Physics-AI symbiosis

One emerging trend in blending physics and learning, is to use DNNs as computationally efficient surrogates for partial differential equations (PDEs) of physics, an approach that accelerates the forward simulations and inverse design used in optimization of engineered physical systems. One example is computing the transmission spectra of a metasurface, an artificial 2D structure with subwavelength features, given its geometry. This involves long computing times necessary to numerically solve the Maxwell's equations in complex structures. It is now possible to train a generative model with a simulator (S), a generator (G), and a critic (D) to inversely design metasurface patterns according to the desired optical spectra [8]. While training such a generative model is time consuming, once trained, it becomes a numerically fast substitute model for the Maxwell equations. The need for training data can be avoided by utilizing a physics driven loss as explained later [9]. Recently, a model called MaxwellNet is proposed [10, 11]. MaxwellNet can approximate solutions to Maxwell's equations without relying on large training datasets that would have to be experimentally or computationally generated [10]. This results in up to 1000 times faster simulation time than the popular COMSOL Multiphysics solver [12]. Similarly, modeling fluid flow is one of the major challenges in computational physics, with diverse applications in weather forecasting and aerodynamics. Recent work has shown that instead of modeling such flow with Navier–Stokes equations, one can directly train a DNN with training datasets from real life experiments [13]. Once trained, the DNN provides high fidelity predictions. Another example involves nonlinearity compensation in optical data communication networks. Modeling optical nonlinearities requires solving the nonlinear Schrödinger equation (NLSE) using split-step Fourier method (SSFM) [14]. However, the iterative process in SSFM is time-consuming. Recent work has shown that a neural network emulates the SSFM but runs much faster. Such a neural network has several blocks that operate on the complex electric field, each block consists of a 1D convolution layer that mimics dispersion and a customized activation layer that provides nonlinearity. In one implementation, this neural network has achieved 18 dB signal to noise ratio with 4 dBm transmit power in 16-QAM transmission [15]. The main challenge with equalization of data in optical network is real-time execution of the algorithms at ultrahigh data rates. Neural networks may have the potential for real-time operation at optical communication data rates [16]. The last example is about solving problems in quantum chemistry. The potential energy surface is the central quantity of interest in modeling of molecules and their interaction. However, it is costly to compute the potential energy from the Schrödinger equation. OrbNet is a graph neural network that uses atomic-orbital features to predict the solution of the Schrödinger equation. It achieves similar accuracy compared to the density functional theory but with a computational cost that is reduced by several orders of magnitude [17]. In the original demonstration, it outperforms other deep learning methods by achieving MAE of 6.8 meV (mean square absolute error in energy) on the QM9 dataset [18] with 50 000 training samples.

While efforts have been made to design neural networks for solving specific types of PDEs, a more ambitious attempt is to develop a general neural network architecture that can learn different types of PDEs. Current work on neural networks as general PDE solvers can be divided into the following two approaches. Figure 2 compares the two approaches based on a ubiquitous PDE utilized in fluid dynamics called Burgers' equation. It is characterized by parameters and , initial condition and periodic boundary conditions, and the domain of variables as shown below. Its solution depends on the spatial variable and the temporal variable :

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The first approach trains a neural network to learn a given instance of PDE at all points in the defined domain. An instance of PDE is defined as a PDE with fixed parameters ( and , and fixed initial and boundary conditions. Physics-informed neural network (PINN) [9] shown in figure 2(a) is a pioneering example of such an approach. The second approach trains a neural network to solve different instances of PDEs by learning the mapping from the initial condition to the solution at a specified time . Different instances of PDEs are defined as PDEs with fixed parameters ( and and boundary conditions but different initial conditions . Fourier neural operator (FNO) [19] shown in figure 2(b) is a representative work of such an approach. Below, these two approaches are explained further.

