Yi Gao

Chuan Liu, Yi Gao, Jiancheng Lv

Batch Normalization has become one of the essential components in CNN. It allows the network to use a higher learning rate and speed up training. And the network doesn't need to be initialized carefully. However, in our work, we find that a simple extension of BN can increase the performance of the network. First, we extend BN to adaptively generate scale and shift parameters for each mini-batch data, called DN-C (Batch-shared and Channel-wise). We use the statistical characteristics of mini-batch data ($E[X], Std[X]\in\mathbb{R}^{c}$) as the input of SC module. Then we extend BN to adaptively generate scale and shift parameters for each channel of each sample, called DN-B (Batch and Channel-wise). Our experiments show that DN-C model can't train normally, but DN-B model has very good robustness. In classification task, DN-B can improve the accuracy of the MobileNetV2 on ImageNet-100 more than 2% with only 0.6% additional Mult-Adds. In detection task, DN-B can improve the accuracy of the SSDLite on MS-COCO nearly 4% mAP with the same settings. Compared with BN, DN-B has stable performance when using higher learning rate or smaller batch size.

Houpu Yao, Yi Gao, Yongming Liu

An innovative physics-guided learning algorithm for predicting the mechanical response of materials and structures is proposed in this paper. The key concept of the proposed study is based on the fact that physics models are governed by Partial Differential Equation (PDE), and its loading/ response mapping can be solved using Finite Element Analysis (FEA). Based on this, a special type of deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) is proposed that takes advantage of our prior knowledge in physics to build data-driven models whose architectures are of physics meaning. This type of network is named as FEA-Net and is used to solve the mechanical response under external loading. Thus, the identification of a mechanical system parameters and the computation of its responses are treated as the learning and inference of FEA-Net, respectively. Case studies on multi-physics (e.g., coupled mechanical-thermal analysis) and multi-phase problems (e.g., composite materials with random micro-structures) are used to demonstrate and verify the theoretical and computational advantages of the proposed method.