Publication Archive

We establish a connection between stochastic optimal control and generative models based on stochastic differential equations (SDEs), such as recently developed diffusion probabilistic models. In particular, we derive a Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation that governs the evolution of the log-densities of the underlying SDE marginals. This perspective allows to transfer methods from optimal control theory to generative modeling. First, we show that the evidence lower bound is a direct consequence of the well-known verification theorem from control theory. Further, we can formulate diffusion-based generative modeling as a minimization of the Kullback-Leibler divergence between suitable measures in path space. Finally, we develop a novel diffusion-based method for sampling from unnormalized densities -- a problem frequently occurring in statistics and computational sciences. We demonstrate that our time-reversed diffusion sampler (DIS) can outperform other diffusion-based sampling approaches on multiple numerical examples.

Recently, a series of papers proposed deep learning-based approaches to sample from unnormalized target densities using controlled diffusion processes. In this work, we identify these approaches as special cases of the Schrödinger bridge problem, seeking the most likely stochastic evolution between a given prior distribution and the specified target. We further generalize this framework by introducing a variational formulation based on divergences between path space measures of time-reversed diffusion processes. This abstract perspective leads to practical losses that can be optimized by gradient-based algorithms and includes previous objectives as special cases. At the same time, it allows us to consider divergences other than the reverse Kullback-Leibler divergence that is known to suffer from mode collapse. In particular, we propose the so-called log-variance loss, which exhibits favorable numerical properties and leads to significantly improved performance across all considered approaches.

In this paper we consider a class of discrete time prey-predator models with three interacting species defined on the two-dimensional simplex. For some choices of parameters of the operator describing the evolution of the relative frequencies, we show that the ergodic hypothesis does not hold.

In the past five years, deep learning methods have become state-of-the-art in solving various inverse problems. Before such approaches can find application in safety-critical fields, a verification of their reliability appears mandatory. Recent works have pointed out instabilities of deep neural networks for several image reconstruction tasks.

QuaCa is an extensible library facilitating the computation of steady-state atom-surface quantum friction. Due to its modular domain-driven structure, QuaCa can be of further use to calculate relevant quantities that are often needed in the context of electromagnetic dispersion forces.

The climate crisis and the degradation of the world's ecosystems require humanity to take immediate action. The international scientific community has a responsibility to limit the negative environmental impacts of basic research. The HECAP+ communities (High Energy Physics, Cosmology, Astroparticle Physics, and Hadron and Nuclear Physics) make use of common and similar experimental infrastructure, such as accelerators and observatories, and rely similarly on the processing of big data.

This work presents a novel deep-learning-based pipeline for the inverse problem of image deblurring, leveraging augmentation and pre-training with synthetic data. Our results build on our winning submission to the recent Helsinki Deblur Challenge 2021, whose goal was to explore the limits of state-of-the-art deblurring algorithms in a real-world data setting.

This work examines the deformed fuzzy sphere, as an example of a fuzzy space that can be described through a spectral triple, using computer visualizations. We first explore this geometry using an analytic expression for the eigenvalues to examine the spectral dimension and volume of the geometry.

This review introduces Markov Chain Monte Carlo simulations in causal set theory, with a focus on the study of the 2d orders. It will first introduce the Benincasa-Dowker action on causal sets, and cover some musings on the philosophy of computer simulations. And then proceed to review results from the study of the 2d orders, first their general phase transition and scaling behavior and then results on defining a wave function of the universe using these orders and on coupling the 2d orders to an Ising like model.

The optical inspection of the surfaces of diode lasers, especially the p-sides and facets, is an essential part of the quality control in the laser fabrication procedure. With reliable, fast, and flexible optical inspection processes, it is possible to identify and eliminate defects, accelerate device selection, reduce production costs, and shorten the cycle time for product development.

