arXiv subjects

Subhayan De

Publications and source records attributed to Subhayan De.

18 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Reliability-based Topology Optimization using Large Deviation Theory

Reliability-based topology optimization (RBTO) requires repeated estimation of small failure probabilities and their gradients, making conventional nested Monte Carlo approaches computationally prohibitive for large scale structural problems. We propose an RBTO framework that integrates large deviation theory~(LDT) with stochastic gradient descent~(SGD) to address this challenge. LDT provides closed-form exponential rate estimates of rare event probabilities, enabling accurate gradient computation without parametric assumptions on the failure density and without evaluating a full nested reliability loop at every iteration. These LDT-based gradient estimates are used directly to drive a mini batch SGD update of the design variables using only a few random samples per iteration. The framework is validated on three benchmarks, namely, a two-dimentional (2D) simply supported rectangular beam, a 2D L-shaped beam, and a three-dimentional (3D) cantilever beam, under both compliance-based and stress-based failure criteria. Across these examples, the RBTO designs achieve failure probabilities lower than their robust topology optimization counterparts, demonstrating that optimizing for performance under uncertainty alone does not guarantee the satisfaction of explicit reliability constraints. Therefore, the proposed framework offers a computationally efficient route to reliable structural design under uncertainty, with direct relevance to safety-critical engineering applications.

math.OC↗

arXiv2026

Level set-based topology optimization of micropolar solids under thermo-mechanical loading

We propose a novel level set-based topology optimization for micropolar solids subjected to thermo-mechanical loading. To capture the size effects, we have incorporated the microstructural length-scale information into the level set-based topology optimization method by adopting a micropolar theory. The proposed non-local topology optimization method can provide accurate topology optimization for size-dependent solids under thermo-mechanical loading. We have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method through a few representative two-dimensional benchmark problems. The numerical results reveal the substantial influence of underlying micro-structures, incorporated in the model through micropolar parameters, and temperature on topology optimization, highlighting the necessity of the proposed thermo-mechanical micropolar formulation for materials with pronounced non-local effects. For the numerical implementation of the proposed model, we have used open-source finite element libraries, \texttt{Gridap.jl}, and \texttt{GridapTopOpt.jl}, available in Julia, to ensure transparency and reproducibility of the reported computational results.

physics.comp-ph↗

arXiv2025

Model Falsification for Predicting Dynamical Responses of Uncertain Structural Systems

Accurate prediction of dynamical response of structural system depends on the correct modeling of that system. However, modeling becomes increasingly challenging when there are many candidate models available to describe the system behavior. Furthermore, uncertainties can be present even for the parameters of these model classes. The plausibility of each input-output model class of the structures with uncertain components can be determined by a Bayesian approach from measured dynamic responses to one or more input records; predictions of the structural system response to alternate input records can then be made. However, this approach may require many model simulations, even though most of those model classes are quite implausible. An approach is proposed herein to use a bound, computed from the false discovery rate, on the likelihood of measured data to falsify models considering uncertainties in the passive control devices that do not reproduce the measured data to sufficient accuracy. Response prediction is then performed using the unfalsified models in an approximate Bayesian sense by assigning weights, computed from the likelihoods, only to the unfalsified models approach incurring only a fraction of the computational cost of the standard Bayesian approach. The proposed approach for response prediction is illustrated using three structural examples: an earthquake-excited four--degree-of-freedom building model with a hysteretic isolation layer; a 1623--degree-of-freedom three-dimensional building model, with tuned mass dampers attached to its roof, subjected to wind loads; and a full-scale four-story base-isolated building tested on world's largest shake table in Japan's E-Defense lab. The results exhibit accurate response predictions and significant computational savings, thereby illustrating the potential of the proposed method.

stat.AP↗

arXiv2025

Likelihood Level Adapted Estimation of Marginal Likelihood for Bayesian Model Selection

