input-convex neural networks (ICNNs) to discretize the JKO steps, which can be optimized by stochastic gradient descent. Unlike previous work, our method does not require domain discretization or particle simulation. As a result, we can sample from the measure at each time step of the diffusion and compute its probability density. We demonstrate our algorithm's performance by computing diffusions following the Fokker-Planck equation and apply it to unnormalized density sampling as well as nonlinear filtering.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

Do Neural Optimal Transport Solvers Work? A Continuous Wasserstein-2 Benchmark

Despite the recent popularity of neural network-based solvers for optimal transport (OT), there is no standard quantitative way to evaluate their performance. In this paper, we address this issue for quadratic-cost transport -- specifically, computation of the Wasserstein-2 distance, a commonly-used formulation of optimal transport in machine learning. To overcome the challenge of computing ground truth transport maps between continuous measures needed to assess these solvers, we use input-convex neural networks (ICNN) to construct pairs of measures whose ground truth OT maps can be obtained analytically. This strategy yields pairs of continuous benchmark measures in high-dimensional spaces such as spaces of images. We thoroughly evaluate existing optimal transport solvers using these benchmark measures. Even though these solvers perform well in downstream tasks, many do not faithfully recover optimal transport maps. To investigate the cause of this discrepancy, we further test the solvers in a setting of image generation. Our study reveals crucial limitations of existing solvers and shows that increased OT accuracy does not necessarily correlate to better results downstream.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

Interactive All-Hex Meshing via Cuboid Decomposition

Standard PolyCube-based hexahedral (hex) meshing methods aim to deform the input domain into an axis-aligned PolyCube volume with integer corners; if this deformation is bijective, then applying the inverse map to the voxelized PolyCube yields a valid hex mesh. A key challenge in these methods is to maintain the bijectivity of the PolyCube deformation, thus reducing the robustness of these algorithms. In this work, we present an interactive pipeline for hex meshing that sidesteps this challenge by using a new representation of PolyCubes as unions of cuboids. We begin by deforming the input tetrahedral mesh into a near-PolyCube domain whose faces are close but not perfectly aligned to the major axis directions. We then build a PolyCube by optimizing the layout of a set of cuboids with user guidance to closely fit the deformed domain. Finally, we construct an inversion-free pullback map from the voxelized PolyCube to the input domain while optimizing for mesh quality metrics. We allow extensive user control over each stage, such as editing the voxelized PolyCube, positioning surface vertices, and exploring the trade-off among competing quality metrics, while also providing automatic alternatives. We validate our method on over one hundred shapes, including models that are challenging for past PolyCube-based and frame-field-based methods. Our pipeline reliably produces hex meshes with quality on par with or better than state-of-the-art. We additionally conduct a user study with 20 participants in which the majority prefer hex meshes they make using our tool to the ones from automatic state-of-the-art methods. This demonstrates the need for intuitive interactive hex meshing tools where the user can dictate the priorities of their mesh.

cs.GR↗

arXiv2021

Continuous Wasserstein-2 Barycenter Estimation without Minimax Optimization

Wasserstein barycenters provide a geometric notion of the weighted average of probability measures based on optimal transport. In this paper, we present a scalable algorithm to compute Wasserstein-2 barycenters given sample access to the input measures, which are not restricted to being discrete. While past approaches rely on entropic or quadratic regularization, we employ input convex neural networks and cycle-consistency regularization to avoid introducing bias. As a result, our approach does not resort to minimax optimization. We provide theoretical analysis on error bounds as well as empirical evidence of the effectiveness of the proposed approach in low-dimensional qualitative scenarios and high-dimensional quantitative experiments.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

Comparing Alternative Route Planning Techniques: A Comparative User Study on Melbourne, Dhaka and Copenhagen Road Networks

Many modern navigation systems and map-based services do not only provide the fastest route from a source location s to a target location t but also provide a few alternative routes to the users as more options to choose from. Consequently, computing alternative paths has received significant research attention. However, it is unclear which of the existing approaches generates alternative routes of better quality because the quality of these alternatives is mostly subjective. Motivated by this, in this paper, we present a user study conducted on the road networks of Melbourne, Dhaka and Copenhagen that compares the quality (as perceived by the users) of the alternative routes generated by four of the most popular existing approaches including the routes provided by Google Maps. We also present a web-based demo system that can be accessed using any internet-enabled device and allows users to see the alternative routes generated by the four approaches for any pair of selected source and target. We report the average ratings received by the four approaches and our statistical analysis shows that there is no credible evidence that the four approaches receive different ratings on average. We also discuss the limitations of this user study and recommend the readers to interpret these results with caution because certain factors may have affected the participants' ratings.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2020

MAICRM: A general model for rapid simulation of hot dense plasma spectra

This work is to continue the development of the general model, Multi-Average Ion Collisional-Radiative Model (MAICRM), to calculate the plasma spectral properties of hot dense plasmas. In this model, an average ion is used to characterize the average orbital occupations and the total populations of the configurations within a single charge state. The orbital occupations and population of the average ion are obtained by solving two sets of rate equations sequentially and iteratively. The calculated spectra of Xe and Au plasmas under different plasma conditions are in good agreement with the DCA/SCA calculations while the computational cost is much lower.

