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Simulating mantle convection often requires reaching a computationally expensive steady-state, crucial for deriving scaling laws for thermal and dynamical flow properties and benchmarking numerical solutions. The strong temperature dependence of the rheology of mantle rocks causes viscosity variations of several orders of magnitude, leading to a slow-evolving stagnant lid where heat conduction dominates, overlying a rapidly-evolving and strongly convecting region. Time-stepping methods, while effective for fluids with constant viscosity, are hindered by the Courant criterion, which restricts the time step based on the system's maximum velocity and grid size. Consequently, achieving steady-state requires a large number of time steps due to the disparate time scales governing the stagnant and convecting regions. We present a concept for accelerating mantle convection simulations using machine learning. We generate a dataset of 128 two-dimensional simulations with mixed basal and internal heating, and pressure- and temperature-dependent viscosity. We train a feedforward neural network on 97 simulations to predict steady-state temperature profiles. These can then be used to initialize numerical time stepping methods for different simulation parameters. Compared to typical initializations, the number of time steps required to reach steady-state is reduced by a median factor of 3.75. The benefit of this method lies in requiring very few simulations to train on, providing a solution with no prediction error as we initialize a numerical method, and posing minimal computational overhead at inference time. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach and discuss the potential implications for accelerated simulations for advancing mantle convection research.

This paper presents a methodology to learn surrogate models of steady state fluid dynamics simulations on meshed domains, based on Implicit Neural Representations (INRs). The proposed models can be applied directly to unstructured domains for different flow conditions, handle non-parametric 3D geometric variations, and generalize to unseen shapes at test time. The coordinate-based formulation naturally leads to robustness with respect to discretization, allowing an excellent trade-off between computational cost (memory footprint and training time) and accuracy. The method is demonstrated on two industrially relevant applications: a RANS dataset of the two-dimensional compressible flow over a transonic airfoil and a dataset of the surface pressure distribution over 3D wings, including shape, inflow condition, and control surface deflection variations. On the considered test cases, our approach achieves a more than three times lower test error and significantly improves generalization error on unseen geometries compared to state-of-the-art Graph Neural Network architectures. Remarkably, the method can perform inference five order of magnitude faster than the high fidelity solver on the RANS transonic airfoil dataset. Code is available at https://gitlab.isae-supaero.fr/gi.catalani/aero-nepf, Comment: 32 pages

Memes have evolved as a prevalent medium for diverse communication, ranging from humour to propaganda. With the rising popularity of image-focused content, there is a growing need to explore its potential harm from different aspects. Previous studies have analyzed memes in closed settings - detecting harm, applying semantic labels, and offering natural language explanations. To extend this research, we introduce MemeMQA, a multimodal question-answering framework aiming to solicit accurate responses to structured questions while providing coherent explanations. We curate MemeMQACorpus, a new dataset featuring 1,880 questions related to 1,122 memes with corresponding answer-explanation pairs. We further propose ARSENAL, a novel two-stage multimodal framework that leverages the reasoning capabilities of LLMs to address MemeMQA. We benchmark MemeMQA using competitive baselines and demonstrate its superiority - ~18% enhanced answer prediction accuracy and distinct text generation lead across various metrics measuring lexical and semantic alignment over the best baseline. We analyze ARSENAL's robustness through diversification of question-set, confounder-based evaluation regarding MemeMQA's generalizability, and modality-specific assessment, enhancing our understanding of meme interpretation in the multimodal communication landscape., Comment: The paper has been accepted in ACL'24 (Findings)

Reinforcement Learning is a promising tool for learning complex policies even in fast-moving and object-interactive domains where human teleoperation or hard-coded policies might fail. To effectively reflect this challenging category of tasks, we introduce a dynamic, interactive RL testbed based on robot air hockey. By augmenting air hockey with a large family of tasks ranging from easy tasks like reaching, to challenging ones like pushing a block by hitting it with a puck, as well as goal-based and human-interactive tasks, our testbed allows a varied assessment of RL capabilities. The robot air hockey testbed also supports sim-to-real transfer with three domains: two simulators of increasing fidelity and a real robot system. Using a dataset of demonstration data gathered through two teleoperation systems: a virtualized control environment, and human shadowing, we assess the testbed with behavior cloning, offline RL, and RL from scratch.

Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning (RL) problems often have access to sparse rewards where the agent receives a reward signal only when it has achieved the goal, making policy optimization a difficult problem. Several works augment this sparse reward with a learned dense reward function, but this can lead to sub-optimal policies if the reward is misaligned. Moreover, recent works have demonstrated that effective shaping rewards for a particular problem can depend on the underlying learning algorithm. This paper introduces a novel way to encourage exploration called $f$-Policy Gradients, or $f$-PG. $f$-PG minimizes the f-divergence between the agent's state visitation distribution and the goal, which we show can lead to an optimal policy. We derive gradients for various f-divergences to optimize this objective. Our learning paradigm provides dense learning signals for exploration in sparse reward settings. We further introduce an entropy-regularized policy optimization objective, that we call $state$-MaxEnt RL (or $s$-MaxEnt RL) as a special case of our objective. We show that several metric-based shaping rewards like L2 can be used with $s$-MaxEnt RL, providing a common ground to study such metric-based shaping rewards with efficient exploration. We find that $f$-PG has better performance compared to standard policy gradient methods on a challenging gridworld as well as the Point Maze and FetchReach environments. More information on our website https://agarwalsiddhant10.github.io/projects/fpg.html., Comment: Accepted at NeurIPS 2023

