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Apr 2

OrgForge: A Multi-Agent Simulation Framework for Verifiable Synthetic Corporate Corpora

Evaluating retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines requires corpora where ground truth is knowable, temporally structured, and cross-artifact properties that real-world datasets rarely provide cleanly. Existing resources such as the Enron corpus carry legal ambiguity, demographic skew, and no structured ground truth. Purely LLM-generated synthetic data solves the legal problem but introduces a subtler one: the generating model cannot be prevented from hallucinating facts that contradict themselves across documents.We present OrgForge, an open-source multi-agent simulation framework that enforces a strict physics-cognition boundary: a deterministic Python engine maintains a SimEvent ground truth bus; large language models generate only surface prose, constrained by validated proposals. An actor-local clock enforces causal timestamp correctness across all artifact types, eliminating the class of timeline inconsistencies that arise when timestamps are sampled independently per document. We formalize three graph-dynamic subsystems stress propagation via betweenness centrality, temporal edge-weight decay, and Dijkstra escalation routing that govern organizational behavior independently of any LLM. Running a configurable N-day simulation, OrgForge produces interleaved Slack threads, JIRA tickets, Confluence pages, Git pull requests, and emails, all traceable to a shared, immutable event log. We additionally describe a causal chain tracking subsystem that accumulates cross-artifact evidence graphs per incident, a hybrid reciprocal-rank-fusion recurrence detector for identifying repeated failure classes, and an inbound/outbound email engine that routes vendor alerts, customer complaints, and HR correspondence through gated causal chains with probabilistic drop simulation. OrgForge is available under the MIT license.

  • 1 authors
·
Mar 16

How Does a Deep Neural Network Look at Lexical Stress?

Despite their success in speech processing, neural networks often operate as black boxes, prompting the question: what informs their decisions, and how can we interpret them? This work examines this issue in the context of lexical stress. A dataset of English disyllabic words was automatically constructed from read and spontaneous speech. Several Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architectures were trained to predict stress position from a spectrographic representation of disyllabic words lacking minimal stress pairs (e.g., initial stress WAllet, final stress exTEND), achieving up to 92% accuracy on held-out test data. Layerwise Relevance Propagation (LRP), a technique for CNN interpretability analysis, revealed that predictions for held-out minimal pairs (PROtest vs. proTEST ) were most strongly influenced by information in stressed versus unstressed syllables, particularly the spectral properties of stressed vowels. However, the classifiers also attended to information throughout the word. A feature-specific relevance analysis is proposed, and its results suggest that our best-performing classifier is strongly influenced by the stressed vowel's first and second formants, with some evidence that its pitch and third formant also contribute. These results reveal deep learning's ability to acquire distributed cues to stress from naturally occurring data, extending traditional phonetic work based around highly controlled stimuli.

  • 8 authors
·
Aug 10, 2025

The Effect of Person-Specific Biometrics in Improving Generic Stress Predictive Models

Because stress is subjective and is expressed differently from one person to another, generic stress prediction models (i.e., models that predict the stress of any person) perform crudely. Only person-specific ones (i.e., models that predict the stress of a preordained person) yield reliable predictions, but they are not adaptable and costly to deploy in real-world environments. For illustration, in an office environment, a stress monitoring system that uses person-specific models would require collecting new data and training a new model for every employee. Moreover, once deployed, the models would deteriorate and need expensive periodic upgrades because stress is dynamic and depends on unforeseeable factors. We propose a simple, yet practical and cost effective calibration technique that derives an accurate and personalized stress prediction model from physiological samples collected from a large population. We validate our approach on two stress datasets. The results show that our technique performs much better than a generic model. For instance, a generic model achieved only a 42.5% accuracy. However, with only 100 calibration samples, we raised its accuracy to 95.2% We also propose a blueprint for a stress monitoring system based on our strategy, and we debate its merits and limitation. Finally, we made public our source code and the relevant datasets to allow other researchers to replicate our findings.