In computational mechanics, multiple models are often present to describe a physical system. While Bayesian model selection is a helpful tool to compare these models using measurement data, it requires the computationally expensive estimation of a multidimensional integral -- known as the marginal likelihood or as the model evidence (\textit{i.e.}, the probability of observing the measured data given the model). This study presents efficient approaches for estimating this marginal likelihood by transforming it into a one-dimensional integral that is subsequently evaluated using a quadrature rule at multiple adaptively-chosen iso-likelihood contour levels. Three different algorithms are proposed to estimate the probability mass at each adapted likelihood level using samples from importance sampling, stratified sampling, and Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling, respectively. The proposed approach is illustrated through four numerical examples. The first example validates the algorithms against a known exact marginal likelihood. The second example uses an 11-story building subjected to an earthquake excitation with an uncertain hysteretic base isolation layer with two models to describe the isolation layer behavior. The third example considers flow past a cylinder when the inlet velocity is uncertain. Based on these examples, the method with stratified sampling is by far the most accurate and efficient method for complex model behavior in low dimension. In the fourth example, the proposed approach is applied to heat conduction in an inhomogeneous plate with uncertain thermal conductivity modeled through a 100 degree-of-freedom Karhunen-Lo\`{e}ve expansion. The results indicate that MultiNest cannot efficiently handle the high-dimensional parameter space, whereas the proposed MCMC-based method more accurately and efficiently explores the parameter space.

stat.CO↗

arXiv2024

Alpha-VI DeepONet: A prior-robust variational Bayesian approach for enhancing DeepONets with uncertainty quantification

We introduce a novel deep operator network (DeepONet) framework that incorporates generalised variational inference (GVI) using R\'enyi's $\alpha$-divergence to learn complex operators while quantifying uncertainty. By incorporating Bayesian neural networks as the building blocks for the branch and trunk networks, our framework endows DeepONet with uncertainty quantification. The use of R\'enyi's $\alpha$-divergence, instead of the Kullback-Leibler divergence (KLD), commonly used in standard variational inference, mitigates issues related to prior misspecification that are prevalent in Variational Bayesian DeepONets. This approach offers enhanced flexibility and robustness. We demonstrate that modifying the variational objective function yields superior results in terms of minimising the mean squared error and improving the negative log-likelihood on the test set. Our framework's efficacy is validated across various mechanical systems, where it outperforms both deterministic and standard KLD-based VI DeepONets in predictive accuracy and uncertainty quantification. The hyperparameter $\alpha$, which controls the degree of robustness, can be tuned to optimise performance for specific problems. We apply this approach to a range of mechanics problems, including gravity pendulum, advection-diffusion, and diffusion-reaction systems. Our findings underscore the potential of $\alpha$-VI DeepONet to advance the field of data-driven operator learning and its applications in engineering and scientific domains.

stat.ML↗

arXiv2023

PINN surrogate of Li-ion battery models for parameter inference. Part I: Implementation and multi-fidelity hierarchies for the single-particle model

To plan and optimize energy storage demands that account for Li-ion battery aging dynamics, techniques need to be developed to diagnose battery internal states accurately and rapidly. This study seeks to reduce the computational resources needed to determine a battery's internal states by replacing physics-based Li-ion battery models -- such as the single-particle model (SPM) and the pseudo-2D (P2D) model -- with a physics-informed neural network (PINN) surrogate. The surrogate model makes high-throughput techniques, such as Bayesian calibration, tractable to determine battery internal parameters from voltage responses. This manuscript is the first of a two-part series that introduces PINN surrogates of Li-ion battery models for parameter inference (i.e., state-of-health diagnostics). In this first part, a method is presented for constructing a PINN surrogate of the SPM. A multi-fidelity hierarchical training, where several neural nets are trained with multiple physics-loss fidelities is shown to significantly improve the surrogate accuracy when only training on the governing equation residuals. The implementation is made available in a companion repository (https://github.com/NREL/pinnstripes). The techniques used to develop a PINN surrogate of the SPM are extended in Part II for the PINN surrogate for the P2D battery model, and explore the Bayesian calibration capabilities of both surrogates.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2023

