Machine Learning (cs.LG)

Abstract: This study proposes a self-learning algorithm for closed-loop cylinder wake control targeting lower drag and lower lift fluctuations with the additional challenge of sparse sensor information, taking deep reinforcement learning as the starting point. DRL performance is significantly improved by lifting the sensor signals to dynamic features (DF), which predict future flow states. The resulting dynamic feature-based DRL (DF-DRL) automatically learns a feedback control in the plant without a dynamic model. Results show that the drag coefficient of the DF-DRL model is 25% less than the vanilla model based on direct sensor feedback. More importantly, using only one surface pressure sensor, DF-DRL can reduce the drag coefficient to a state-of-the-art performance of about 8% at Re = 100 and significantly mitigate lift coefficient fluctuations. Hence, DF-DRL allows the deployment of sparse sensing of the flow without degrading the control performance. This method also shows good robustness in controlling flow under higher Reynolds numbers, which reduces the drag coefficient by 32.2% and 46.55% at Re = 500 and 1000, respectively, indicating the broad applicability of the method. Since surface pressure information is more straightforward to measure in realistic scenarios than flow velocity information, this study provides a valuable reference for experimentally designing the active flow control of a circular cylinder based on wall pressure signals, which is an essential step toward further developing intelligent control in realistic multi-input multi-output (MIMO) system.

Abstract: Recently, zero-shot (or training-free) Neural Architecture Search (NAS) approaches have been proposed to liberate the NAS from training requirements. The key idea behind zero-shot NAS approaches is to design proxies that predict the accuracies of the given networks without training network parameters. The proxies proposed so far are usually inspired by recent progress in theoretical deep learning and have shown great potential on several NAS benchmark datasets. This paper aims to comprehensively review and compare the state-of-the-art (SOTA) zero-shot NAS approaches, with an emphasis on their hardware awareness. To this end, we first review the mainstream zero-shot proxies and discuss their theoretical underpinnings. We then compare these zero-shot proxies through large-scale experiments and demonstrate their effectiveness in both hardware-aware and hardware-oblivious NAS scenarios. Finally, we point out several promising ideas to design better proxies. Our source code and the related paper list are available on https://github.com/SLDGroup/survey-zero-shot-nas.

Abstract: Efficiently capturing the complex spatiotemporal representations from large-scale unlabeled traffic data remains to be a challenging task. In considering of the dilemma, this work employs the advanced contrastive learning and proposes a novel Spatial-Temporal Synchronous Contextual Contrastive Learning (STS-CCL) model. First, we elaborate the basic and strong augmentation methods for spatiotemporal graph data, which not only perturb the data in terms of graph structure and temporal characteristics, but also employ a learning-based dynamic graph view generator for adaptive augmentation. Second, we introduce a Spatial-Temporal Synchronous Contrastive Module (STS-CM) to simultaneously capture the decent spatial-temporal dependencies and realize graph-level contrasting. To further discriminate node individuals in negative filtering, a Semantic Contextual Contrastive method is designed based on semantic features and spatial heterogeneity, achieving node-level contrastive learning along with negative filtering. Finally, we present a hard mutual-view contrastive training scheme and extend the classic contrastive loss to an integrated objective function, yielding better performance. Extensive experiments and evaluations demonstrate that building a predictor upon STS-CCL contrastive learning model gains superior performance than existing traffic forecasting benchmarks. The proposed STS-CCL is highly suitable for large datasets with only a few labeled data and other spatiotemporal tasks with data scarcity issue.