cloth sim with implicit integration unstable problem - integration

Im implementing a gpu based cloth simulation using mass-spring model with a backward euler integration.
The linear system is solved by using the conjugate gradient solver with filter. Everything is done in GPU.
I think as an implicit integration it should be stable like many paper pointed out, but it is unstable just like
the emplicit method. Most of time, when the time step size reaches a certain value (depending on the stiffness), the CG refuses to converge and goes into a infinite loop.
Although I've checked the code over and over again and read many papers, I still couldn't find out the reason.
The cloth moves correctly and the animation is much more convincible than the one using explicit integration, so i guess
the forces are computed correctly. Is there anything I missed to cause the instability?
I've been tackled by this strange problem for days......
Any one can help? any suggestion i would really appreciate
thanks alot in advance!

Related

In deep learning, can I change the weight of loss dynamically?

Call for experts in deep learning.
Hey, I am recently working on training images using tensorflow in python for tone mapping. To get the better result, I focused on using perceptual loss introduced from this paper by Justin Johnson.
In my implementation, I made the use of all 3 parts of loss: a feature loss that extracted from vgg16; a L2 pixel-level loss from the transferred image and the ground true image; and the total variation loss. I summed them up as the loss for back propagation.
From the function
yˆ=argminλcloss_content(y,yc)+λsloss_style(y,ys)+λTVloss_TV(y)
in the paper, we can see that there are 3 weights of the losses, the λ's, to balance them. The value of three λs are probably fixed throughout the training.
My question is that does it make sense if I dynamically change the λ's in every epoch(or several epochs) to adjust the importance of these losses?
For instance, the perceptual loss converges drastically in the first several epochs yet the pixel-level l2 loss converges fairly slow. So maybe the weight λs should be higher for the content loss, let's say 0.9, but lower for others. As the time passes, the pixel-level loss will be increasingly important to smooth up the image and to minimize the artifacts. So it might be better to adjust it higher a bit. Just like changing the learning rate according to the different epochs.
The postdoc supervises me straightly opposes my idea. He thought it is dynamically changing the training model and could cause the inconsistency of the training.
So, pro and cons, I need some ideas...
Thanks!
It's hard to answer this without knowing more about the data you're using, but in short, dynamic loss should not really have that much effect and may have opposite effect altogether.
If you are using Keras, you could simply run a hyperparameter tuner similar to the following in order to see if there is any effect (change the loss accordingly):
https://towardsdatascience.com/hyperparameter-optimization-with-keras-b82e6364ca53
I've only done this on smaller models (way too time consuming) but in essence, it's best to keep it constant and also avoid angering off your supervisor too :D
If you are running a different ML or DL library, there are optimizer for each, just Google them. It may be best to run these on a cluster and overnight, but they usually give you a good enough optimized version of your model.
Hope that helps and good luck!

Adding noise to image for deep learning, yes or no?

I've been thinking that adding noise to an image can prevent overfitting and also "increase" the dataset by adding variations to it. I'm only trying to add some random 1s to images that has shape (256,256,3) which uses uint8 to represent its color. I don't think that can affect the visualization at all (I showed both images with matplotlib and they seems almost the same) and has only ~0.01 mean difference in the sum of their values.
But it doesn't look to have its advances. After training for a long time it's still not as good as the one doesn't use noises.
Has anyone tried to use noise for image classification tasks like this? Is it eventually better?
I wouldn't go to add noise to your data. Some papers employ input deformations during training to increase robutness and convergence speed of models. However, these deformations are statistically inefficient (not just on image but any kind of data).
You can read Intriguing properties of Neural Networks from Szegedy et al. for more details (and refer to references 9 & 13 for papers that uses deformations).
If you want to avoid overfitting, you might be interested to read about regularization instead.
Yes you may add noise to extend your dataset and avoid overfitting your training set but make sure it is random otherwise your network will take this noise as something it should learn (and that's not something you want). I wouldn't use this method first to do that, I would first rotate and/or flip my samples.
However, your network should perform better or, at least, as well as your previous network.
First thing I would check is : How do you measure your performances ? What were your performances before and after ? And did you change anything else ?
There are a couple of works that deal with this problem. Because you make the training set harder the training error will be lower, however your generalization might be better. It has been shown that adding noise can have stability effects for training Generative Adversarial Networks (Adversarial Training).
For classification tasks it is not that cut and dry. Not many works have actually dealt with this topic. The closest one is to my best knowledge is this one from google (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1412.6572.pdf), where they show the limitation of using training without noise. They do report a regularization effect, but not actual better results than using other methods.

