Chak Shing Lee

Socratis Petrides, Tucker Hartland, Tzanio Kolev et al.

Large-scale contact mechanics simulations are crucial in many engineering fields such as structural design and manufacturing. In the frictionless case, contact can be modeled by minimizing an energy functional; however, these problems are often nonlinear, nonconvex, and increasingly difficult to solve as mesh resolution increases. In this work, we employ a Newton-based interior-point (IP) filter line-search method, an effective approach for large-scale constrained optimization. While this method converges rapidly, each iteration requires solving a large saddle-point linear system that becomes ill-conditioned as the optimization process converges, largely due to IP treatment of the contact constraints. Such ill-conditioning can hinder solver scalability and increase iteration counts with mesh refinement. To address this, we introduce a novel preconditioner, AMG with filtering (AMGF), tailored to the Schur complement of the saddle-point system. Building on the classical AMG solver, commonly used for elasticity, we augment it with a specialized subspace correction that filters near null space components introduced by contact interface constraints. Through theoretical analysis and numerical experiments on a range of linear and nonlinear contact problems, we demonstrate that AMGF achieves mesh independent convergence and maintains robustness against the ill-conditioning that notoriously plagues IP methods. These results indicate that AMGF makes contact mechanics simulations more tractable and broadens the applicability of Newton-based IP methods in challenging engineering scenarios. More broadly, AMGF is well suited for problems where solver performance is limited by a low-dimensional subspace, such as those arising from localized constraints, interface conditions or model heterogeneities, making it applicable beyond contact mechanics and constrained optimization.

Shao-Ting Chiu, Siu Wun Cheung, Ulisses Braga-Neto et al.

Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) have shown strong potential for efficiently approximating complex nonlinear functions. However, the original KAN formulation relies on B-spline basis functions, which incur substantial computational overhead due to De Boor's algorithm. To address this limitation, recent work has explored alternative basis functions such as radial basis functions (RBFs) that can improve computational efficiency and flexibility. Yet, standard RBF-KANs often sacrifice accuracy relative to the original KAN design. In this work, we propose Free-RBF-KAN, a RBF-based KAN architecture that incorporates adaptive learning grids and trainable smoothness to close this performance gap. Our method employs freely learnable RBF shapes that dynamically align grid representations with activation patterns, enabling expressive and adaptive function approximation. Additionally, we treat smoothness as a kernel parameter optimized jointly with network weights, without increasing computational complexity. We provide a general universality proof for RBF-KANs, which encompasses our Free-RBF-KAN formulation. Through a broad set of experiments, including multiscale function approximation, physics-informed machine learning, and PDE solution operator learning, Free-RBF-KAN achieves accuracy comparable to the original B-spline-based KAN while delivering faster training and inference. These results highlight Free-RBF-KAN as a compelling balance between computational efficiency and adaptive resolution, particularly for high-dimensional structured modeling tasks.

Jacob F. Pettit, Chak Shing Lee, Jiachen Yang et al.

We consider the challenge of black-box optimization within hybrid discrete-continuous and variable-length spaces, a problem that arises in various applications, such as decision tree learning and symbolic regression. We propose DisCo-DSO (Discrete-Continuous Deep Symbolic Optimization), a novel approach that uses a generative model to learn a joint distribution over discrete and continuous design variables to sample new hybrid designs. In contrast to standard decoupled approaches, in which the discrete and continuous variables are optimized separately, our joint optimization approach uses fewer objective function evaluations, is robust against non-differentiable objectives, and learns from prior samples to guide the search, leading to significant improvement in performance and sample efficiency. Our experiments on a diverse set of optimization tasks demonstrate that the advantages of DisCo-DSO become increasingly evident as the complexity of the problem increases. In particular, we illustrate DisCo-DSO's superiority over the state-of-the-art methods for interpretable reinforcement learning with decision trees.