PINN surrogate of Li-ion battery models for parameter inference. Part II: Regularization and application of the pseudo-2D model

Bayesian parameter inference is useful to improve Li-ion battery diagnostics and can help formulate battery aging models. However, it is computationally intensive and cannot be easily repeated for multiple cycles, multiple operating conditions, or multiple replicate cells. To reduce the computational cost of Bayesian calibration, numerical solvers for physics-based models can be replaced with faster surrogates. A physics-informed neural network (PINN) is developed as a surrogate for the pseudo-2D (P2D) battery model calibration. For the P2D surrogate, additional training regularization was needed as compared to the PINN single-particle model (SPM) developed in Part I. Both the PINN SPM and P2D surrogate models are exercised for parameter inference and compared to data obtained from a direct numerical solution of the governing equations. A parameter inference study highlights the ability to use these PINNs to calibrate scaling parameters for the cathode Li diffusion and the anode exchange current density. By realizing computational speed-ups of 2250x for the P2D model, as compared to using standard integrating methods, the PINN surrogates enable rapid state-of-health diagnostics. In the low-data availability scenario, the testing error was estimated to 2mV for the SPM surrogate and 10mV for the P2D surrogate which could be mitigated with additional data.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2023

Bi-fidelity Variational Auto-encoder for Uncertainty Quantification

Quantifying the uncertainty of quantities of interest (QoIs) from physical systems is a primary objective in model validation. However, achieving this goal entails balancing the need for computational efficiency with the requirement for numerical accuracy. To address this trade-off, we propose a novel bi-fidelity formulation of variational auto-encoders (BF-VAE) designed to estimate the uncertainty associated with a QoI from low-fidelity (LF) and high-fidelity (HF) samples of the QoI. This model allows for the approximation of the statistics of the HF QoI by leveraging information derived from its LF counterpart. Specifically, we design a bi-fidelity auto-regressive model in the latent space that is integrated within the VAE's probabilistic encoder-decoder structure. An effective algorithm is proposed to maximize the variational lower bound of the HF log-likelihood in the presence of limited HF data, resulting in the synthesis of HF realizations with a reduced computational cost. Additionally, we introduce the concept of the bi-fidelity information bottleneck (BF-IB) to provide an information-theoretic interpretation of the proposed BF-VAE model. Our numerical results demonstrate that BF-VAE leads to considerably improved accuracy, as compared to a VAE trained using only HF data, when limited HF data is available.

stat.ML↗

arXiv2023

A Bi-fidelity DeepONet Approach for Modeling Uncertain and Degrading Hysteretic Systems

Nonlinear systems, such as with degrading hysteretic behavior, are often encountered in engineering applications. In addition, due to the ubiquitous presence of uncertainty and the modeling of such systems becomes increasingly difficult. On the other hand, datasets from pristine models developed without knowing the nature of the degrading effects can be easily obtained. In this paper, we use datasets from pristine models without considering the degrading effects of hysteretic systems as low-fidelity representations that capture many of the important characteristics of the true system's behavior to train a deep operator network (DeepONet). Three numerical examples are used to show that the proposed use of the DeepONets to model the discrepancies between the low-fidelity model and the true system's response leads to significant improvements in the prediction error in the presence of uncertainty in the model parameters for degrading hysteretic systems.