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 3, 2019

Cross-Modality Investigation on WESAD Stress Classification

Deep learning's growing prevalence has driven its widespread use in healthcare, where AI and sensor advancements enhance diagnosis, treatment, and monitoring. In mobile health, AI-powered tools enable early diagnosis and continuous monitoring of conditions like stress. Wearable technologies and multimodal physiological data have made stress detection increasingly viable, but model efficacy depends on data quality, quantity, and modality. This study develops transformer models for stress detection using the WESAD dataset, training on electrocardiograms (ECG), electrodermal activity (EDA), electromyography (EMG), respiration rate (RESP), temperature (TEMP), and 3-axis accelerometer (ACC) signals. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of single-modality transformers in analyzing physiological signals, achieving state-of-the-art performance with accuracy, precision and recall values in the range of 99.73% to 99.95% for stress detection. Furthermore, this study explores cross-modal performance and also explains the same using 2D visualization of the learned embedding space and quantitative analysis based on data variance. Despite the large body of work on stress detection and monitoring, the robustness and generalization of these models across different modalities has not been explored. This research represents one of the initial efforts to interpret embedding spaces for stress detection, providing valuable information on cross-modal performance.

  • 2 authors
·
Feb 25, 2025

StressTest: Can YOUR Speech LM Handle the Stress?

Sentence stress refers to emphasis, placed on specific words within a spoken utterance to highlight or contrast an idea, or to introduce new information. It is often used to imply an underlying intention that is not explicitly stated. Recent advances in speech-aware language models (SLMs) have enabled direct processing of audio, allowing models to bypass transcription and access the full richness of the speech signal and perform audio reasoning tasks such as spoken question answering. Despite the crucial role of sentence stress in shaping meaning and speaker intent, it remains largely overlooked in evaluation and development of such models. In this work, we address this gap by introducing StressTest, a benchmark specifically designed to evaluate a model's ability to distinguish between interpretations of spoken sentences based on the stress pattern. We assess the performance of several leading SLMs and find that, despite their overall capabilities, they perform poorly on such tasks. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel synthetic data generation pipeline, and create Stress17k, a training set that simulates change of meaning implied by stress variation. Then, we empirically show that optimizing models with this synthetic dataset aligns well with real-world recordings and enables effective finetuning of SLMs. Results suggest, that our finetuned model, StresSLM, significantly outperforms existing models on both sentence stress reasoning and detection tasks. Code, models, data, and audio samples - pages.cs.huji.ac.il/adiyoss-lab/stresstest.

  • 3 authors
·
May 28, 2025 2

Shear Stress Build-up Under Constant Strain Conditions in Soft Glassy Materials

In this work, we investigate the transient rheological behavior of two soft glassy materials: a clay dispersion and a silica gel, emphasizing their unconventional shear stress build-up behavior under conditions of constant imposed strain. For both materials, the elastic modulus and static yield stress undergo time-dependent evolution or aging. In addition, following an intense period of pre-shearing (i.e. shear-melting or destructuration), the material relaxation time is observed to show a stronger than linear dependence on the sample age, suggestive of hyper-aging dynamics. We show that these features are consistent with non-monotonic steady-state shear stress/shear rate flow curves characterized by a local stress minimum. When a steady shear flow is suddenly ceased, and the total imposed sample strain is held constant, both materials show an initial relaxation of the shear stress followed by a period of shear stress buildup, resulting in a local minimum in the evolution of shear stress with time. For the clay dispersion, the intensity of these effects increases with higher pre-shear rates, whereas for the silica gel, the effects are largely independent of the pre-shear rate. We also propose a simple time-dependent linear Maxwell model, which qualitatively predicts the experimentally observed trends in which the shear stress build-up is directly related to a monotonic increase in the elastic modulus, giving keen insight into this peculiar phenomenon.

