Search for: All records

In this paper, we propose an efficient and flexible algorithm to solve dynamic mean-field planning problems based on an accelerated proximal gradient method. Besides an easy-to-implement gradient descent step in this algorithm, a crucial projection step becomes solving an elliptic equation whose solution can be obtained by conventional methods efficiently. By induction on iterations used in the algorithm, we theoretically show that the proposed discrete solution converges to the underlying continuous solution as the grid becomes finer. Furthermore, we generalize our algorithm to mean-field game problems and accelerate it using multilevel and multigrid strategies. We conduct comprehensive numerical experiments to confirm the convergence analysis of the proposed algorithm, to show its efficiency and mass preservation property by comparing it with state-of-the-art methods, and to illustrate its flexibility for handling various mean-field variational problems.

 

First-order optimization algorithms are widely used today. Two standard building blocks in these algorithms are proximal operators (proximals) and gradients. Although gradients can be computed for a wide array of functions, explicit proximal formulas are known for only limited classes of functions. We provide an algorithm, HJ-Prox, for accurately approximating such proximals. This is derived from a collection of relations between proximals, Moreau envelopes, Hamilton–Jacobi (HJ) equations, heat equations, and Monte Carlo sampling. In particular, HJ-Prox smoothly approximates the Moreau envelope and its gradient. The smoothness can be adjusted to act as a denoiser. Our approach applies even when functions are accessible only by (possibly noisy) black box samples. We show that HJ-Prox is effective numerically via several examples. 

Self-attention is key to the remarkable success of transformers in sequence modeling tasks including many applications in natural language processing and computer vision. Like neural network layers, these attention mechanisms are often developed by heuristics and experience. To provide a principled framework for constructing attention layers in transformers, we show that the self-attention corresponds to the support vector expansion derived from a support vector regression problem, whose primal formulation has the form of a neural network layer. Using our framework, we derive popular attention layers used in practice and propose two new attentions: 1) the Batch Normalized Attention (Attention-BN) derived from the batch normalization layer and 2) the Attention with Scaled Head (Attention-SH) derived from using less training data to fit the SVR model. We empirically demonstrate the advantages of the Attention-BN and Attention-SH in reducing head redundancy, increasing the model's accuracy, and improving the model's efficiency in a variety of practical applications including image and time-series classification.