stat.ML↗

arXiv2022

Bi-fidelity Modeling of Uncertain and Partially Unknown Systems using DeepONets

Recent advances in modeling large-scale complex physical systems have shifted research focuses towards data-driven techniques. However, generating datasets by simulating complex systems can require significant computational resources. Similarly, acquiring experimental datasets can prove difficult as well. For these systems, often computationally inexpensive, but in general inaccurate, models, known as the low-fidelity models, are available. In this paper, we propose a bi-fidelity modeling approach for complex physical systems, where we model the discrepancy between the true system's response and low-fidelity response in the presence of a small training dataset from the true system's response using a deep operator network (DeepONet), a neural network architecture suitable for approximating nonlinear operators. We apply the approach to model systems that have parametric uncertainty and are partially unknown. Three numerical examples are used to show the efficacy of the proposed approach to model uncertain and partially unknown complex physical systems.

stat.ML↗

arXiv2021

Topology Optimization under Microscale Uncertainty using Stochastic Gradients

This paper considers the design of structures made of engineered materials, accounting for uncertainty in material properties. We present a topology optimization approach that optimizes the structural shape and topology at the macroscale assuming design-independent uncertain microstructures. The structural geometry at the macroscale is described by an explicit level set approach, and the macroscopic structural response is predicted by the eXtended Finite Element Method (XFEM). We describe the microscopic layout by either an analytic geometric model with uncertain parameters or a level cut from a Gaussian random field. The macroscale properties of the microstructured material are predicted by homogenization. Considering the large number of possible microscale configurations, one of the main challenges of solving such topology optimization problems is the computational cost of estimating the statistical moments of the cost and constraint functions and their gradients with respect to the design variables. Methods for predicting these moments, such as Monte Carlo sampling, and Taylor series and polynomial chaos expansions often require many random samples resulting in an impractical computation. To reduce this cost, we propose an approach wherein, at every design iteration, we only use a small number of microstructure configurations to generate an independent, stochastic approximation of the gradients. These gradients are then used either with a gradient descent algorithm, namely Adam, or the globally convergent method of moving asymptotes (GCMMA). Three numerical examples from structural mechanics are used to show that the proposed approach provides a computationally efficient way for macroscale topology optimization in the presence of microstructural uncertainty and enables the designers to consider a new class of problems that are out of reach today with conventional tools.

math.OC↗

arXiv2021

Neural Network Training Using $\ell_1$-Regularization and Bi-fidelity Data

With the capability of accurately representing a functional relationship between the inputs of a physical system's model and output quantities of interest, neural networks have become popular for surrogate modeling in scientific applications. However, as these networks are over-parameterized, their training often requires a large amount of data. To prevent overfitting and improve generalization error, regularization based on, e.g., $\ell_1$- and $\ell_2$-norms of the parameters is applied. Similarly, multiple connections of the network may be pruned to increase sparsity in the network parameters. In this paper, we explore the effects of sparsity promoting $\ell_1$-regularization on training neural networks when only a small training dataset from a high-fidelity model is available. As opposed to standard $\ell_1$-regularization that is known to be inadequate, we consider two variants of $\ell_1$-regularization informed by the parameters of an identical network trained using data from lower-fidelity models of the problem at hand. These bi-fidelity strategies are generalizations of transfer learning of neural networks that uses the parameters learned from a large low-fidelity dataset to efficiently train networks for a small high-fidelity dataset. We also compare the bi-fidelity strategies with two $\ell_1$-regularization methods that only use the high-fidelity dataset. Three numerical examples for propagating uncertainty through physical systems are used to show that the proposed bi-fidelity $\ell_1$-regularization strategies produce errors that are one order of magnitude smaller than those of networks trained only using datasets from the high-fidelity models.

stat.ML↗

arXiv2021

Prediction of Ultrasonic Guided Wave Propagation in Solid-fluid and their Interface under Uncertainty using Machine Learning