In this article, we propose a deep learning-based algorithm for the classification of crop types from Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 time series data which is based on the celebrated transformer architecture. Crucially, we enable our algorithm to do early classification, i.e., predict crop types at arbitrary time points early in the year with a single trained model (progressive intra-season classification). Such early season predictions are of practical relevance for instance for yield forecasts or the modeling of agricultural water balances, therefore being important for the public as well as the private sector. Furthermore, we improve the mechanism of combining different data sources for the prediction task, allowing for both optical and radar data as inputs (multi-modal data fusion) without the need for temporal interpolation. We can demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on an extensive data set from three federal states of Germany reaching an average F1 score of 0.920.92 using data of a complete growing season to predict the eight most important crop types and an F1 score above 0.80.8 when doing early classification at least one month before harvest time. In carefully chosen experiments, we can show that our model generalizes well in time and space.

We give a complete characterisation of families of probability distributions that are invariant under the action of ReLU neural network layers (in the same way that the family of Gaussian distributions is invariant to affine linear transformations).

We provide a rather general perfection result for crude local semi-flows taking values in a Polish space showing that a crude semi-flow has a modification which is a (perfect) local semi-flow which is invariant under a suitable metric dynamical system. Such a (local) semi-flow induces a (local) random dynamical system.

The combination of Monte Carlo methods and deep learning has recently led to efficient algorithms for solving partial differential equations (PDEs) in high dimensions. Related learning problems are often stated as variational formulations based on associated stochastic differential equations (SDEs), which allow the minimization of corresponding losses using gradient-based optimization methods.

Sampling rare events in metastable dynamical systems is often a computationally expensive task and one needs to resort to enhanced sampling methods such as importance sampling. Since we can formulate the problem of finding optimal importance sampling controls as a stochastic optimization problem, this then brings additional numerical challenges and the convergence of corresponding algorithms might as well suffer from metastabilty.

We study the effects of constrained optimization formulations and Frank-Wolfe algorithms for obtaining interpretable neural network predictions. Reformulating the Rate-Distortion Explanations (RDE) method for relevance attribution as a constrained optimization problem provides precise control over the sparsity of relevance maps.

This work is concerned with the following fundamental question in scientific machine learning: Can deep-learning-based methods solve noise-free inverse problems to near-perfect accuracy? Positive evidence is provided for the first time, focusing on a prototypical computed tomography (CT) setup.

We investigate the steady-state nonconservative open-system dynamics of an atom in a generic complex structured electromagnetic environment at finite temperature T. In such systems, when the atom moves along a translation-invariant axis of the environment, a frictional force acts on the particle.

For a d-ary Boolean function Φ: {0, 1}^d → {0, 1} and an assignment to its variables x = (x₁, x₂, . . . , x_d) we consider the problem of finding those subsets of the variables that are sufficient to determine the function value with a given probability δ. This is motivated by the task of interpreting predictions of binary classifiers described as Boolean circuits, which can be seen as special cases of neural networks.

High-dimensional partial differential equations (PDEs) are ubiquitous in economics, science and engineering. However, their numerical treatment poses formidable challenges since traditional grid-based methods tend to be frustrated by the curse of dimensionality.

Importance sampling is a popular variance reduction method for Monte Carlo estimation, where a notorious question is how to design good proposal distributions. While in most cases optimal (zero-variance) estimators are theoretically possible, in practice only suboptimal proposal distributions are available and it can often be observed numerically that those can reduce statistical performance significantly, leading to large relative errors and therefore counteracting the original intention.

We introduce a differential extension of algebraic K-theory of an algebra using Karoubi's Chern character. In doing so, we develop a necessary theory of secondary transgression forms as well as a differential refinement of the smooth Serre--Swan correspondence. Our construction subsumes the differential K-theory of a smooth manifold when the algebra is complex-valued smooth functions.

Solving high-dimensional partial differential equations is a recurrent challenge in economics, science and engineering. In recent years, a great number of computational approaches have been developed, most of them relying on a combination of Monte Carlo sampling and deep learning based approximation.

This work investigates the detection of instabilities that may occur when utilizing deep learning models for image reconstruction tasks. Although neural networks often empirically outperform traditional reconstruction methods, their usage for sensitive medical applications remains controversial.