  • 3 authors
·
Apr 1, 2025

Dynamic and adaptive mesh-based graph neural network framework for simulating displacement and crack fields in phase field models

Fracture is one of the main causes of failure in engineering structures. Phase field methods coupled with adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) techniques have been widely used to model crack propagation due to their ease of implementation and scalability. However, phase field methods can still be computationally demanding making them unfeasible for high-throughput design applications. Machine learning (ML) models such as Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown their ability to emulate complex dynamic problems with speed-ups orders of magnitude faster compared to high-fidelity simulators. In this work, we present a dynamic mesh-based GNN framework for emulating phase field simulations of crack propagation with AMR for different crack configurations. The developed framework - ADAPTive mesh-based graph neural network (ADAPT-GNN) - exploits the benefits of both ML methods and AMR by describing the graph representation at each time-step as the refined mesh itself. Using ADAPT-GNN, we predict the evolution of displacement fields and scalar damage field (or phase field) with high accuracy compared to conventional phase field fracture model. We also compute crack stress fields with high accuracy using the predicted displacements and phase field parameter. Finally, we observe speed up of 15-36x compared to serial execution of the phase field model.

  • 2 authors
·
Aug 30, 2022

Automating modeling in mechanics: LLMs as designers of physics-constrained neural networks for constitutive modeling of materials

Large language model (LLM)-based agentic frameworks increasingly adopt the paradigm of dynamically generating task-specific agents. We suggest that not only agents but also specialized software modules for scientific and engineering tasks can be generated on demand. We demonstrate this concept in the field of solid mechanics. There, so-called constitutive models are required to describe the relationship between mechanical stress and body deformation. Constitutive models are essential for both the scientific understanding and industrial application of materials. However, even recent data-driven methods of constitutive modeling, such as constitutive artificial neural networks (CANNs), still require substantial expert knowledge and human labor. We present a framework in which an LLM generates a CANN on demand, tailored to a given material class and dataset provided by the user. The framework covers LLM-based architecture selection, integration of physical constraints, and complete code generation. Evaluation on three benchmark problems demonstrates that LLM-generated CANNs achieve accuracy comparable to or greater than manually engineered counterparts, while also exhibiting reliable generalization to unseen loading scenarios and extrapolation to large deformations. These findings indicate that LLM-based generation of physics-constrained neural networks can substantially reduce the expertise required for constitutive modeling and represent a step toward practical end-to-end automation.

  • 7 authors
·
Dec 1, 2025

Living Capillary Bridges

Biological tissues exhibit complex behaviors with their dynamics often resembling inert soft matter such as liquids, polymers, colloids, and liquid crystals. These analogies enable physics-based approaches for investigations of emergent behaviors in biological processes. A well-studied case is the spreading of cellular aggregates on solid surfaces, where they display dynamics similar to viscous droplets. In vivo, however, cells and tissues are in a confined environment with varying geometries and mechanical properties to which they need to adapt. In this work, we compressed cellular aggregates between two solid surfaces and studied their dynamics using microscopy, and computer simulations. The confined cellular aggregates transitioned from compressed spheres into dynamic living capillary bridges exhibiting bridge thinning and a convex-to-concave meniscus curvature transition. We found that the stability of the bridge is determined by the interplay between cell growth and cell spreading on the confining surfaces. This interaction leads to bridge rupture at a critical length scale determined by the distance between the plates. The force distributions, formation and stability regimes of the living capillary bridges were characterized with full 3D computer simulations that included cell division, migration and growth dynamics, directly showing how mechanical principles govern the behavior of the living bridges; cellular aggregates display jamming and stiffening analogously to granular matter, and cell division along the long axis enhances thinning. Based on our results, we propose a new class of active soft matter behavior, where cellular aggregates exhibit liquid-like adaptation to confinement, but with self-organized rupturing driven by biological activity.

  • 8 authors
·
Oct 16, 2025

StressPrompt: Does Stress Impact Large Language Models and Human Performance Similarly?

