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The paper is devoted to convex-concave saddle point problems where the objective is a sum of a large number of functions. Such problems attract considerable attention of the mathematical community due to the variety of applications in machine learning, including adversarial learning, adversarial attacks and robust reinforcement learning, to name a few. The individual functions in the sum usually represent losses related to examples from a data set. Additionally, the formulation admits a possibly nonsmooth composite term. Such terms often reflect regularization in machine learning problems. We assume that the dimension of one of the variable groups is relatively small (about a hundred or less), and the other one is large. This case arises, for example, when one considers the dual formulation for a minimization problem with a moderate number of constraints. The proposed approach is based on using Vaidya’s cutting plane method to minimize with respect to the outer block of variables. This optimization algorithm is especially effective when the dimension of the problem is not very large. An inexact oracle for Vaidya’s method is calculated via an approximate solution of the inner maximization problem, which is solved by the accelerated variance reduced algorithm Katyusha. Thus, we leverage the structure of the problem to achieve fast convergence. Separate complexity bounds for gradients of different components with respect to different variables are obtained in the study. The proposed approach is imposing very mild assumptions about the objective. In particular, neither strong convexity nor smoothness is required with respect to the low-dimensional variable group. The number of steps of the proposed algorithm as well as the arithmetic complexity of each step explicitly depend on the dimensionality of the outer variable, hence the assumption that it is relatively small.

The article focuses on the problem of mechanisms’ co-design for robotic systems to perform adaptive physical interaction with an unstructured environment, including physical human robot interaction. The co-design means simultaneous optimization of mechanics and control system, ensuring optimal behavior and performance of the system. Mechanics optimization refers to the search for optimal structure, geometric parameters, mass distribution among the links and their compliance; control refers to the search for motion trajectories for mechanism’s joints. The paper presents a generalized method of structural-parametric synthesis of underactuated mechanisms with closed kinematics for robotic systems for various purposes, e. g., it was previously used for the co-design of fingers’ mechanisms for anthropomorphic gripper and legs’ mechanisms for galloping robots. The method implements the concept of morphological computation of control laws due to the features of mechanical design, minimizing the control effort from the algorithmic component of the control system, which reduces the requirements for the level of technical equipment and reduces energy consumption. In this paper, the proposed method is used to optimize the structure and geometric parameters of the passive mechanism of the back support module of an industrial exosuit. Human movements are diverse and non-deterministic when compared with the movements of autonomous robots, which complicates the design of wearable robotic devices. To reduce injuries, fatigue and increase the productivity of workers, the synthesized industrial exosuit should not only compensate for loads, but also not interfere with the natural human motions. To test the developed exosuit, kinematic datasets from motion capture of an entire human body during industrial operations were used. The proposed method of structural-parametric synthesis was used to improve the ergonomics of a wearable robotic device. Verification of the synthesized mechanism was carried out using simulation: the passive module of the back is attached to two geometric primitives that move the chest and pelvis of the exosuit operator in accordance with the motion capture data. The ergonomics of the back module is quantified by the distance between the joints connecting the upper and bottom parts of the exosuit; minimizing deviation from the average value corresponds to a lesser limitation of the operator’s movement, i. e. greater ergonomics. The article provides a detailed description of the method of structural-parametric synthesis, an example of synthesis of an exosuit module and the results of simulation.

In this paper, we investigate different alternative ideas for the design of digital predistortion models for radiofrequency power amplifiers. When compared to the greedy search algorithm, these algorithms allow a faster identification of the model parameters combination while still performing reasonably well. For the subsequent implementation, different metrics of model costs and score results in the process of optimization enable us to achieve sparse selections of the model, which balance the model accuracy and model resources (according to the complexity of implementation). The results achieved in the process of simulations show that combinations obtained with explored algorithms show the best performance after a lower number of simulations.

Numerical study of unsteady mixed convection in an open partially porous horizontal channel with a heatgenerating source was performed. The outer surfaces of horizontal walls of finite thickness were adiabatic. In the channel there was a Newtonian heat-conducting fluid with a temperature-dependent viscosity. The discrete heatconducting and heat-generating source is located inside the bottom wall. The temperature of the fluid phase was equal to the temperature of the porous medium, and calculations were performed using the local thermal equilibrium model. The porous insertion is isotropic, homogeneous and permeable to fluid. The Darcy–Brinkman model was used to simulate the transport process within the porous medium. Governing equations formulated in dimensionless variables “stream function – vorticity – temperature” using the Boussinesq approximation were solved numerically by the finite difference method. The vorticity dispersion equation and energy equation were solved using locally one-dimensional Samarskii scheme. The diffusive terms were approximated by central differences, while the convective terms were approximated using monotonic Samarskii scheme. The difference equations were solved by the Thomas algorithm. The approximated Poisson equation for the stream function was solved separately by successive over-relaxation method. Optimal value of the relaxation parameter was found on the basis of computational experiments. The developed computational code was tested using a set of uniform grids and verified by comparing the results obtained of other authors.