In this note we study exceptional algebroids, focusing on their relation to type IIB superstring theory. We show that a IIB-exact exceptional algebroid locally has a standard form given by the exceptional tangent bundle. We derive possible twists, given by a flat gl(2,R)-connection, a covariantly closed pair of 3-forms, and a 5-form, and comment on their physical interpretation.

We introduce the notion of G-algebroid, generalising both Lie and Courant algebroids, as well as the algebroids used in E_n(n) × ℝ⁺ exceptional generalised geometry for n∈{3,…,6}. Focusing on the exceptional case, we prove a classification of "exact" algebroids and translate the related classification of Leibniz parallelisable spaces into a tractable algebraic problem.

The quantitative detection of failure modes is important for making deep neural networks reliable and usable at scale. We consider three examples for common failure modes in image reconstruction and demonstrate the potential of uncertainty quantification as a fine-grained alarm system.

In this paper, we develop a general framework of geometric functorial field theories, meaning that all bordisms in question are endowed with geometric structures. We take particular care to establish a notion of smooth variation of such geometric structures, so that it makes sense to require the output of our field theory to depend smoothly on the input.

We analyse the properties of an unbiased gradient estimator of the ELBO for variational inference, based on the score function method with leave-one-out control variates. We show that this gradient estimator can be obtained using a new loss, defined as the variance of the log-ratio between the exact posterior and the variational approximation, which we call the log-variance loss.

Optimal control of diffusion processes is intimately connected to the problem of solving certain Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equations. Building on recent machine learning inspired approaches towards high-dimensional PDEs, we investigate the potential of iterative diffusion optimisation techniques.

We estimate the time a point or set, respectively, requires to approach the attractor of a radially symmetric gradient type stochastic differential equation driven by small noise. Here, both of these times tend to infinity as the noise gets small. However, the rates at which they go to infinity differ significantly. In the case of a set approaching the attractor, we use large deviation techniques to show that this time increases exponentially.

We analyze a structure-preserving model order reduction technique for delay and stochastic delay equations based on the balanced truncation method and provide a system theoretic interpretation. Transferring error bounds based on Hankel operators to delay systems, we find error estimates for the difference between the dynamics of the full and reduced model.

We propose an adaptive importance sampling scheme for the simulation of rare events when the underlying dynamics is given by diffusion. The scheme is based on a Gibbs variational principle that is used to determine the optimal (i.e., zero-variance) change of measure and exploits the fact that the latter can be rephrased as a stochastic optimal control problem.

We study the set of trapped photons outside the event horizon of Schwarzschild-Tangherlini black holes in dimension d≥4. We prove that the only trapped photons are those with constant Boyer-Lindquist coordinate radius.

We discuss the conditions under which non-abelian T-duality can be considered as a chain of abelian T-dualities. Motivated by these results, we propose that the topology of a non-abelian T-dual should be phrased in the language of T-folds, and give the explicit O(d, d) transformations which can be used to glue the dual space.

An atom moving in a vacuum at constant velocity and parallel to a surface experiences a frictional force induced by the dissipative interaction with the quantum fluctuations of the electromagnetic field. We show that the combination of nonequilibrium dynamics, anomalous Doppler effect and spin-momentum locking of light mediates an intriguing interplay between the atom's translational and rotational motion.

The dissipative properties of spatially nonlocal conductors are investigated in the context of quantum friction acting on an atom moving above a macroscopic body. The focus is on an extended version of the hydrodynamic model for the bulk material's electromagnetic response.

We analyze structure-preserving model order reduction methods for Ornstein-Uhlenbeck processes and linear S(P)DEs with multiplicative noise based on balanced truncation. For the first time, we include in this study the analysis of non-zero initial conditions.

We study multivariate Mellin transforms of Laurent polynomials by considering special toric compactifications which make their singular structure apparent. This gives a precise description of their convergence domain, refining results of Nilsson, Passare, Berkesch and Forsgård.