Memes are powerful means for effective communication on social media. Their effortless amalgamation of viral visuals and compelling messages can have far-reaching implications with proper marketing. Previous research on memes has primarily focused on characterizing their affective spectrum and detecting whether the meme's message insinuates any intended harm, such as hate, offense, racism, etc. However, memes often use abstraction, which can be elusive. Here, we introduce a novel task - EXCLAIM, generating explanations for visual semantic role labeling in memes. To this end, we curate ExHVV, a novel dataset that offers natural language explanations of connotative roles for three types of entities - heroes, villains, and victims, encompassing 4,680 entities present in 3K memes. We also benchmark ExHVV with several strong unimodal and multimodal baselines. Moreover, we posit LUMEN, a novel multimodal, multi-task learning framework that endeavors to address EXCLAIM optimally by jointly learning to predict the correct semantic roles and correspondingly to generate suitable natural language explanations. LUMEN distinctly outperforms the best baseline across 18 standard natural language generation evaluation metrics. Our systematic evaluation and analyses demonstrate that characteristic multimodal cues required for adjudicating semantic roles are also helpful for generating suitable explanations., Comment: Accepted at AAAI 2023 (Main Track). 7 Pages (main content) + 2 Pages (Refs.); 3 Figures; 6 Tables; Paper ID: 10326 (AAAI'23)

Deep Learning has become overly complicated and has enjoyed stellar success in solving several classical problems like image classification, object detection, etc. Several methods for explaining these decisions have been proposed. Black-box methods to generate saliency maps are particularly interesting due to the fact that they do not utilize the internals of the model to explain the decision. Most black-box methods perturb the input and observe the changes in the output. We formulate saliency map generation as a sequential search problem and leverage upon Reinforcement Learning (RL) to accumulate evidence from input images that most strongly support decisions made by a classifier. Such a strategy encourages to search intelligently for the perturbations that will lead to high-quality explanations. While successful black box explanation approaches need to rely on heavy computations and suffer from small sample approximation, the deterministic policy learned by our method makes it a lot more efficient during the inference. Experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed approach in inference time over state-of-the-arts without hurting the performance. Project Page: https://cvir.github.io/projects/rexl.html, Comment: Accepted in NeurIPS 2021 workshop on eXplainable AI approaches for debugging and diagnosis. Project Page: https://cvir.github.io/projects/rexl.html

Traditionally, 1D models based on scaling laws have been used to parameterized convective heat transfer rocks in the interior of terrestrial planets like Earth, Mars, Mercury and Venus to tackle the computational bottleneck of high-fidelity forward runs in 2D or 3D. However, these are limited in the amount of physics they can model (e.g. depth dependent material properties) and predict only mean quantities such as the mean mantle temperature. We recently showed that feedforward neural networks (FNN) trained using a large number of 2D simulations can overcome this limitation and reliably predict the evolution of entire 1D laterally-averaged temperature profile in time for complex models. We now extend that approach to predict the full 2D temperature field, which contains more information in the form of convection structures such as hot plumes and cold downwellings. Using a dataset of 10,525 two-dimensional simulations of the thermal evolution of the mantle of a Mars-like planet, we show that deep learning techniques can produce reliable parameterized surrogates (i.e. surrogates that predict state variables such as temperature based only on parameters) of the underlying partial differential equations. We first use convolutional autoencoders to compress the temperature fields by a factor of 142 and then use FNN and long-short term memory networks (LSTM) to predict the compressed fields. On average, the FNN predictions are 99.30% and the LSTM predictions are 99.22% accurate with respect to unseen simulations. Proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) of the LSTM and FNN predictions shows that despite a lower mean absolute relative accuracy, LSTMs capture the flow dynamics better than FNNs. When summed, the POD coefficients from FNN predictions and from LSTM predictions amount to 96.51% and 97.66% relative to the coefficients of the original simulations, respectively.

Knowledge graphs (KGs) have helped neural models improve performance on various knowledge-intensive tasks, like question answering and item recommendation. By using attention over the KG, such KG-augmented models can also "explain" which KG information was most relevant for making a given prediction. In this paper, we question whether these models are really behaving as we expect. We show that, through a reinforcement learning policy (or even simple heuristics), one can produce deceptively perturbed KGs, which maintain the downstream performance of the original KG while significantly deviating from the original KG's semantics and structure. Our findings raise doubts about KG-augmented models' ability to reason about KG information and give sensible explanations., Comment: 13 pages, 11 figures

Under a commonly-studied backdoor poisoning attack against classification models, an attacker adds a small trigger to a subset of the training data, such that the presence of this trigger at test time causes the classifier to always predict some target class. It is often implicitly assumed that the poisoned classifier is vulnerable exclusively to the adversary who possesses the trigger. In this paper, we show empirically that this view of backdoored classifiers is incorrect. We describe a new threat model for poisoned classifier, where one without knowledge of the original trigger, would want to control the poisoned classifier. Under this threat model, we propose a test-time, human-in-the-loop attack method to generate multiple effective alternative triggers without access to the initial backdoor and the training data. We construct these alternative triggers by first generating adversarial examples for a smoothed version of the classifier, created with a procedure called Denoised Smoothing, and then extracting colors or cropped portions of smoothed adversarial images with human interaction. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our attack through extensive experiments on high-resolution datasets: ImageNet and TrojAI. We also compare our approach to previous work on modeling trigger distributions and find that our method are more scalable and efficient in generating effective triggers. Last, we include a user study which demonstrates that our method allows users to easily determine the existence of such backdoors in existing poisoned classifiers. Thus, we argue that there is no such thing as a secret backdoor in poisoned classifiers: poisoning a classifier invites attacks not just by the party that possesses the trigger, but from anyone with access to the classifier.