Human beings often experience stress, which can significantly influence their performance. This study explores whether Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit stress responses similar to those of humans and whether their performance fluctuates under different stress-inducing prompts. To investigate this, we developed a novel set of prompts, termed StressPrompt, designed to induce varying levels of stress. These prompts were derived from established psychological frameworks and carefully calibrated based on ratings from human participants. We then applied these prompts to several LLMs to assess their responses across a range of tasks, including instruction-following, complex reasoning, and emotional intelligence. The findings suggest that LLMs, like humans, perform optimally under moderate stress, consistent with the Yerkes-Dodson law. Notably, their performance declines under both low and high-stress conditions. Our analysis further revealed that these StressPrompts significantly alter the internal states of LLMs, leading to changes in their neural representations that mirror human responses to stress. This research provides critical insights into the operational robustness and flexibility of LLMs, demonstrating the importance of designing AI systems capable of maintaining high performance in real-world scenarios where stress is prevalent, such as in customer service, healthcare, and emergency response contexts. Moreover, this study contributes to the broader AI research community by offering a new perspective on how LLMs handle different scenarios and their similarities to human cognition.

  • 6 authors
·
Sep 14, 2024

Microscale stress-geometry interactions in an additively manufactured NiTi cardiovascular stent: A synchrotron dual imaging tomography and diffraction study

This study explores cardiovascular stents fabricated using laser powder bed fusion (LPBF); an emerging method to offer patient-specific customisable parts. Here, the shape memory alloy NiTi, in a near equiatomic composition, was investigated to deconvolve the material response from macroscopic component effects. Specifically, stress-geometry interactions were revealed, in-situ, for a minaturised cardiovascular stent subjected to an externally applied cylindrical stress whilst acquiring synchrotron X-ray imaging and diffraction data. The approach enabled the collection of spatially resolved micromechanical deformation data; the formation of stress-induced martensite and R-phase was evident, occurring in locations near junctions between stent ligaments where stress concentrations exist. In the as-fabricated condition, hardness maps were obtained through nanoindentation, demonstrating that the localised deformation and deformation patterning is further controlled by porosity and microstructural heterogeneity. Electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD) supported these observations, showing a finer grain structure near stent junctions with higher associated lattice curvature. These features, combined with stress concentrations when loaded will initiate localised phase transformations. If the stent was subjected to repeated loading, representing in-vivo conditions, these regions would be susceptible to cyclic damage through transformation memory loss, leading to premature component failure. This study highlights the challenges that must be addressed for the post-processing treatment of LABF-processed stents for healthcare-related applications.

  • 11 authors
·
Dec 12, 2023

Scaling physics-informed hard constraints with mixture-of-experts

Imposing known physical constraints, such as conservation laws, during neural network training introduces an inductive bias that can improve accuracy, reliability, convergence, and data efficiency for modeling physical dynamics. While such constraints can be softly imposed via loss function penalties, recent advancements in differentiable physics and optimization improve performance by incorporating PDE-constrained optimization as individual layers in neural networks. This enables a stricter adherence to physical constraints. However, imposing hard constraints significantly increases computational and memory costs, especially for complex dynamical systems. This is because it requires solving an optimization problem over a large number of points in a mesh, representing spatial and temporal discretizations, which greatly increases the complexity of the constraint. To address this challenge, we develop a scalable approach to enforce hard physical constraints using Mixture-of-Experts (MoE), which can be used with any neural network architecture. Our approach imposes the constraint over smaller decomposed domains, each of which is solved by an "expert" through differentiable optimization. During training, each expert independently performs a localized backpropagation step by leveraging the implicit function theorem; the independence of each expert allows for parallelization across multiple GPUs. Compared to standard differentiable optimization, our scalable approach achieves greater accuracy in the neural PDE solver setting for predicting the dynamics of challenging non-linear systems. We also improve training stability and require significantly less computation time during both training and inference stages.