Structural health monitoring (SHM) systems use the non-destructive testing principle for damage identification. As part of SHM, the propagation of ultrasonic guided waves (UGWs) is tracked and analyzed for the changes in the associated wave pattern. These changes help identify the location of a structural damage, if any. We advance existing research by accounting for uncertainty in the material and geometric properties of a structure. The physics model used in this study comprises of a monolithically coupled system of acoustic and elastic wave equations, known as the wave propagation in fluid-solid and their interface (WpFSI) problem. As the UGWs propagate in the solid, fluid, and their interface, the wave signal displacement measurements are contrasted against the benchmark pattern. For the numerical solution, we develop an efficient algorithm that successfully addresses the inherent complexity of solving the multiphysics problem under uncertainty. We present a procedure that uses Gaussian process regression and convolutional neural network for predicting the UGW propagation in a solid-fluid and their interface under uncertainty. First, a set of training images for different realizations of the uncertain parameters of the inclusion inside the structure is generated using a monolithically-coupled system of acoustic and elastic wave equations. Next, Gaussian processes trained with these images are used for predicting the propagated wave with convolutional neural networks for further enhancement to produce high-quality images of the wave patterns for new realizations of the uncertainty. The results indicate that the proposed approach provides an accurate prediction for the WpFSI problem in the presence of uncertainty.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2021

Reliability-based Topology Optimization using Stochastic Gradients

This paper addresses the computational challenges in reliability-based topology optimization (RBTO) of structures associated with the estimation of statistics of the objective and constraints using standard sampling methods, and overcomes the accuracy issues of traditional methods that rely on approximating the limit state function. Herein, we present a stochastic gradient-based approach, where we estimate the probability of failure at every few iterations using an efficient sampling strategy. To estimate the gradients of the failure probability with respect to the design parameters, we apply Bayes' rule wherein we assume a parametric exponential model for the probability density function of the design parameters conditioned on the failure. The design parameters as well as the parameters of this probability density function are updated using a stochastic gradient descent approach requiring only a small, e.g., O(1), number of random samples per iteration, thus leading to a considerable reduction of the computational cost as compared to standard RBTO techniques. We illustrate the proposed approach with a benchmark example that has an analytical solution as well as two widely used problems in structural topology optimization. These examples illustrate the efficacy of the approach in producing reliable designs.

math.OC↗

arXiv2020

Uncertainty Quantification of Locally Nonlinear Dynamical Systems using Neural Networks

Models are often given in terms of differential equations to represent physical systems. In the presence of uncertainty, accurate prediction of the behavior of these systems using the models requires understanding the effect of uncertainty in the response. In uncertainty quantification, statistics such as mean and variance of the response of these physical systems are sought. To estimate these statistics sampling-based methods like Monte Carlo often require many evaluations of the models' governing equations for multiple realizations of the uncertainty. However, for large complex engineering systems, these methods become computationally burdensome. In structural engineering, often an otherwise linear structure contains spatially local nonlinearities with uncertainty present in them. A standard nonlinear solver for them with sampling-based methods for uncertainty quantification incurs significant computational cost for estimating the statistics of the response. To ease this computational burden of uncertainty quantification of large-scale locally nonlinear dynamical systems, a method is proposed herein, which decomposes the response into two parts -- response of a nominal linear system and a corrective term. This corrective term is the response from a pseudoforce that contains the nonlinearity and uncertainty information. In this paper, neural network, a recently popular tool for universal function approximation in the scientific machine learning community due to the advancement of computational capability as well as the availability of open-sourced packages like PyTorch and TensorFlow is used to estimate the pseudoforce. Since only the nonlinear and uncertain pseudoforce is modeled using the neural networks the same network can be used to predict a different response of the system and hence no new network is required to train if the statistic of a different response is sought.

physics.comp-ph↗

arXiv2020

On transfer learning of neural networks using bi-fidelity data for uncertainty propagation