Numerical analysis of unsteady mixed convection of variable viscosity fluid in the horizontal channel with a heat-generating source was performed for the following parameters: $\mathrm{Pr} = 7.0$, $\varepsilon = 0.8$, $\mathrm{Gr} = 10^5$, $C = 0-1$, $10^{-5} < \mathrm{Da} < 10^{-1}$, $50 < \mathrm{Re} < 500$, $\delta = l/H = 0.6-3$. Distributions of the isolines of the stream function, temperature and the dependences of the average Nusselt number and the average temperature inside the heater were obtained in a steady-state regime, when the stationary picture of the flow and heat transfer is observed. As a result we showed that an addition of a porous insertion leads to an intensification of heat removal from the surface of the energy source. The increase in the porous insertion sizes and the use of working fluid with different thermal characteristics, lead to a decrease in temperature inside the source.

Inverse geophysical problems are difficult to solve due to their mathematically incorrect formulation and large computational complexity. Geophysical exploration in frontier areas is even more complicated due to the lack of reliable geological information. In this case, inversion methods that allow interpretation of several types of geophysical data together are recognized to be of major importance. This paper is dedicated to one of such inversion methods, which is based on minimization of the determinant of the Gram matrix for a set of model vectors. Within the framework of this approach, we minimize a nonlinear functional, which consists of squared norms of data residual of different types, the sum of stabilizing functionals and a term that measures the structural similarity between different model vectors. We apply this approach to seismic and electromagnetic synthetic data set. Specifically, we study joint inversion of acoustic pressure response together with controlled-source electrical field imposing structural constraints on resulting electrical conductivity and P-wave velocity distributions.

We start off this note with the problem formulation and present the numerical method for inverse problem. We implemented the conjugate-gradient algorithm for non-linear optimization. The efficiency of our approach is demonstrated in numerical experiments, in which the true 3D electrical conductivity model was assumed to be known, but the velocity model was constructed during inversion of seismic data. The true velocity model was based on a simplified geology structure of a marine prospect. Synthetic seismic data was used as an input for our minimization algorithm. The resulting velocity model not only fit to the data but also has structural similarity with the given conductivity model. Our tests have shown that optimally chosen weight of the Gramian term may improve resolution of the final models considerably.

We present a physico-mathematical statement of coupled geometrical and gas dynamics problem of intrachamber processes simulation and calculation of main internal ballistics characteristics of solid rocket motors in axisymmetric approximation. Method and numerical algorithm of solving the problem are described in this paper. We track the propellant burning surface using the level set method. This method allows us to implicitly represent the surface on a fixed Cartesian grid as zero-level of some function. Two-dimensional gas-dynamics equations describe a flow of combustion products in a solid rocket motor. Due to inconsistency of domain boundaries and nodes of computational grid, presence of ghost points lying outside the computational domain is taken into account. For setting the values of flow parameters in ghost points, we use the inverse Lax – Wendroff procedure. We discretize spatial derivatives of level set and gas-dynamics equations with standard WENO schemes of fifth and third-order respectively and time derivatives using total variation diminishing Runge –Kutta methods. We parallelize the presented numerical algorithm using CUDA technology and further optimize it with regard to peculiarities of graphics processors architecture.

Created software package is used for calculating internal ballistics characteristics of nozzleless solid rocket motor during main firing phase. On the base of obtained numerical results, we discuss efficiency of parallelization using CUDA technology and applying considered optimizations. It has been shown that implemented parallelization technique leads to a significant acceleration in comparison with central processes. Distributions of key parameters of combustion products flow in different periods of time have been presented in this paper. We make a comparison of obtained results between quasione-dimensional approach and developed numerical technique.