  • 3 authors
·
Feb 20, 2024

Soap Film Drainage Under Tunable Gravity Using a Centrifugal Thin Film Balance

Surface bubbles are an abundant source of aerosols, with important implications for climate processes. In this context, we investigate the stability and thinning dynamics of soap films under effective gravity fields. Experiments are performed using a centrifugal thin-film balance capable of generating accelerations from 0.2 up to 100 times standard gravity, combined with thin-film interferometry to obtain time-resolved thickness maps. Across all experimental conditions, the drainage dynamics are shown to be governed by capillary suction and marginal regeneration-a mechanism in which thick regions of the film are continuously replaced by thin film elements (TFEs) formed at the meniscus. We consistently recover a thickness ratio of 0.8 - 0.9 between the TFEs and the adjacent film, in agreement with previous observations under standard gravity. The measured thinning rates also follow the predicted scaling laws. We identified that gravity has three distinct effects: (i) it induces a strong stretching of the initial film, extending well beyond the linear-elastic regime; (ii) it controls the meniscus size, and thereby the amplitude of the capillary suction and the drainage rate; and (iii) it reveals an inertia-to-viscous transition in the motion of TFEs within the film. These results are supported by theoretical modeling and highlight the robustness of marginal regeneration and capillary-driven drainage under extreme gravity conditions.

  • 6 authors
·
Nov 11, 2025

Unified Micromechanics Theory of Composites

We consider the matrix composite materials (CM) of either random (statistically homogeneous or inhomogeneous), periodic, or deterministic (neither random nor periodic) structures. CMs exhibit linear or nonlinear behavior, coupled or uncoupled multi-physical phenomena, locally elastic, weakly nonlocal (strain gradient and stress gradient), or strongly nonlocal (strain-type and displacement-type, peridynamics) phase properties. A modified Computational Analytical Micromechanics (CAM) approach introduces an exact Additive General Integral Equation (AGIE) for CMs of any structure and phase properties mentioned above. The unified iteration solution of static AGIEs is adapted to the body force with compact support serving as a fundamentally new universal training parameter. The approach also establishes a critical threshold for filtering out unsuitable sub-datasets of effective parameters through a novel Representative Volume Element (RVE) concept, which extends Hill's classical framework. This RVE concept eliminates sample size, boundary layer, and edge effects, making it applicable to CMs of any structure and phase properties, regardless of local or nonlocal, linear or nonlinear. Incorporating this new RVE concept into machine learning and neural network techniques enables the construction of any unpredefined surrogate nonlocal operators. The methodology is structured as a modular, block-based framework, allowing independent development and refinement of software components. This flexible, robust AGIE-CAM framework integrates data-driven, multi-scale, and multi-physics modeling, accelerating research in CM of any microtopology and phase properties considered. The AGIE-CAM framework represents a groundbreaking paradigm shift in the micromechanics of composites, redefining the very philosophy that underpins our understanding of their behavior at the microscopic level.

  • 1 authors
·
Mar 15, 2025

Solving Navier-Stokes Equations Using Data-free Physics-Informed Neural Networks With Hard Boundary Conditions

In recent years, Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) have emerged as a powerful and robust framework for solving nonlinear differential equations across a wide range of scientific and engineering disciplines, including biology, geophysics, astrophysics and fluid dynamics. In the PINN framework, the governing partial differential equations, along with initial and boundary conditions, are encoded directly into the loss function, enabling the network to learn solutions that are consistent with the underlying physics. In this work, we employ the PINN framework to solve the dimensionless Navier-Stokes equations for three two-dimensional incompressible, steady, laminar flow problems without using any labeled data. The boundary and initial conditions are enforced in a hard manner, ensuring they are satisfied exactly rather than penalized during training. We validate the PINN predicted velocity profiles, drag coefficients and pressure profiles against the conventional computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations for moderate to high values of Reynolds number (Re). It is observed that the PINN predictions show good agreement with the CFD results at lower Re. We also extend our analysis to a transient condition and find that our method is equally capable of simulating complex time-dependent flow dynamics. To quantitatively assess the accuracy, we compute the L_2 normalized error, which lies in the range O(10^{-4}) - O(10^{-1}) for our chosen case studies.

