Daily Papers

High Power Laser's (HPL) optimal performance is essential for the success of a wide variety of experimental tasks related to light-matter interactions. Traditionally, HPL parameters are optimised in an automated fashion relying on black-box numerical methods. However, these can be demanding in terms of computational resources and usually disregard transient and complex dynamics. Model-free Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) offers a promising alternative framework for optimising HPL performance since it allows to tune the control parameters as a function of system states subject to nonlinear temporal dynamics without requiring an explicit dynamics model of those. Furthermore, DRL aims to find an optimal control policy rather than a static parameter configuration, particularly suitable for dynamic processes involving sequential decision-making. This is particularly relevant as laser systems are typically characterised by dynamic rather than static traits. Hence the need for a strategy to choose the control applied based on the current context instead of one single optimal control configuration. This paper investigates the potential of DRL in improving the efficiency and safety of HPL control systems. We apply this technique to optimise the temporal profile of laser pulses in the L1 pump laser hosted at the ELI Beamlines facility. We show how to adapt DRL to the setting of spectral phase control by solely tuning dispersion coefficients of the spectral phase and reaching pulses similar to transform limited with full-width at half-maximum (FWHM) of ca1.6 ps.

The interdiffusion coefficients are estimated either following the Wagner's method expressed with respect to the composition (mol or atomic fraction) normalized variable after considering the molar volume variation or the den Broeder's method expressed with respect to the concentration (composition divided by the molar volume) normalized variable. On the other hand, the relations for estimation of the intrinsic diffusion coefficients of components as established by van Loo and integrated diffusion coefficients in a phase with narrow homogeneity range as established by Wagner are currently available with respect to the composition normalized variable only. In this study, we have first derived the relation proposed by den Broeder following the line of treatment proposed by Wagner. Further, the relations for estimation of the intrinsic diffusion coefficients of the components and integrated interdiffusion coefficient are established with respect to the concentration normalized variable, which were not available earlier. The veracity of these methods is examined based on the estimation of data in Ni-Pd, Ni-Al and Cu-Sn systems. Our analysis indicates that both the approaches are logically correct and there is small difference in the estimated data in these systems although a higher difference could be found in other systems. The integrated interdiffusion coefficients with respect to the concentration (or concentration normalized variable) can only be estimated considering the ideal molar volume variation. This might be drawback in certain practical systems.

We present ConDiff, a novel dataset for scientific machine learning. ConDiff focuses on the parametric diffusion equation with space dependent coefficients, a fundamental problem in many applications of partial differential equations (PDEs). The main novelty of the proposed dataset is that we consider discontinuous coefficients with high contrast. These coefficient functions are sampled from a selected set of distributions. This class of problems is not only of great academic interest, but is also the basis for describing various environmental and industrial problems. In this way, ConDiff shortens the gap with real-world problems while remaining fully synthetic and easy to use. ConDiff consists of a diverse set of diffusion equations with coefficients covering a wide range of contrast levels and heterogeneity with a measurable complexity metric for clearer comparison between different coefficient functions. We baseline ConDiff on standard deep learning models in the field of scientific machine learning. By providing a large number of problem instances, each with its own coefficient function and right-hand side, we hope to encourage the development of novel physics-based deep learning approaches, such as neural operators, ultimately driving progress towards more accurate and efficient solutions of complex PDE problems.

The quantitative prediction of the intensity of rainfall events (light or heavy) has remained a challenge in Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) models. For the first time the mean coefficient of diffusional growth rates are calculated using an Eulerian-Lagrangian particle-based small-scale model on in situ airborne measurement data of Cloud Aerosol Interaction and Precipitation Enhancement Experiment (CAIPEEX) during monsoon over Indian sub-continent. The results show that diffusional growth rates varies in the range of 0.00025 - 0.0015(cm/s). The generic problem of the overestimation of light rain in NWP models might be related with the choice of cm in the model. It is also shown from DNS experiment using Eulerian-Lagrangian particle-based small-scale model that the relative dispersion is constrained with average values in the range of ~ 0.2 - 0.37 (~ 0.1- 0.26) in less humid (more humid) conditions. This is in agreement with in situ airborne observation (dispersion ~ 0.36) and previous study over Indian sub-continent. The linear relationship between relative dispersion and cloud droplet number concentration (NC) is obtained from this study using CAIPEEX observation over Indian subcontinent. The dispersion based autoconversion-scheme for Indian region must be useful for the Indian summer monsoon precipitation calculation in the general circulation model. The present study also provide valuable guidance for the parameterization of effective radius, important for radiation scheme.

Score distillation of 2D diffusion models has proven to be a powerful mechanism to guide 3D optimization, for example enabling text-based 3D generation or single-view reconstruction. A common limitation of existing score distillation formulations, however, is that the outputs of the (mode-seeking) optimization are limited in diversity despite the underlying diffusion model being capable of generating diverse samples. In this work, inspired by the sampling process in denoising diffusion, we propose a score formulation that guides the optimization to follow generation paths defined by random initial seeds, thus ensuring diversity. We then present an approximation to adopt this formulation for scenarios where the optimization may not precisely follow the generation paths (e.g. a 3D representation whose renderings evolve in a co-dependent manner). We showcase the applications of our `Diverse Score Distillation' (DSD) formulation across tasks such as 2D optimization, text-based 3D inference, and single-view reconstruction. We also empirically validate DSD against prior score distillation formulations and show that it significantly improves sample diversity while preserving fidelity.

