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Main Authors: Holl, Philipp, Thuerey, Nils
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.08119
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author Holl, Philipp
Thuerey, Nils
author_facet Holl, Philipp
Thuerey, Nils
contents Finding model parameters from data is an essential task in science and engineering, from weather and climate forecasts to plasma control. Previous works have employed neural networks to greatly accelerate finding solutions to inverse problems. Of particular interest are end-to-end models which utilize differentiable simulations in order to backpropagate feedback from the simulated process to the network weights and enable roll-out of multiple time steps. So far, it has been assumed that, while model inference is faster than classical optimization, this comes at the cost of a decrease in solution accuracy. We show that this is generally not true. In fact, neural networks trained to learn solutions to inverse problems can find better solutions than classical optimizers even on their training set. To demonstrate this, we perform both a theoretical analysis as well an extensive empirical evaluation on challenging problems involving local minima, chaos, and zero-gradient regions. Our findings suggest an alternative use for neural networks: rather than generalizing to new data for fast inference, they can also be used to find better solutions on known data.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2408_08119
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Solving Inverse Problems with Neural Networks
Holl, Philipp
Thuerey, Nils
Machine Learning
Finding model parameters from data is an essential task in science and engineering, from weather and climate forecasts to plasma control. Previous works have employed neural networks to greatly accelerate finding solutions to inverse problems. Of particular interest are end-to-end models which utilize differentiable simulations in order to backpropagate feedback from the simulated process to the network weights and enable roll-out of multiple time steps. So far, it has been assumed that, while model inference is faster than classical optimization, this comes at the cost of a decrease in solution accuracy. We show that this is generally not true. In fact, neural networks trained to learn solutions to inverse problems can find better solutions than classical optimizers even on their training set. To demonstrate this, we perform both a theoretical analysis as well an extensive empirical evaluation on challenging problems involving local minima, chaos, and zero-gradient regions. Our findings suggest an alternative use for neural networks: rather than generalizing to new data for fast inference, they can also be used to find better solutions on known data.
title The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Solving Inverse Problems with Neural Networks
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.08119