  • 4 authors
·
Nov 18, 2025

Lagrangian PINNs: A causality-conforming solution to failure modes of physics-informed neural networks

Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) leverage neural-networks to find the solutions of partial differential equation (PDE)-constrained optimization problems with initial conditions and boundary conditions as soft constraints. These soft constraints are often considered to be the sources of the complexity in the training phase of PINNs. Here, we demonstrate that the challenge of training (i) persists even when the boundary conditions are strictly enforced, and (ii) is closely related to the Kolmogorov n-width associated with problems demonstrating transport, convection, traveling waves, or moving fronts. Given this realization, we describe the mechanism underlying the training schemes such as those used in eXtended PINNs (XPINN), curriculum regularization, and sequence-to-sequence learning. For an important category of PDEs, i.e., governed by non-linear convection-diffusion equation, we propose reformulating PINNs on a Lagrangian frame of reference, i.e., LPINNs, as a PDE-informed solution. A parallel architecture with two branches is proposed. One branch solves for the state variables on the characteristics, and the second branch solves for the low-dimensional characteristics curves. The proposed architecture conforms to the causality innate to the convection, and leverages the direction of travel of the information in the domain. Finally, we demonstrate that the loss landscapes of LPINNs are less sensitive to the so-called "complexity" of the problems, compared to those in the traditional PINNs in the Eulerian framework.

  • 3 authors
·
May 5, 2022

Fatigue-PINN: Physics-Informed Fatigue-Driven Motion Modulation and Synthesis

Fatigue modeling is essential for motion synthesis tasks to model human motions under fatigued conditions and biomechanical engineering applications, such as investigating the variations in movement patterns and posture due to fatigue, defining injury risk mitigation and prevention strategies, formulating fatigue minimization schemes and creating improved ergonomic designs. Nevertheless, employing data-driven methods for synthesizing the impact of fatigue on motion, receives little to no attention in the literature. In this work, we present Fatigue-PINN, a deep learning framework based on Physics-Informed Neural Networks, for modeling fatigued human movements, while providing joint-specific fatigue configurations for adaptation and mitigation of motion artifacts on a joint level, resulting in more realistic animations. To account for muscle fatigue, we simulate the fatigue-induced fluctuations in the maximum exerted joint torques by leveraging a PINN adaptation of the Three-Compartment Controller model to exploit physics-domain knowledge for improving accuracy. This model also introduces parametric motion alignment with respect to joint-specific fatigue, hence avoiding sharp frame transitions. Our results indicate that Fatigue-PINN accurately simulates the effects of externally perceived fatigue on open-type human movements being consistent with findings from real-world experimental fatigue studies. Since fatigue is incorporated in torque space, Fatigue-PINN provides an end-to-end encoder-decoder-like architecture, to ensure transforming joint angles to joint torques and vice-versa, thus, being compatible with motion synthesis frameworks operating on joint angles.

  • 2 authors
·
Feb 26, 2025

Developing an Explainable Artificial Intelligent (XAI) Model for Predicting Pile Driving Vibrations in Bangkok's Subsoil

This study presents an explainable artificial intelligent (XAI) model for predicting pile driving vibrations in Bangkok's soft clay subsoil. A deep neural network was developed using a dataset of 1,018 real-world pile driving measurements, encompassing variations in pile dimensions, hammer characteristics, sensor locations, and vibration measurement axes. The model achieved a mean absolute error (MAE) of 0.276, outperforming traditional empirical methods and other machine learning approaches such as XGBoost and CatBoost. SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) analysis was employed to interpret the model's predictions, revealing complex relationships between input features and peak particle velocity (PPV). Distance from the pile driving location emerged as the most influential factor, followed by hammer weight and pile size. Non-linear relationships and threshold effects were observed, providing new insights into vibration propagation in soft clay. A web-based application was developed to facilitate adoption by practicing engineers, bridging the gap between advanced machine learning techniques and practical engineering applications. This research contributes to the field of geotechnical engineering by offering a more accurate and nuanced approach to predicting pile driving vibrations, with implications for optimizing construction practices and mitigating environmental impacts in urban areas. The model and its source code are publicly available, promoting transparency and reproducibility in geotechnical research.