PINN [9] utilizes a physics-driven loss defined as the residual of the network prediction relative to physical differential equation including the initial and boundary conditions. It solves an instance of PDE with fixed parameters, initial and boundary conditions. It takes scalar values (single point) of spatial and temporal coordinates as input and approximates the solution at the corresponding coordinate. Since the parameters, initial and boundary conditions of the PDE are fully known, it does not need training datasets. Training can be done by sampling in the defined domain and using loss derived from the equation itself as well as its initial and periodic boundary conditions as shown in figure 2(a). Once trained, the PINN can solve the given PDE at any point in the defined domain. Besides Burgers' equation, it has also been successfully applied to solve NLSE, Navier–Stokes equation, etc. Quantitatively, the relative error (between predicted and exact solution) is 0.2% when solving the NLSE by a five-layer fully connected neural network with 100 neurons per layer, the relative error is 0.06% when solving the Burgers' equation by a six-layer fully-connected neural network with 40 neurons per layer [9]. One limitation of this approach is that the trained network solves only a single instance of the PDE with a fixed set of parameters and conditions. It cannot generalize to other instances in the same PDE family. When parameters or initial and boundary conditions change, the network has to be re-trained. This is impractical for applications where solutions to the PDE are required for various instances.

A neural operator learns the mapping from different initial conditions to corresponding solutions at time as shown in figure 2(b). It is trained in a supervised manner with the dataset , where is an instance of the initial condition and is the corresponding solution at time and is the set of spatial coordinates. The solution of the PDE is approximated with a cascade of layers each containing linear and nonlinear transformations. Fourier Neural Operator (FNO) [19] performs these in the Fourier space as shown in figure 3. It takes an array of coordinates and the corresponding initial condition and lifts them to a higher dimensional space by an encoder network . The high dimensional representation goes through the cascade of layers each consistent of two paths. In the upper path input is first transformed into the Fourier space, then low frequency components are kept and re-weighted by channels while high frequency components are truncated. The features in the Fourier space are transformed back to the original space by an inverse Fourier transform. The lower path performs a linear transform in the original space. The sum of the two paths goes through a nonlinear operation (activation). At the output, the high dimensional representation is projected back to the target dimension by a decoder neural network which gives the solution at time . A loss function defined as the difference between the predicted solution and the ground truth is applied. Once trained, FNO is able to solve the given PDE with unseen initial conditions. It has been applied to solve 1D Burgers' equation based on the aforementioned settings and has also been extended to solve 2D Darcy Flow and Navier Stokes equation. It has been reported that FNO can achieve 1.5% relative error in solving Burgers' equation and 1% for solving 2D Darcy Flow while being up to three orders of magnitude faster compared to traditional PDE solvers [19]. Furthermore, by operating in the Fourier domain, FNO can be directly evaluated on a higher resolution sampling grid by only being trained on lower resolutions [19]. Unlike the PINN, this approach requires training datasets.

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Besides being blended into neural networks for efficiently solving PDEs, physics priors have also been exploited in identifying the optimal architecture by searching over a topological space of neural network configurations. This algorithm, dubbed PhysicsNAS (Physics neural architecture search), is able to blend physics and learning for problems such as collision estimation and projectile motion [20]. In particular, to blend prior equations into the network, PhysicsNAS has a physics-only branch, which takes as input the kinematic equations. One can envision PhysicsNAS as a form of multimodal fusion, where physics is one modality of an input. While current work only considers elementary kinematic tasks, the future of physics-based learning lies in its applicability to handle difficult and partially defined physical models, and potentially the ability to discover the underlying equations behind them [21]. Using neural networks and physical insights, computationally difficult tasks, such as the three-body problem, can be solved [22].