physics.plasm-ph↗

arXiv2020

Continuous Regularized Wasserstein Barycenters

Wasserstein barycenters provide a geometrically meaningful way to aggregate probability distributions, built on the theory of optimal transport. They are difficult to compute in practice, however, leading previous work to restrict their supports to finite sets of points. Leveraging a new dual formulation for the regularized Wasserstein barycenter problem, we introduce a stochastic algorithm that constructs a continuous approximation of the barycenter. We establish strong duality and use the corresponding primal-dual relationship to parametrize the barycenter implicitly using the dual potentials of regularized transport problems. The resulting problem can be solved with stochastic gradient descent, which yields an efficient online algorithm to approximate the barycenter of continuous distributions given sample access. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach and compare against previous work on synthetic examples and real-world applications.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2020

A constrained transport divergence-free finite element method for Incompressible MHD equations

In this paper we study finite element method for three-dimensional incompressible resistive magnetohydrodynamic equations, in which the velocity, the current density, and the magnetic induction are divergence-free. It is desirable that the discrete solutions should also satisfy divergence-free conditions exactly especially for the momentum equations. Inspired by constrained transport method,we devise a new stable mixed finite element method that can achieve the goal. We also prove the well-posedness of the discrete solutions. To solve the resulting linear algebraic equations, we propose a GMRES solver with an augmented Lagrangian block preconditioner. By numerical experiments, we verify the theoretical results and demonstrate the quasi-optimality of the discrete solver with respect to the number of degrees of freedom

math.NA↗

arXiv2020

MAICRM : A general model for rapid simulation of hot dense plasmas

We propose a general model, Multi-Average Ion Collisional-Radiative Model (MAICRM), to rapid simulate the ionization and population distributions of hot dense plasmas. In MAICRM, the orbital occupation numbers of ions at the same charge stage are averaged and determined by the excitation and de-excitation processes; the populations of the average ions are determined by the ionization and recombination processes with the fixed orbital average occupation numbers in each ion. The calculated mean ionizations and charge state distributions of MAICRM are in general agreement with the other theoretical and experimental results especially for the mid- and high-density plasmas. Since MAICRM considers more detailed transitions and ionization balances than the average atom model and is faster than DCA/SCA models, this model has the advantage to be combined into hydrodynamic simulations.

physics.atom-ph↗

arXiv2020

SentPWNet: A Unified Sentence Pair Weighting Network for Task-specific Sentence Embedding

Pair-based metric learning has been widely adopted to learn sentence embedding in many NLP tasks such as semantic text similarity due to its efficiency in computation. Most existing works employed a sequence encoder model and utilized limited sentence pairs with a pair-based loss to learn discriminating sentence representation. However, it is known that the sentence representation can be biased when the sampled sentence pairs deviate from the true distribution of all sentence pairs. In this paper, our theoretical analysis shows that existing works severely suffered from a good pair sampling and instance weighting strategy. Instead of one time pair selection and learning on equal weighted pairs, we propose a unified locality weighting and learning framework to learn task-specific sentence embedding. Our model, SentPWNet, exploits the neighboring spatial distribution of each sentence as locality weight to indicate the informative level of sentence pair. Such weight is updated along with pair-loss optimization in each round, ensuring the model keep learning the most informative sentence pairs. Extensive experiments on four public available datasets and a self-collected place search benchmark with 1.4 million places clearly demonstrate that our model consistently outperforms existing sentence embedding methods with comparable efficiency.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2020

Supervised Fitting of Geometric Primitives to 3D Point Clouds

Fitting geometric primitives to 3D point cloud data bridges a gap between low-level digitized 3D data and high-level structural information on the underlying 3D shapes. As such, it enables many downstream applications in 3D data processing. For a long time, RANSAC-based methods have been the gold standard for such primitive fitting problems, but they require careful per-input parameter tuning and thus do not scale well for large datasets with diverse shapes. In this work, we introduce Supervised Primitive Fitting Network (SPFN), an end-to-end neural network that can robustly detect a varying number of primitives at different scales without any user control. The network is supervised using ground truth primitive surfaces and primitive membership for the input points. Instead of directly predicting the primitives, our architecture first predicts per-point properties and then uses a differential model estimation module to compute the primitive type and parameters. We evaluate our approach on a novel benchmark of ANSI 3D mechanical component models and demonstrate a significant improvement over both the state-of-the-art RANSAC-based methods and the direct neural prediction.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2017

A novel divergence-free Finite Element Method for the MHD Kinematics equations using Vector-potential

We propose a new mixed finite element method for the three-dimensional steady magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) kinematics equations for which the velocity of the fluid is given. Although prescribing the velocity field leads to a simpler model than full MHD equations, its conservative and efficient numerical methods are still active research topic. The distinctive feature of our discrete scheme is that the divergence-free conditions for current density and magnetic induction are both satisfied. To reach this goal, we use magnetic vector potential to represent magnetic induction and resort to H(div)-conforming element to discretize the current density. We develop an preconditioned iterative solver based on a block preconditioner for the algebraic systems arising from the discretization. Several numerical experiments are implemented to verify the divergence-free properties, the convergence rate of the finite element scheme and the robustness of the preconditioner.

math.NA↗

arXiv2017

A robust solver for the finite element approximation of stationary incompressible MHD equations in 3D

In this paper, we propose a robust solver for the finite element discrete problem of the stationary incompressible magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) equations in three dimensions. By the mixed finite element method, both the velocity and the pressure are approximated by H1-conforming finite elements, while the magnetic field is approximated by H(curl)-conforming edge elements. An efficient preconditioner is proposed to accelerate the convergence of the GMRES method for solving the linearized MHD problem. We use three numerical experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of the finite element method and the robustness of the discrete solver. The preconditioner contains the least undetermined parameters and is optimal with respect to the number of degrees of freedom. We also show the scalability of the solver for moderate physical parameters.

math.NA↗