Web Audio Pitch Detection for Tuner

So I have been making a simple HTML5 tuner using the Web Audio API. I have it all set up to respond to the correct frequencies, the problem seems to be with getting the actual frequencies. Using the input, I create an array of the spectrum where I look for the highest value and use that frequency as the one to feed into the tuner. The problem is that when creating an analyser in Web Audio it can not become more specific than an FFT value of 2048. When using this if i play a 440hz note, the closest note in the array is something like 430hz and the next value seems to be higher than 440. Therefor the tuner will think I am playing these notes when infact the loudest frequency should be 440hz and not 430hz. Since this frequency does not exist in the analyser array I am trying to figure out a way around this or if I am missing something very obvious.
I am very new at this so any help would be very appreciated.
Thanks
There are a number of approaches to implementing pitch detection. This paper provides a review of them. Their conclusion is that using FFTs may not be the best way to go - however, it's unclear quite what their FFT-based algorithm actually did.
If you're simply tuning guitar strings to fixed frequencies, much simpler approaches exist. Building a fully chromatic tuner that does not know a-priori the frequency to expect is hard.
The FFT approach you're using is entirely possible (I've built a robust musical instrument tuner using this approach that is being used white-label by a number of 3rd parties). However you need a significant amount of post-processing of the FFT data.
To start, you solve the resolution problem using the Short Timer FFT (STFT) - or more precisely - a succession of them. The process is described nicely in this article.
If you intend building a tuner for guitar and bass guitar (and let's face it, everyone who asks the question here is), you'll need t least a 4092-point DFT with overlapping windows in order not to violate the nyquist rate on the bottom E1 string at ~41Hz.
You have a bunch of other algorithmic and usability hurdles to overcome. Not least, perceived pitch and the spectral peak aren't always the same. Taking the spectral peak from the STFT doesn't work reliably (this is also why the basic auto-correlation approach is also broken).

Berkeley Pac-Man Project: features divided through by 10

I am busy coding reinforcement learning agents for the game Pac-Man and came across Berkeley's CS course's Pac-Man Projects, specifically the reinforcement learning section.
For the approximate Q-learning agent, feature approximation is used. A simple extractor is implemented in this code. What I am curious about is why, before the features are returned, they are scaled down by 10? By running the solution without the factor of 10 you can notice that Pac-Man does significantly worse, but why?
After running multiple tests it turns out that the optimal Q-value can diverge wildly away. In fact, the features can all become negative, even the one which would usually incline PacMan to eat pills. So he just stands there and eventually tries to run from ghosts but never tries to finish a level.
I speculate that this happens when he loses in training, that the negative reward is propagated through the system and since the potential number of ghosts can be greater than one, this has a heavy bearing on the weights, causing everything to become very negative and the system can't "recover" from this.
I confirmed this by adjusting the feature extractor to only scale the #-of-ghosts-one-step-away feature and then PacMan manages to get a much better result
In retrospect this question is now more mathsy and might fit better on another stackexchange.

What kind of learning algorithm would you use to build a model of how long it takes a human to solve a given Sudoku situation?

I don't have much experience in machine learning, pattern recognition, data mining, etc. and in their underlying theory and systems.
I would like to develop an artificial model of the time it takes a human to make a move in a given Sudoku puzzle.
So what I'm looking for as an output from the machine learning process is a model that can give predictions on how long does it take for a target human to make a move in a given Sudoku situation.
Same input doesn't always map to same outcome. It takes different times for the human to make a move with the same situation, but my hypothesis is that there's a tendency in the resulting probability distribution. (My educated guess is that it is ~normal.)
I have ideas about the factors that influence the distribution (like #empty slots) but would preferably leave it to the system to figure these patterns out. Please notice, that I'm not interested in the patterns, just the model.
I can generate sample and test data easily by running sudoku puzzles and measuring the times it takes to make the moves.
What kind of learning algorithm would you suggest to use for this?
I was thinking NNs, but I'm not sure if they can have the desired property of giving weighted random outcomes for the same input.
If I understand this correctly you have an input vector of length 81, which contains 1 if the square is filled in and 0 otherwise. You want to learn a function which returns a probability distribution which models the response time of a human to that board position.
My first response would be that this is a regression problem and you should try straightforward linear regression. This will not provide you with a distribution of response times, but a single 'best-guess' response time.
I'm not clear on why you want to model a distribution of response times. However, if you really want to do want to output a distribution then it sounds like you want to look at Bayesian methods. I'm not really an expert on Bayesian inference, so I can't help you much further here.
However, I don't really think your approach is going to work because I agree with your intuition about features such as the number of empty slots being important. There are also other obvious features, such as the number of empty slots per row/column that are likely to be important. Explicitly putting these features in your representation will probably be much more successful than expecting that the learning algorithm will infer something similar on its own.
The monte carlo method seems like it would work well here but would require a stack of solutions the size of the moon to really do it. And it wouldn't give you the time per person, just the time on average.
My understanding of it, tenuous as it is, is that you have a database with a board position and the time it took a human to make the next move. At the very least you have a starting point for most moves. Even if it's not in the database you could start to calculate how long it would take to make a move based on some algorithm. Though I know you had specified you wanted machine learning to do this it might be worth segmenting the problem into something a little smaller then building on it.
If you have some guesstimate as to what influences the function (# of empty cell, etc), try to train a classifier on a vector of features, and not on the 81 cells vector (0/1 or 0..9, doesn't really matter for my argument).
I think that your claim:
we wouldn't have to necessary know the underlying patterns, the "trained patterns" in a learning system automatically encodes these sometimes quite delicate and subtle patterns inside them -- that's one of their great power
is wrong. you do have to give the network the right domain. for example, when trying to detect object in an image, working in the pixel domain is pointless. you'll only get results if you first run some feature detection to detect edges, corners, etc.
Theoretically, with enough non-linearity (in NN - enough layers in the network) it can detect such things, but in practice, I have never seen that work, without giving the classifier the right features to work with.
I was thinking NNs, but I'm not sure if they can have the desired property of giving weighted random outcomes for the same input.
You're just trying to learn a function from 2^81 or 10^81 (or a much smaller feature space as I suggest) to R (response time between 0 and Inf) or some discretization of that. So NN and other classifiers can do that.