Yet another ambitious theme of blending physics with AI is an emerging area known as 'discovering physics'. The aim is to design AI algorithms that can learn natural laws. For instance, if a machine were to observe a video of a physical event (e.g. an apple falling), would it be possible for the machine to obtain the symbolic expression for projectile motion? The problem has thus far been partially solved. If a machine were to have an understanding of certain natural laws, it is possible to mine videos for the rest of laws and discover physical equations [23]. However, this algorithm requires some knowledge of a physical foundation. For example, it can obtain the equation for projectile motion, but the existence and calculation of velocity must be provided as inputs. More recent work has aimed to offer a more complete picture of physical discovery. For example, a special neural network can be trained to learn physical laws from video without prior human intervention, by creating a pipeline that extends a latent embedding module based upon variational auto-encoders [24]. Figure 4 compares how humans discover physical laws versus how machines discover physical laws [25].

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Neural Networks can approximate the master equations of physics but how well can it learn physics? An important step toward answering this question is recently made by researchers at DeepMind with the conclusion that current networks' ability in learning physical intuition is, at best, at the level of young children [26]. They propose a deep learning system that is trained using videos of objects moving and interacting according to the laws of mechanics. When presented with example where the laws were violated, the level of 'surprise' is measured in terms of the difference between the predicted and observed outcome. This provides a measure of 'common sense' learned by the network from observations.

Despite the increasing speed of digital processors, the execution time of AI algorithms are still orders of magnitude slower than the time scales in ultrafast optical imaging, sensing, and metrology. To address this problem, a new concept in hardware acceleration of AI that exploits femtosecond pulses for both data acquisition and computing called nonlinear Schrödinger kernel has recently been demonstrated as shown in figure 5 [28]. In the experiments, data is first modulated onto the spectrum of a supercontinuum laser. Then, a nonlinear optical element performs a data transformation analogous to a kernel operation projecting the data into an intermediate space in which data classification accuracy is enhanced. The output spectrum is sampled by a spectrometer and is sent into a digital classifier that is lightly trained. It is shown that the nonlinear optical kernel can improve the linear classification results similar to a traditional numerical kernel (such as the radial-basis-function (RBF)) but with orders of magnitude lower latency. The inference latency of the RBF kernel with a linear classifier is on the order of to s, while the nonlinear Schrödinger kernel achieves a substantially reduced latency on the order of s and better classification accuracy. It is further validated that this technique can work with various other digital classifiers. Finally, the technique's resiliency to nonidealities such as additive and quantization noise in the system is demonstrated. Presently, the performance is data-dependent due to the limited degrees of freedom and the unsupervised nature of the optical kernel.

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Wave propagation in a metamaterial is another emerging field that can be exploited to perform specialized computational tasks such as solving integral equations [29]. Integral equations are ubiquitous in science and engineering and are described by a kernel function which performs a specific transformation of the input function. To create the metamaterial for solving a specific integral equation, an inverse-problem optimization approach was used to identify the structure that exhibits the desired computational kernel.

Besides analog computing using metamaterials, there is a large body of research centered on emulating neural networks with diffractive optics or optical waveguide circuits with the goal of performing machine learning (ML) at the speed of light. Specific approaches include the use of spatial light modulators for matrix manipulation or using integrated optical circuits involving electrooptic modulators [30, 31].

More recently, the idea of physical neural network is proposed to implement DNNs on various modalities of physical systems such as in mechanics, optics and electronics [32]. Input data and controllable parameters are encoded onto physical quantities such as sound, light and voltage. As they evolve in physical systems, the nonlinear dynamics is a natural form of mathematical transformations as done in neural networks. With a hybrid physical-digital algorithm called physics-aware training, the controllable parameters of the systems can be trained by doing forward pass in the real physical systems and backward pass in digital simulation models. This shows the potential for analog sensors themselves to perform computations directly on signals without using digital processors. It is demonstrated that mechanical, electronic and optics-based physical neural networks can achieve 87%, 93% and 97% test accuracy respectively, on the MNIST dataset.