Due to their high degree of expressiveness, neural networks have recently been used as surrogate models for mapping inputs of an engineering system to outputs of interest. Once trained, neural networks are computationally inexpensive to evaluate and remove the need for repeated evaluations of computationally expensive models in uncertainty quantification applications. However, given the highly parameterized construction of neural networks, especially deep neural networks, accurate training often requires large amounts of simulation data that may not be available in the case of computationally expensive systems. In this paper, to alleviate this issue for uncertainty propagation, we explore the application of transfer learning techniques using training data generated from both high- and low-fidelity models. We explore two strategies for coupling these two datasets during the training procedure, namely, the standard transfer learning and the bi-fidelity weighted learning. In the former approach, a neural network model mapping the inputs to the outputs of interest is trained based on the low-fidelity data. The high-fidelity data is then used to adapt the parameters of the upper layer(s) of the low-fidelity network, or train a simpler neural network to map the output of the low-fidelity network to that of the high-fidelity model. In the latter approach, the entire low-fidelity network parameters are updated using data generated via a Gaussian process model trained with a small high-fidelity dataset. The parameter updates are performed via a variant of stochastic gradient descent with learning rates given by the Gaussian process model. Using three numerical examples, we illustrate the utility of these bi-fidelity transfer learning methods where we focus on accuracy improvement achieved by transfer learning over standard training approaches.

stat.ML↗

arXiv2019

Bi-fidelity Stochastic Gradient Descent for Structural Optimization under Uncertainty

The presence of uncertainty in material properties and geometry of a structure is ubiquitous. The design of robust engineering structures, therefore, needs to incorporate uncertainty in the optimization process. Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method can alleviate the cost of optimization under uncertainty, which includes statistical moments of quantities of interest in the objective and constraints. However, the design may change considerably during the initial iterations of the optimization process which impedes the convergence of the traditional SGD method and its variants. In this paper, we present two SGD based algorithms, where the computational cost is reduced by employing a low-fidelity model in the optimization process. In the first algorithm, most of the stochastic gradient calculations are performed on the low-fidelity model and only a handful of gradients from the high-fidelity model are used per iteration, resulting in an improved convergence. In the second algorithm, we use gradients from low-fidelity models to be used as control variate, a variance reduction technique, to reduce the variance in the search direction. These two bi-fidelity algorithms are illustrated first with a conceptual example. Then, the convergence of the proposed bi-fidelity algorithms is studied with two numerical examples of shape and topology optimization and compared to popular variants of the SGD method that do not use low-fidelity models. The results show that the proposed use of a bi-fidelity approach for the SGD method can improve the convergence. Two analytical proofs are also provided that show the linear convergence of these two algorithms under appropriate assumptions.

math.OC↗

arXiv2019

Topology Optimization under Uncertainty using a Stochastic Gradient-based Approach

Topology optimization under uncertainty (TOuU) often defines objectives and constraints by statistical moments of geometric and physical quantities of interest. Most traditional TOuU methods use gradient-based optimization algorithms and rely on accurate estimates of the statistical moments and their gradients, e.g., via adjoint calculations. When the number of uncertain inputs is large or the quantities of interest exhibit large variability, a large number of adjoint (and/or forward) solves may be required to ensure the accuracy of these gradients. The optimization procedure itself often requires a large number of iterations, which may render TOuU computationally expensive, if not infeasible. To tackle this difficulty, we here propose an optimization approach that generates a stochastic approximation of the objective, constraints, and their gradients via a small number of adjoint (and/or forward) solves, per iteration. A statistically independent (stochastic) approximation of these quantities is generated at each optimization iteration. The total cost of this approach is only a small factor larger than that of the corresponding deterministic TO problem. We incorporate the stochastic approximation of objective, constraints and their design sensitivities into two classes of optimization algorithms. First, we investigate the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method and a number of its variants, which have been successfully applied to large-scale optimization problems for machine learning. Second, we study the use of the proposed stochastic approximation approach within conventional nonlinear programming methods, focusing on the Globally Convergent Method of Moving Asymptotes (GCMMA). The performance of these algorithms is investigated with structural design optimization problems utilizing a Solid Isotropic Material with Penalization (SIMP), as well as an explicit level set method.

math.OC↗