We study the Λ→0 behaviour of Schwarzschild-de Sitter spacetime and show, according to Geroch's notion of spacetime limits, that it converges to the Schwarzschild spacetime. We use an embedding into AdS₃ to illustrate and quantify this limiting behaviour.

We study the motion of bound null geodesics with fixed coordinate radius around a five-dimensional rotating black hole. These spherical photon orbits are not confined to a plane, and can exhibit interesting quasiperiodic behaviour.

We give a description of the delocalized twisted cohomology of an orbifold and the Chern character of a twisted vector bundle in terms of supersymmetric Euclidean field theories. This includes the construction of a twist functor for 1|1-dimensional EFTs from the data of a gerbe with connection.

The impact of lossy multi-layer structures on nonequilibrium atom-surface interactions is discussed. Specifically, the focus lies on a fully non-Markovian and nonequilibrium description of quantum friction, the fluctuation-induced drag force acting on an atom moving at constant velocity and height above the multi-layer structures.

Interactions of quantum systems with their environment play a crucial role in resource-theoretic approaches to thermodynamics in the microscopic regime. Here, we analyze the possible state transitions in the presence of "small" heat baths of bounded dimension and energy.

Recent experiments on type-II Weyl semimetals such as WT_e2, MoT_e2, Mo_xW_1−xTe₂, and WP₂ reveal remarkable transport properties in the presence of a strong magnetic field, including an extremely large magnetoresistance and an unusual temperature dependence.

We present an improved technique for susceptibility artifact correction in echo-planar imaging (EPI), a widely used ultra-fast magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technique. Our method corrects geometric deformations and intensity modulations present in EPI images.

During the past decades, the question of existence and properties of a random attractor of a random dynamical system generated by an S(P)DE has received considerable attention, for example by the work of Gess and Röckner. Recently some authors investigated sufficient conditions which guarantee synchronization, i.e. existence of a random attractor which is a singleton. It is reasonable to conjecture that synchronization and negativity (or non-positivity) of the top Lyapunov exponent of the system should be closely related since both mean that the system is contracting in some sense.

We provide an example of an SDE with degenerate additive noise where synchronization depends on the strength of noise and the number of directions in which the noise acts. Here, synchronization means that the weak random attractor consists of a single random point. Indicated by a change of sign of the top Lyapunov exponent, we prove synchronization respectively no (weak) synchronization.

We study the holographic Dynamic AdS/QCD description of a SU(N_c) non-abelian gauge theory with N_f fermions in the fundamental representation which also have Nambu-Jona-Lasinio interactions included using Witten's multi-trace prescription. In particular here we study aspects of the dynamics in and near the conformal window of the gauge theory as described by the two loop running of the gauge theory.

We examine the question whether random set attractors for continuous-time random dynamical systems on a connected state space are connected. In the deterministic case, these attractors are known to be connected. In the probabilistic setup, however, connectedness has only been shown under stronger connectedness assumptions on the state space. Under a weak continuity condition on the random dynamical system we prove connectedness of the pullback attractor on a connected space. Additionally, we provide an example of a weak random set attractor of a random dynamical system with even more restrictive continuity assumptions on an even path-connected space which even attracts all bounded sets and which is not connected.

The Nambu Jona-Lasinio model of chiral symmetry breaking predicts a second order chiral phase transition. If the fermions in addition have non-abelian gauge interactions then the transition is expected to become a crossover as the NJL term enhances the IR chiral symmetry breaking of the gauge theory. We study this behaviour in the holographic Dynamic AdS/QCD description of a non-abelian gauge theory with the NJL interaction included using Witten's multi-trace prescription.

The hallmark of topological phases is their robust boundary signature whose intriguing properties—such as the one-way transport on the chiral edge of a Chern insulator and the sudden disappearance of surface states forming open Fermi arcs on the surfaces of Weyl semimetals—are impossible to realize on the surface alone.