In addition to physical systems acting as natural computers, principles of physics can be used to design computationally efficient and explainable algorithms for solving problems in multiple domains such as computer vision. PhyCV is a physics-inspired computer vision library [33]. It utilizes algorithms directly derived from the equations of physics governing physical phenomena. Unlike traditional algorithms that are hand-crafted empirical rules, physics-inspired algorithms leverage physical laws of nature as blueprints for crafting algorithms. The current release of PhyCV has two algorithms for computationally efficient edge and texture extraction: Phase-stretch transform (PST) [34] and Phase-Stretch Adaptive Gradient-Field Extractor (PAGE) [35, 36]. They are originated from photonic time stretch [37], a hardware technique for ultrafast and single-shot data acquisition. The algorithms emulate the propagation of light through a 2D physical medium with natural and artificial diffractive properties followed by coherent, i.e. phase detection. PhyCV algorithms do not require training data and may be implemented in real physical devices for fast and efficient analog computation. While the algorithms are deterministic, current implementation is not adaptive therefore the model parameters must be empirically determined.

Another example of a physics inspired algorithm is inspired by a network of mechanical springs to model a complex object consisting of interacting parts. Each part is represented by a node and each edge represents springs with different stiffness parameters to model the interactions. Recent methods have shown how such spring models can be learned in an automated manner from much fewer learning examples than conventional supervised learning methods [38]. This geometric and explainable model (instead of a black-box model) mimics the way the human brain is theorized to represent object categories with a natural model (i.e. elastics) as a basis for the computing.

Climate change is one of the main challenges facing humanity today. It is of great significance to have accurate and fast climate modeling techniques to predict not only extreme weather, such as hurricanes, but also the impact of climate change. This is challenging since it requires modeling the physics of Earth, including atmosphere, oceans, lands, and human activities etc. Numerical weather prediction attempts to solve the physics equations at large scales given the current conditions. However, the enormous computational complexity only allows low spatial and temporal resolution. It has been shown that deep generative models trained on weather radar data can successfully predict the precipitation for the next 90 min at 5 min and 1 km resolution [39]. Weather forecasting with improved resolution can benefit decision-making in vehicle routing and the planning of public outdoor events. The superior computational efficiency of the neural network approach compared to numerical simulations may lead to a planet-scale model for predicting climate change in the future. Figure 6 shows an example of weather forecast of California Coast.

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Drug discovery is a large and crucial industry where Physics-AI symbiosis can play a transformative role. A core task in modern drug discovery is to search for molecules with desired properties, e.g. those bind-to and modify the function of a target protein. This requires predicting the interactions between the drug molecule and the target protein. The resulting quantum mechanical calculations require knowledge of the 3D structure of complex proteins. Traditionally, the protein structure is revealed by laborious and time-consuming experimental methods such as x-ray crystallography and cryo-electron microscopy. Recently, AI techniques have shown promise in predicting the 3D structure of proteins purely from their amino acid sequences. AlphaFold [41] achieves accurate prediction results that are competitive to experimental methods and has been applied to predict 98.5% percent of all human proteins. RoseTTAFold [42] achieves similar accuracy with higher computational efficiency. In the meantime, attempts have also been made in controllable protein sequence generation. ProGen adapts the transformer model that is widely used in language modeling to generate desired protein sequences conditioned on taxonomic and keyword tags [43]. These breakthrough AI models can significantly accelerate drug discovery. Figure 7 shows an example of how AI and physics can play the role in the future of drug discovery.

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With emerging techniques in Physics-AI symbiosis, open-source software platforms are becoming increasingly available for developers and researchers. The NVIDIA Modulus is a framework containing physics-ML models [45]. It blends PDEs with AI to design digital twins for complicated nonlinear physical systems. PennyLane is a cross-platform Python library for differentiable programming of quantum computers which could be used for quantum machine learning [46]. Snapchat Lens Studio is an augmented reality application with customization and interactive experiences for graphical editing [47]. With the focus on building industrial-scale digital twins, NVIDIA has introduced the 'Omniverse' [48], an open platform for virtual collaboration and real-time physical simulations in architecture, construction, and manufacturing industries.