Babak Maboudi Afkham

Babak Maboudi Afkham, Jan S. Hesthaven

While reduced-order models (ROMs) have been popular for efficiently solving large systems of differential equations, the stability of reduced models over long-time integration is of present challenges. We present a greedy approach for ROM generation of parametric Hamiltonian systems that captures the symplectic structure of Hamiltonian systems to ensure stability of the reduced model. Through the greedy selection of basis vectors, two new vectors are added at each iteration to the linear vector space to increase the accuracy of the reduced basis. We use the error in the Hamiltonian due to model reduction as an error indicator to search the parameter space and identify the next best basis vectors. Under natural assumptions on the set of all solutions of the Hamiltonian system under variation of the parameters, we show that the greedy algorithm converges with exponential rate. Moreover, we demonstrate that combining the greedy basis with the discrete empirical interpolation method also preserves the symplectic structure. This enables the reduction of the computational cost for nonlinear Hamiltonian systems. The efficiency, accuracy, and stability of this model reduction technique is illustrated through simulations of the parametric wave equation and the parametric Schrodinger equation.

Babak Maboudi Afkham, Jan S. Hesthaven

Reduced basis methods are popular for approximately solving large and complex systems of differential equations. However, conventional reduced basis methods do not generally preserve conservation laws and symmetries of the full order model. Here, we present an approach for reduced model construction, that preserves the symplectic symmetry of dissipative Hamiltonian systems. The method constructs a closed reduced Hamiltonian system by coupling the full model with a canonical heat bath. This allows the reduced system to be integrated with a symplectic integrator, resulting in a correct dissipation of energy, preservation of the total energy and, ultimately, in the stability of the solution. Accuracy and stability of the method are illustrated through the numerical simulation of the dissipative wave equation and a port-Hamiltonian model of an electric circuit.

Babak Maboudi Afkham, Ashish Bhatt, Bernard Haasdonk et al.

In the recent years, considerable attention has been paid to preserving structures and invariants in reduced basis methods, in order to enhance the stability and robustness of the reduced system. In the context of Hamiltonian systems, symplectic model reduction seeks to construct a reduced system that preserves the symplectic symmetry of Hamiltonian systems. However, symplectic methods are based on the standard Euclidean inner products and are not suitable for problems equipped with a more general inner product. In this paper, we generalize symplectic model reduction to allow for the norms and inner products that are most appropriate to the problem while preserving the symplectic symmetry of the Hamiltonian systems. To construct a reduced basis and accelerate the evaluation of nonlinear terms, a greedy generation of a symplectic basis is proposed. Furthermore, it is shown that the greedy approach yields a norm-bounded reduced basis. The accuracy and the stability of this model reduction technique are illustrated through the development of reduced models for a vibrating elastic beam and the sine-Gordon equation.

Babak Maboudi Afkham, Ana Carpio

This paper introduces an infinite-dimensional Bayesian framework for acoustic seabed tomography, leveraging wave scattering to simultaneously estimate the seabed and its roughness. Tomography is considered an ill-posed problem where multiple seabed configurations can result in similar measurement patterns. We propose a novel approach focusing on the statistical isotropy of the seabed. Utilizing fractional differentiability to identify seabed roughness, the paper presents a robust numerical algorithm to estimate the seabed and quantify uncertainties. Extensive numerical experiments validate the effectiveness of this method, offering a promising avenue for large-scale seabed exploration.

Babak Maboudi Afkham, Julianne Chung, Matthias Chung

In this work, we describe a new approach that uses variational encoder-decoder (VED) networks for efficient goal-oriented uncertainty quantification for inverse problems. Contrary to standard inverse problems, these approaches are \emph{goal-oriented} in that the goal is to estimate some quantities of interest (QoI) that are functions of the solution of an inverse problem, rather than the solution itself. Moreover, we are interested in computing uncertainty metrics associated with the QoI, thus utilizing a Bayesian approach for inverse problems that incorporates the prediction operator and techniques for exploring the posterior. This may be particularly challenging, especially for nonlinear, possibly unknown, operators and nonstandard prior assumptions. We harness recent advances in machine learning, i.e., VED networks, to describe a data-driven approach to large-scale inverse problems. This enables a real-time goal-oriented uncertainty quantification for the QoI. One of the advantages of our approach is that we avoid the need to solve challenging inversion problems by training a network to approximate the mapping from observations to QoI. Another main benefit is that we enable uncertainty quantification for the QoI by leveraging probability distributions in the latent space. This allows us to efficiently generate QoI samples and circumvent complicated or even unknown forward models and prediction operators. Numerical results from medical tomography reconstruction and nonlinear hydraulic tomography demonstrate the potential and broad applicability of the approach.

Hjørdis Schlüter, Babak Maboudi Afkham

Acousto-electric tomography (AET) is a hybrid imaging modality that combines electrical impedance tomography with focused ultrasound perturbations to obtain interior power density measurements, which provide additional information that can enhance the stability of conductivity reconstruction. In this work, we study the AET inverse problem within a Bayesian framework and compare statistical reconstruction with analytical approaches. The unknown conductivity is modeled as a random field, and inference is based on the posterior distribution conditioned on the measurements. We consider likelihood constructions based on both L1- and L2-type data misfit norms and establish Bayesian well-posedness for both formulations within the framework of Stuart (2010). Numerical experiments investigate the performance of the Bayesian method from noisy power density measurements using the L1 and L2 likelihood functions and a smooth prior and a piecewise-constant prior for different limited view configurations, including severely limited boundary access. In particular, we demonstrate that small inclusions near the accessible boundary can be reconstructed from AET data corresponding to a single EIT measurement, and we quantify reconstruction uncertainty through posterior statistics.

John E. Darges, Babak Maboudi Afkham, Matthias Chung

We introduce Neural Optimal Design of Experiments, a learning-based framework for optimal experimental design in inverse problems that avoids classical bilevel optimization and indirect sparsity regularization. NODE jointly trains a neural reconstruction model and a fixed-budget set of continuous design variables representing sensor locations, sampling times, or measurement angles, within a single optimization loop. By optimizing measurement locations directly rather than weighting a dense grid of candidates, the proposed approach enforces sparsity by design, eliminates the need for l1 tuning, and substantially reduces computational complexity. We validate NODE on an analytically tractable exponential growth benchmark, on MNIST image sampling, and illustrate its effectiveness on a real world sparse view X ray CT example. In all cases, NODE outperforms baseline approaches, demonstrating improved reconstruction accuracy and task-specific performance.

Babak Maboudi Afkham, Julianne Chung, Matthias Chung

In this work, we describe a new approach that uses deep neural networks (DNN) to obtain regularization parameters for solving inverse problems. We consider a supervised learning approach, where a network is trained to approximate the mapping from observation data to regularization parameters. Once the network is trained, regularization parameters for newly obtained data can be computed by efficient forward propagation of the DNN. We show that a wide variety of regularization functionals, forward models, and noise models may be considered. The network-obtained regularization parameters can be computed more efficiently and may even lead to more accurate solutions compared to existing regularization parameter selection methods. We emphasize that the key advantage of using DNNs for learning regularization parameters, compared to previous works on learning via optimal experimental design or empirical Bayes risk minimization, is greater generalizability. That is, rather than computing one set of parameters that is optimal with respect to one particular design objective, DNN-computed regularization parameters are tailored to the specific features or properties of the newly observed data. Thus, our approach may better handle cases where the observation is not a close representation of the training set. Furthermore, we avoid the need for expensive and challenging bilevel optimization methods as utilized in other existing training approaches. Numerical results demonstrate the potential of using DNNs to learn regularization parameters.