The article surveys and extends variational formulations of the thermodynamic free energy and discusses their information-theoretic content from the perspective of mathematical statistics. We revisit the well-known Jarzynski equality for nonequilibrium free energy sampling within the framework of importance sampling and Girsanov change-of-measure transformations.

Although Lorentz invariance forbids the presence of a term that tilts the energy-momentum relation in the Weyl Hamiltonian, a tilted dispersion is not forbidden and, in fact, generic for condensed matter realizations of Weyl semimetals. We here investigate the combined effect of such a tilted Weyl dispersion and the presence of potential disorder.

We study the T-dualisability criteria of Chatzistavrakidis, Deser and Jonke [3] who recently used Lie algebroid gauge theories to obtain sigma models exhibiting a "T-duality without isometry". We point out that those T-dualisability criteria are not written invariantly in [3] and depend on the choice of the algebroid framing.

We present holographic desciptions of dynamical electroweak symmetry breaking models that incorporate the top mass generation mechanism. The models allow computation of the spectrum in the presence of large anomalous dimensions due to walking and strong NJL interactions. Technicolour and QCD dynamics are described by the bottom-up Dynamic AdS/QCD model for arbitrary gauge groups and numbers of quark flavours.

Shortly after the discovery of Weyl semimetals, properties related to the topology of their bulk band structure have been observed, e.g., signatures of the chiral anomaly and Fermi arc surface states. These essentially single particle phenomena are well understood, but whether interesting many-body effects due to interactions arise in Weyl systems remains much less explored.

We propose a dimensional reduction procedure in the Stolz--Teichner framework of supersymmetric Euclidean field theories (EFTs) that is well-suited in the presence of a finite gauge group or, more generally, for field theories over an orbifold. As an illustration, we give a geometric interpretation of the Chern character for manifolds with an action by a finite group.

Double Weyl nodes are topologically protected band crossing points which carry chiral charge ±2. They are stabilized by C₄ point-group symmetry and are predicted to occur in SrSi₂ or HgCr₂Se₄. We study their stability and physical properties in the presence of a disorder potential.

We develop a theory for the analytic computation of the free energy of band insulators in the presence of a uniform and constant electric field. The two key ingredients are a perturbation-like expression of the Wannier-Stark energy spectrum of electrons and a modified statistical mechanics approach involving a local chemical potential in order to deal with the unbounded spectrum and impose the physically relevant electronic filling.

We consider the effect of global repulsive coupling on an ensemble of identical excitable elements. An increase of the coupling strength destabilizes the synchronous equilibrium and replaces it with many attracting oscillatory states, created in the transcritical heteroclinic bifurcation. The period of oscillations is inversely proportional to the distance from the critical parameter value.

In a network with a mixture of different electrophysiological types of neurons linked by excitatory and inhibitory connections, temporal evolution leads through repeated epochs of intensive global activity separated by intervals with low activity level. This behavior mimics “up” and “down” states, experimentally observed in cortical tissues in absence of external stimuli. We interpret global dynamical features in terms of individual dynamics of the neurons.

We show that, quite generically, a [111] slab of spin-orbit coupled pyrochlore lattice exhibits surface states whose constant energy curves take the shape of Fermi arcs, localized to different surfaces depending on their quasimomentum. Remarkably, these persist independently of the existence of Weyl points in the bulk.

We calculate conductance and noise for quantum transport at the nodal point for arbitrarily tilted and anisotropic Dirac or Weyl cones. Tilted and anisotropic dispersions are generic in the absence of certain discrete symmetries, such as particle-hole and lattice point group symmetries.

The cerebral cortex exhibits neural activity even in the absence of external stimuli. This self-sustained activity is characterized by irregular firing of individual neurons and population oscillations with a broad frequency range.

A large number of recent works point to the emergence of intriguing analogs of fractional quantum Hall states in lattice models due to effective interactions in nearly flat bands with Chern number C=1. Here, we provide an intuitive and efficient construction of almost dispersionless bands with higher Chern numbers.