Authors describe a two-stage traffic assignment model. It contains of two blocks. The first block consists of a model for calculating a correspondence (demand) matrix, whereas the second block is a traffic assignment model. The first model calculates a matrix of correspondences using a matrix of transport costs (it characterizes the required volumes of movement from one area to another, it is time in this case). To solve this problem, authors propose to use one of the most popular methods of calculating the correspondence matrix in urban studies — the entropy model. The second model describes exactly how the needs for displacement specified by the correspondence matrix are distributed along the possible paths. Knowing the ways of the flows distribution along the paths, it is possible to calculate the cost matrix. Equilibrium in a two-stage model is a fixed point in the sequence of these two models. In practice the problem of finding a fixed point can be solved by the fixed-point iteration method. Unfortunately, at the moment the issue of convergence and estimations of the convergence rate for this method has not been studied quite thoroughly. In addition, the numerical implementation of the algorithm results in many problems. In particular, if the starting point is incorrect, situations may arise where the algorithm requires extremely large numbers to be computed and exceeds the available memory even on the most modern computers. Therefore the article proposes a method for reducing the problem of finding the equilibrium to the problem of the convex non-smooth optimization. Also a numerical method for solving the obtained optimization problem is proposed. Numerical experiments were carried out for both methods of solving the problem. The authors used data for Vladivostok (for this city information from various sources was processed and collected in a new dataset) and two smaller cities in the USA. It was not possible to achieve convergence by the method of fixed-point iteration, whereas the second model for the same dataset demonstrated convergence rate $k^{-1.67}$.

The work is devoted to the construction of efficient and applicable to real tasks first-order methods of convex optimization, that is, using only values of the target function and its derivatives. Construction uses OGMG, fast gradient method which is optimal by complexity, but requires to know the Lipschitz constant for gradient and the strong convexity constant to determine the number of steps and step length. This requirement makes practical usage very hard. An adaptive on the constant for strong convexity algorithm ACGM is proposed, based on restarts of the OGM-G with update of the strong convexity constant estimate, and an adaptive on the Lipschitz constant for gradient ALGM, in which the use of OGM-G restarts is supplemented by the selection of the Lipschitz constant with verification of the smoothness conditions used in the universal gradient descent method. This eliminates the disadvantages of the original method associated with the need to know these constants, which makes practical usage possible. Optimality of estimates for the complexity of the constructed algorithms is proved. To verify the results obtained, experiments on model functions and real tasks from machine learning are carried out.

The paper provides a method for selecting the composition of a refrigerant with a given isobaric cooling curve using an artificial neural network (ANN). This method is based on the use of 1D layers of a convolutional neural network. To train the neural network, we applied a technological model of a simple heat exchanger in the UniSim design program, using the Peng – Robinson equation of state.We created synthetic database on isobaric boiling curves of refrigerants of different compositions using the technological model. To record the database, an algorithm was developed in the Python programming language, and information on isobaric boiling curves for 1 049 500 compositions was uploaded using the COM interface. The compositions have generated by Monte Carlo method. Designed architecture of ANN allows select composition of a mixed refrigerant by 101 points of boiling curve. ANN gives mole flows of mixed refrigerant by composition (methane, ethane, propane, nitrogen) on the output layer. For training ANN, we used method of cyclical learning rate. For results demonstration we selected MR composition by natural gas cooling curve with a minimum temperature drop of 3 К and a maximum temperature drop of no more than 10 К, which turn better than we predicted via UniSim SQP optimizer and better than predicted by $k$-nearest neighbors algorithm. A significant value of this article is the fact that an artificial neural network can be used to select the optimal composition of the refrigerant when analyzing the cooling curve of natural gas. This method can help engineers select the composition of the mixed refrigerant in real time, which will help reduce the energy consumption of natural gas liquefaction.

When recognizing workers on images of a construction site obtained from surveillance cameras, a situation is typical in which the objects of detection have a very different spatial scale relative to each other and other objects. An increase in the accuracy of detection of small objects can be achieved by using the Feature-Fused modification of the SSD detector. Together with the use of overlapping image slicing on the inference, this model copes well with the detection of small objects. However, the practical use of this approach requires manual adjustment of the slicing parameters. This reduces the accuracy of object detection on scenes that differ from the scenes used in training, as well as large objects. In this paper, we propose an algorithm for automatic selection of image slicing parameters depending on the ratio of the characteristic geometric dimensions of objects in the image. We have developed a two-pass version of the Feature-Fused SSD detector for automatic determination of optimal image slicing parameters. On the first pass, a fast truncated version of the detector is used, which makes it possible to determine the characteristic sizes of objects of interest. On the second pass, the final detection of objects with slicing parameters selected after the first pass is performed. A dataset was collected with images of workers on a construction site. The dataset includes large, small and diverse images of workers. To compare the detection results for a one-pass algorithm without splitting the input image, a one-pass algorithm with uniform splitting, and a two-pass algorithm with the selection of the optimal splitting, we considered tests for the detection of separately large objects, very small objects, with a high density of objects both in the foreground and in the background, only in the background. In the range of cases we have considered, our approach is superior to the approaches taken in comparison, allows us to deal well with the problem of double detections and demonstrates a quality of 0.82–0.91 according to the mAP (mean Average Precision) metric.