Abstract We study Bayesian data assimilation (filtering) for time-evolution Partial differential equations (PDEs), for which the underlying forward problem may be very unstable or ill-posed. Such PDEs, which include the Navier–Stokes equations of fluid dynamics, are characterized by a high sensitivity of solutions to perturbations of the initial data, a lack of rigorous global well-posedness results as well as possible non-convergence of numerical approximations. Under very mild and readily verifiable general hypotheses on the forward solution operator of such PDEs, we prove that the posterior measure expressing the solution of the Bayesian filtering problem is stable with respect to perturbations of the noisy measurements, and we provide quantitative estimates on the convergence of approximate Bayesian filtering distributions computed from numerical approximations. For the Navier–Stokes equations, our results imply uniform stability of the filtering problem even at arbitrarily small viscosity, when the underlying forward problem may become ill-posed, as well as the compactness of numerical approximants in a suitable metric on time-parametrized probability measures.
more »
« less
Wasserstein Proximal Algorithms for the Schr\"{o}dinger Bridge Problem: Density Control with Nonlinear Drift
We study the Schr{\"o}dinger bridge problem (SBP) with nonlinear prior dynamics. In control-theoretic language, this is a problem of minimum effort steering of a given joint state probability density function (PDF) to another over a finite time horizon, subject to a controlled stochastic differential evolution of the state vector. For generic nonlinear drift, we reduce the SBP to solving a system of forward and backward Kolmogorov partial differential equations (PDEs) that are coupled through the boundary conditions, with unknowns being the ``Schr\"{o}dinger factors". We show that if the drift is a gradient vector field, or is of mixed conservative-dissipative nature, then it is possible to transform these PDEs into a pair of initial value problems (IVPs) involving the same forward Kolmogorov operator. We employ a proximal algorithm developed in our prior work to solve these IVPs and compute the Schr\"{o}dinger factors via weighted scattered point cloud evolution in the state space. We provide the algorithmic details and illustrate the proposed framework of solving the SBPs with nonlinear prior dynamics by numerical examples.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 1923278
- PAR ID:
- 10273797
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control
- ISSN:
- 0018-9286
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 1
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
null (Ed.)Abstract We study fully nonlinear second-order (forward) stochastic PDEs. They can also be viewed as forward path-dependent PDEs and will be treated as rough PDEs under a unified framework. For the most general fully nonlinear case, we develop a local theory of classical solutions and then define viscosity solutions through smooth test functions. Our notion of viscosity solutions is equivalent to the alternative using semi-jets. Next, we prove basic properties such as consistency, stability, and a partial comparison principle in the general setting. If the diffusion coefficient is semilinear (i.e, linear in the gradient of the solution and nonlinear in the solution; the drift can still be fully nonlinear), we establish a complete theory, including global existence and a comparison principle.more » « less
-
This paper proposes a scalable learning framework to solve a system of coupled forward–backward partial differential equations (PDEs) arising from mean field games (MFGs). The MFG system incorporates a forward PDE to model the propagation of population dynamics and a backward PDE for a representative agent’s optimal control. Existing work mainly focus on solving the mean field game equilibrium (MFE) of the MFG system when given fixed boundary conditions, including the initial population state and terminal cost. To obtain MFE efficiently, particularly when the initial population density and terminal cost vary, we utilize a physics-informed neural operator (PINO) to tackle the forward–backward PDEs. A learning algorithm is devised and its performance is evaluated on one application domain, which is the autonomous driving velocity control. Numerical experiments show that our method can obtain the MFE accurately when given different initial distributions of vehicles. The PINO exhibits both memory efficiency and generalization capabilities compared to physics-informed neural networks (PINNs).more » « less
-
We develop a new computational framework to solve the partial differential equations (PDEs) governing the flow of the joint probability density functions (PDFs) in continuous-time stochastic nonlinear systems. The need for computing the transient joint PDFs subject to prior dynamics arises in uncertainty propagation, nonlinear filtering and stochastic control. Our methodology breaks away from the traditional approach of spatial discretization or function approximation – both of which, in general, suffer from the “curse-of-dimensionality”. In the proposed framework, we discretize time but not the state space. We solve infinite dimensional proximal recursions in the manifold of joint PDFs, which in the small time-step limit, is theoretically equivalent to solving the underlying transport PDEs. The resulting computation has the geometric interpretation of gradient flow of certain free energy functional with respect to the Wasserstein metric arising from the theory of optimal mass transport. We show that dualization along with an entropic regularization, leads to a cone-preserving fixed point recursion that is proved to be contractive in Thompson metric. A block co-ordinate iteration scheme is proposed to solve the resulting nonlinear recursions with guaranteed convergence. This approach enables remarkably fast computation for non-parametric transient joint PDF propagation. Numerical examples and various extensions are provided to illustrate the scope and efficacy of the proposed approach.more » « less
-
Finch, a domain specific language and code generation framework for partial differential equations (PDEs), is demonstrated here to solve two classical problems: steady-state advection diffusion equation (single PDE) and the phonon Boltzmann transport equation (coupled PDEs). Both finite volume and finite element methods are explored. In addition to work presented at the 2022 International Conference on Computational Science (Heisler et al., 2022), we include recent developments for solving nonlinear equations using both automatic and symbolic differentiation, and demonstrate the capability for the Bratu (nonlinear Poisson) equation.more » « less
An official website of the United States government