  • 2 authors
·
Sep 8, 2024

Climate-sensitive Urban Planning through Optimization of Tree Placements

Climate change is increasing the intensity and frequency of many extreme weather events, including heatwaves, which results in increased thermal discomfort and mortality rates. While global mitigation action is undoubtedly necessary, so is climate adaptation, e.g., through climate-sensitive urban planning. Among the most promising strategies is harnessing the benefits of urban trees in shading and cooling pedestrian-level environments. Our work investigates the challenge of optimal placement of such trees. Physical simulations can estimate the radiative and thermal impact of trees on human thermal comfort but induce high computational costs. This rules out optimization of tree placements over large areas and considering effects over longer time scales. Hence, we employ neural networks to simulate the point-wise mean radiant temperatures--a driving factor of outdoor human thermal comfort--across various time scales, spanning from daily variations to extended time scales of heatwave events and even decades. To optimize tree placements, we harness the innate local effect of trees within the iterated local search framework with tailored adaptations. We show the efficacy of our approach across a wide spectrum of study areas and time scales. We believe that our approach is a step towards empowering decision-makers, urban designers and planners to proactively and effectively assess the potential of urban trees to mitigate heat stress.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 9, 2023

Bidirectional Learning for Robust Neural Networks

A multilayer perceptron can behave as a generative classifier by applying bidirectional learning (BL). It consists of training an undirected neural network to map input to output and vice-versa; therefore it can produce a classifier in one direction, and a generator in the opposite direction for the same data. The learning process of BL tries to reproduce the neuroplasticity stated in Hebbian theory using only backward propagation of errors. In this paper, two novel learning techniques are introduced which use BL for improving robustness to white noise static and adversarial examples. The first method is bidirectional propagation of errors, which the error propagation occurs in backward and forward directions. Motivated by the fact that its generative model receives as input a constant vector per class, we introduce as a second method the hybrid adversarial networks (HAN). Its generative model receives a random vector as input and its training is based on generative adversarial networks (GAN). To assess the performance of BL, we perform experiments using several architectures with fully and convolutional layers, with and without bias. Experimental results show that both methods improve robustness to white noise static and adversarial examples, and even increase accuracy, but have different behavior depending on the architecture and task, being more beneficial to use the one or the other. Nevertheless, HAN using a convolutional architecture with batch normalization presents outstanding robustness, reaching state-of-the-art accuracy on adversarial examples of hand-written digits.

  • 2 authors
·
May 21, 2018

Zyxin is all you need: machine learning adherent cell mechanics

Cellular form and function emerge from complex mechanochemical systems within the cytoplasm. No systematic strategy currently exists to infer large-scale physical properties of a cell from its many molecular components. This is a significant obstacle to understanding biophysical processes such as cell adhesion and migration. Here, we develop a data-driven biophysical modeling approach to learn the mechanical behavior of adherent cells. We first train neural networks to predict forces generated by adherent cells from images of cytoskeletal proteins. Strikingly, experimental images of a single focal adhesion protein, such as zyxin, are sufficient to predict forces and generalize to unseen biological regimes. This protein field alone contains enough information to yield accurate predictions even if forces themselves are generated by many interacting proteins. We next develop two approaches - one explicitly constrained by physics, the other more agnostic - that help construct data-driven continuum models of cellular forces using this single focal adhesion field. Both strategies consistently reveal that cellular forces are encoded by two different length scales in adhesion protein distributions. Beyond adherent cell mechanics, our work serves as a case study for how to integrate neural networks in the construction of predictive phenomenological models in cell biology, even when little knowledge of the underlying microscopic mechanisms exist.

