Binyang Song

Binyang Song, Rui Zhou, Faez Ahmed

In the rapidly advancing field of multi-modal machine learning (MMML), the convergence of multiple data modalities has the potential to reshape various applications. This paper presents a comprehensive overview of the current state, advancements, and challenges of MMML within the sphere of engineering design. The review begins with a deep dive into five fundamental concepts of MMML:multi-modal information representation, fusion, alignment, translation, and co-learning. Following this, we explore the cutting-edge applications of MMML, placing a particular emphasis on tasks pertinent to engineering design, such as cross-modal synthesis, multi-modal prediction, and cross-modal information retrieval. Through this comprehensive overview, we highlight the inherent challenges in adopting MMML in engineering design, and proffer potential directions for future research. To spur on the continued evolution of MMML in engineering design, we advocate for concentrated efforts to construct extensive multi-modal design datasets, develop effective data-driven MMML techniques tailored to design applications, and enhance the scalability and interpretability of MMML models. MMML models, as the next generation of intelligent design tools, hold a promising future to impact how products are designed.

Nikos Arechiga, Frank Permenter, Binyang Song et al.

Denoising diffusion models trained at web-scale have revolutionized image generation. The application of these tools to engineering design is an intriguing possibility, but is currently limited by their inability to parse and enforce concrete engineering constraints. In this paper, we take a step towards this goal by proposing physics-based guidance, which enables optimization of a performance metric (as predicted by a surrogate model) during the generation process. As a proof-of-concept, we add drag guidance to Stable Diffusion, which allows this tool to generate images of novel vehicles while simultaneously minimizing their predicted drag coefficients.

Binyang Song, Chenyang Yuan, Frank Permenter et al.

Generative AI models have made significant progress in automating the creation of 3D shapes, which has the potential to transform car design. In engineering design and optimization, evaluating engineering metrics is crucial. To make generative models performance-aware and enable them to create high-performing designs, surrogate modeling of these metrics is necessary. However, the currently used representations of three-dimensional (3D) shapes either require extensive computational resources to learn or suffer from significant information loss, which impairs their effectiveness in surrogate modeling. To address this issue, we propose a new two-dimensional (2D) representation of 3D shapes. We develop a surrogate drag model based on this representation to verify its effectiveness in predicting 3D car drag. We construct a diverse dataset of 9,070 high-quality 3D car meshes labeled by drag coefficients computed from computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations to train our model. Our experiments demonstrate that our model can accurately and efficiently evaluate drag coefficients with an $R^2$ value above 0.84 for various car categories. Moreover, the proposed representation method can be generalized to many other product categories beyond cars. Our model is implemented using deep neural networks, making it compatible with recent AI image generation tools (such as Stable Diffusion) and a significant step towards the automatic generation of drag-optimized car designs. We have made the dataset and code publicly available at https://decode.mit.edu/projects/dragprediction/.

Hanqi Su, Binyang Song, Faez Ahmed

Accurate vehicle rating prediction can facilitate designing and configuring good vehicles. This prediction allows vehicle designers and manufacturers to optimize and improve their designs in a timely manner, enhance their product performance, and effectively attract consumers. However, most of the existing data-driven methods rely on data from a single mode, e.g., text, image, or parametric data, which results in a limited and incomplete exploration of the available information. These methods lack comprehensive analyses and exploration of data from multiple modes, which probably leads to inaccurate conclusions and hinders progress in this field. To overcome this limitation, we propose a multi-modal learning model for more comprehensive and accurate vehicle rating predictions. Specifically, the model simultaneously learns features from the parametric specifications, text descriptions, and images of vehicles to predict five vehicle rating scores, including the total score, critics score, performance score, safety score, and interior score. We compare the multi-modal learning model to the corresponding unimodal models and find that the multi-modal model's explanatory power is 4% - 12% higher than that of the unimodal models. On this basis, we conduct sensitivity analyses using SHAP to interpret our model and provide design and optimization directions to designers and manufacturers. Our study underscores the importance of the data-driven multi-modal learning approach for vehicle design, evaluation, and optimization. We have made the code publicly available at http://decode.mit.edu/projects/vehicleratings/.

Kristen M. Edwards, Binyang Song, Jaron Porciello et al.

When designing evidence-based policies and programs, decision-makers must distill key information from a vast and rapidly growing literature base. Identifying relevant literature from raw search results is time and resource intensive, and is often done by manual screening. In this study, we develop an AI agent based on a bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT) model and incorporate it into a human team designing an evidence synthesis product for global development. We explore the effectiveness of the human-AI hybrid team in accelerating the evidence synthesis process. To further improve team efficiency, we enhance the human-AI hybrid team through active learning (AL). Specifically, we explore different sampling strategies, including random sampling, least confidence (LC) sampling, and highest priority (HP) sampling, to study their influence on the collaborative screening process. Results show that incorporating the BERT-based AI agent into the human team can reduce the human screening effort by 68.5% compared to the case of no AI assistance and by 16.8% compared to the case of using a support vector machine (SVM)-based AI agent for identifying 80% of all relevant documents. When we apply the HP sampling strategy for AL, the human screening effort can be reduced even more: by 78.3% for identifying 80% of all relevant documents compared to no AI assistance. We apply the AL-enhanced human-AI hybrid teaming workflow in the design process of three evidence gap maps (EGMs) for USAID and find it to be highly effective. These findings demonstrate how AI can accelerate the development of evidence synthesis products and promote timely evidence-based decision making in global development in a human-AI hybrid teaming context.

Shuo Jiang, Serhad Sarica, Binyang Song et al.

Patent data have long been used for engineering design research because of its large and expanding size, and widely varying massive amount of design information contained in patents. Recent advances in artificial intelligence and data science present unprecedented opportunities to develop data-driven design methods and tools, as well as advance design science, using the patent database. Herein, we survey and categorize the patent-for-design literature based on its contributions to design theories, methods, tools, and strategies, as well as the types of patent data and data-driven methods used in respective studies. Our review highlights promising future research directions in patent data-driven design research and practice.