While 2D diffusion models generate realistic, high-detail images, 3D shape generation methods like Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) built on these 2D diffusion models produce cartoon-like, over-smoothed shapes. To help explain this discrepancy, we show that the image guidance used in Score Distillation can be understood as the velocity field of a 2D denoising generative process, up to the choice of a noise term. In particular, after a change of variables, SDS resembles a high-variance version of Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models (DDIM) with a differently-sampled noise term: SDS introduces noise i.i.d. randomly at each step, while DDIM infers it from the previous noise predictions. This excessive variance can lead to over-smoothing and unrealistic outputs. We show that a better noise approximation can be recovered by inverting DDIM in each SDS update step. This modification makes SDS's generative process for 2D images almost identical to DDIM. In 3D, it removes over-smoothing, preserves higher-frequency detail, and brings the generation quality closer to that of 2D samplers. Experimentally, our method achieves better or similar 3D generation quality compared to other state-of-the-art Score Distillation methods, all without training additional neural networks or multi-view supervision, and providing useful insights into relationship between 2D and 3D asset generation with diffusion models.

A class of generative models that unifies flow-based and diffusion-based methods is introduced. These models extend the framework proposed in Albergo & Vanden-Eijnden (2023), enabling the use of a broad class of continuous-time stochastic processes called `stochastic interpolants' to bridge any two arbitrary probability density functions exactly in finite time. These interpolants are built by combining data from the two prescribed densities with an additional latent variable that shapes the bridge in a flexible way. The time-dependent probability density function of the stochastic interpolant is shown to satisfy a first-order transport equation as well as a family of forward and backward Fokker-Planck equations with tunable diffusion coefficient. Upon consideration of the time evolution of an individual sample, this viewpoint immediately leads to both deterministic and stochastic generative models based on probability flow equations or stochastic differential equations with an adjustable level of noise. The drift coefficients entering these models are time-dependent velocity fields characterized as the unique minimizers of simple quadratic objective functions, one of which is a new objective for the score of the interpolant density. We show that minimization of these quadratic objectives leads to control of the likelihood for generative models built upon stochastic dynamics, while likelihood control for deterministic dynamics is more stringent. We also discuss connections with other methods such as score-based diffusion models, stochastic localization processes, probabilistic denoising techniques, and rectifying flows. In addition, we demonstrate that stochastic interpolants recover the Schr\"odinger bridge between the two target densities when explicitly optimizing over the interpolant. Finally, algorithmic aspects are discussed and the approach is illustrated on numerical examples.

An experimental demonstration of directivities exceeding the fundamental Kildal limit, a phenomenon called superdirectivity, is provided for spherical high-index dielectric antennas with an electric dipole excitation. A directivity factor of about 10 with a total efficiency of more than 80\% for an antenna having a size of a third of the wavelength was measured. High directivities are shown to be associated with constructive interference of particular electric and magnetic modes of an open spherical resonator. Both analytic solution for a point dipole and a full-wave rigorous simulation for a realistic dipole antenna were employed for optimization and analysis, yielding an excellent agreement between experimentally measured and numerically predicted directivities. The use of high-index low-loss ceramics can significantly reduce the physical size of such antennas while maintaining their overall high radiation efficiency. Such antennas can be attractive for various high-frequency applications, such as antennas for the Internet of things, smart city systems, 5G network systems, and others. The demonstrated concept can be scaled in frequency.

Score distillation sampling has been pivotal for integrating diffusion models into generation of complex visuals. Despite impressive results it suffers from mode collapse and lack of diversity. To cope with this challenge, we leverage the gradient flow interpretation of score distillation to propose Repulsive Score Distillation (RSD). In particular, we propose a variational framework based on repulsion of an ensemble of particles that promotes diversity. Using a variational approximation that incorporates a coupling among particles, the repulsion appears as a simple regularization that allows interaction of particles based on their relative pairwise similarity, measured e.g., via radial basis kernels. We design RSD for both unconstrained and constrained sampling scenarios. For constrained sampling we focus on inverse problems in the latent space that leads to an augmented variational formulation, that strikes a good balance between compute, quality and diversity. Our extensive experiments for text-to-image generation, and inverse problems demonstrate that RSD achieves a superior trade-off between diversity and quality compared with state-of-the-art alternatives.

Accelerating the sampling speed of diffusion models remains a significant challenge. Recent score distillation methods distill a heavy teacher model into an one-step student generator, which is optimized by calculating the difference between the two score functions on the samples generated by the student model. However, there is a score mismatch issue in the early stage of the distillation process, because existing methods mainly focus on using the endpoint of pre-trained diffusion models as teacher models, overlooking the importance of the convergence trajectory between the student generator and the teacher model. To address this issue, we extend the score distillation process by introducing the entire convergence trajectory of teacher models and propose Distribution Backtracking Distillation (DisBack) for distilling student generators. DisBask is composed of two stages: Degradation Recording and Distribution Backtracking. Degradation Recording is designed to obtain the convergence trajectory of teacher models, which records the degradation path from the trained teacher model to the untrained initial student generator. The degradation path implicitly represents the intermediate distributions of teacher models. Then Distribution Backtracking trains a student generator to backtrack the intermediate distributions for approximating the convergence trajectory of teacher models. Extensive experiments show that DisBack achieves faster and better convergence than the existing distillation method and accomplishes comparable generation performance. Notably, DisBack is easy to implement and can be generalized to existing distillation methods to boost performance. Our code is publicly available on https://github.com/SYZhang0805/DisBack.