  • 8 authors
·
Feb 28, 2023

Standardized Benchmark Dataset for Localized Exposure to a Realistic Source at 10-90 GHz

The lack of freely available standardized datasets represents an aggravating factor during the development and testing the performance of novel computational techniques in exposure assessment and dosimetry research. This hinders progress as researchers are required to generate numerical data (field, power and temperature distribution) anew using simulation software for each exposure scenario. Other than being time consuming, this approach is highly susceptible to errors that occur during the configuration of the electromagnetic model. To address this issue, in this paper, the limited available data on the incident power density and resultant maximum temperature rise on the skin surface considering various steady-state exposure scenarios at 10-90 GHz have been statistically modeled. The synthetic data have been sampled from the fitted statistical multivariate distribution with respect to predetermined dosimetric constraints. We thus present a comprehensive and open-source dataset compiled of the high-fidelity numerical data considering various exposures to a realistic source. Furthermore, different surrogate models for predicting maximum temperature rise on the skin surface were fitted based on the synthetic dataset. All surrogate models were tested on the originally available data where satisfactory predictive performance has been demonstrated. A simple technique of combining quadratic polynomial and tensor-product spline surrogates, each operating on its own cluster of data, has achieved the lowest mean absolute error of 0.058 {\deg}C. Therefore, overall experimental results indicate the validity of the proposed synthetic dataset.

  • 3 authors
·
May 3, 2023

Uncertainty quantification in a mechanical submodel driven by a Wasserstein-GAN

The analysis of parametric and non-parametric uncertainties of very large dynamical systems requires the construction of a stochastic model of said system. Linear approaches relying on random matrix theory and principal componant analysis can be used when systems undergo low-frequency vibrations. In the case of fast dynamics and wave propagation, we investigate a random generator of boundary conditions for fast submodels by using machine learning. We show that the use of non-linear techniques in machine learning and data-driven methods is highly relevant. Physics-informed neural networks is a possible choice for a data-driven method to replace linear modal analysis. An architecture that support a random component is necessary for the construction of the stochastic model of the physical system for non-parametric uncertainties, since the goal is to learn the underlying probabilistic distribution of uncertainty in the data. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are suited for such applications, where the Wasserstein-GAN with gradient penalty variant offers improved convergence results for our problem. The objective of our approach is to train a GAN on data from a finite element method code (Fenics) so as to extract stochastic boundary conditions for faster finite element predictions on a submodel. The submodel and the training data have both the same geometrical support. It is a zone of interest for uncertainty quantification and relevant to engineering purposes. In the exploitation phase, the framework can be viewed as a randomized and parametrized simulation generator on the submodel, which can be used as a Monte Carlo estimator.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 26, 2021

DyFraNet: Forecasting and Backcasting Dynamic Fracture Mechanics in Space and Time Using a 2D-to-3D Deep Neural Network

The dynamics of materials failure is one of the most critical phenomena in a range of scientific and engineering fields, from healthcare to structural materials to transportation. In this paper we propose a specially designed deep neural network, DyFraNet, which can predict dynamic fracture behaviors by identifying a complete history of fracture propagation - from cracking onset, as a crack grows through the material, modeled as a series of frames evolving over time and dependent on each other. Furthermore, this model can not only forecast future fracture processes but also backcast to elucidate the past fracture history. In this scenario, once provided with the outcome of a fracture event, the model will elucidate past events that led to this state and will predict the future evolution of the failure process. By comparing the predicted results with atomistic-level simulations and theory, we show that DyFraNet can capture dynamic fracture mechanics by accurately predicting how cracks develop over time, including measures such as the crack speed, as well as when cracks become unstable. We use GradCAM to interpret how DyFraNet perceives the relationship between geometric conditions and fracture dynamics and we find DyFraNet pays special attention to the areas around crack tips, which have a critical influence in the early stage of fracture propagation. In later stages, the model pays increased attention to the existing or newly formed damage distribution in the material. The proposed approach offers significant potential to accelerate the exploration of the dynamics in material design against fracture failures and can be beneficially adapted for all kinds of dynamical engineering problems.

  • 2 authors
·
Nov 15, 2022