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The study of the structural characteristics of composites and nanostructures is of fundamental importance in materials science. Theoretical and numerical modeling and simulation of the mechanical properties of nanostructures is the main tool that allows for complex studies that are difficult to conduct only experimentally. One example of nanostructures considered in this work are carbon nanotubes (CNTs), which have good thermal and electrical properties, as well as low density and high Young’s modulus, making them the most suitable reinforcement element for composites, for potential applications in aerospace, automotive, metallurgical and biomedical industries. In this review, we reviewed the modeling methods, mechanical properties, and applications of CNT-reinforced metal matrix composites. Some modeling methods applicable in the study of composites with polymer and metal matrices are also considered. Methods such as the gradient descent method, the Monte Carlo method, methods of molecular statics and molecular dynamics are considered. Molecular dynamics simulations have been shown to be excellent for creating various composite material systems and studying the properties of metal matrix composites reinforced with carbon nanomaterials under various conditions. This paper briefly presents the most commonly used potentials that describe the interactions of composite modeling systems. The correct choice of interaction potentials between parts of composites directly affects the description of the phenomenon being studied. The dependence of the mechanical properties of composites on the volume fraction of the diameter, orientation, and number of CNTs is detailed and discussed. It has been shown that the volume fraction of carbon nanotubes has a significant effect on the tensile strength and Young’s modulus. The CNT diameter has a greater impact on the tensile strength than on the elastic modulus. An example of works is also given in which the effect of CNT length on the mechanical properties of composites is studied. In conclusion, we offer perspectives on the direction of development of molecular dynamics modeling in relation to metal matrix composites reinforced with carbon nanomaterials.

In today’s technology-driven world, lite devices like Internet of Things (IoT) devices and microcontrollers (MCUs) are becoming increasingly common. These devices are more energyefficient and affordable, often with reduced features compared to the standard versions such as very limited memory and processing power for typical machine learning models. However, modern machine learning models can have millions of parameters, resulting in a large memory footprint. This complexity not only makes it difficult to deploy these large models on resource constrained devices but also increases the risk of latency and inefficiency in processing, which is crucial in some cases where real-time responses are required such as autonomous driving and medical diagnostics. In recent years, neural networks have seen significant advancements in model optimization techniques that help deployment and inference on these small devices. This narrative review offers a thorough examination of the progression and latest developments in neural network optimization, focusing on key areas such as quantization, pruning, knowledge distillation, and neural architecture search. It examines how these algorithmic solutions have progressed and how new approaches have improved upon the existing techniques making neural networks more efficient. This review is designed for machine learning researchers, practitioners, and engineers who may be unfamiliar with these methods but wish to explore the available techniques. It highlights ongoing research in optimizing networks for achieving better performance, lowering energy consumption, and enabling faster training times, all of which play an important role in the continued scalability of neural networks. Additionally, it identifies gaps in current research and provides a foundation for future studies, aiming to enhance the applicability and effectiveness of existing optimization strategies.

In this paper, we propose an adaptive algorithm that simulates the process of forming the initial behavioral skills on the example of the system ‘eye-arm’ animat. The situation is the formation of the initial behavioral skills occurs, for example, when a child masters the management of their hands by understanding the relationship between baseline unidentified spots on the retina of his eye and the position of the real object. Since the body control skills are not ‘hardcoded’ initially in the brain and the spinal cord at the level of instincts, the human child, like most young of other mammals, it is necessary to develop these skills in search behavior mode. Exploratory behavior begins with trial and error and then its contribution is gradually reduced as the development of the body and its environment. Since the correct behavior patterns at this stage of development of the organism does not exist for now, then the only way to select the right skills is a positive reinforcement to achieve the objective. A key feature of the proposed algorithm is to fix in the imprinting mode, only the final action that led to success, and that is very important, led to the familiar imprinted situation clearly leads to success. Over time, the continuous chain is lengthened right action — maximum use of previous positive experiences and negative ‘forgotten’ and not used.

Thus there is the gradual replacement of the random search purposeful actions that observed in the real young. Thus, the algorithm is able to establish a correspondence between the laws of the world and the ‘inner feelings’, the internal state of the animat. The proposed animat model was used 2 types of neural networks: 1) neural network NET1 to the input current which is fed to the position of the brush arms and the target point, and the output of motor commands, directing ‘brush’ manipulator animat to the target point; 2) neural network NET2 is received at the input of target coordinates and the current coordinates of the ‘brush’ and the output value is formed likelihood that the animat already ‘know’ this situation, and he ‘knows’ how to react to it. With this architecture at the animat has to rely on the ‘experience’ of neural networks to recognize situations where the response from NET2 network of close to 1, and on the other hand, run a random search, when the experience of functioning in this area of the visual field in animat not (response NET2 close to 0).

This article reviews both historical achievements and modern results in the field of Markov Decision Process (MDP) and convex optimization. This review is the first attempt to cover the field of reinforcement learning in Russian in the context of convex optimization. The fundamental Bellman equation and the criteria of optimality of policy — strategies based on it, which make decisions based on the known state of the environment at the moment, are considered. The main iterative algorithms of policy optimization based on the solution of the Bellman equations are also considered. An important section of this article was the consideration of an alternative to the $Q$-learning approach — the method of direct maximization of the agent’s average reward for the chosen strategy from interaction with the environment. Thus, the solution of this convex optimization problem can be represented as a linear programming problem. The paper demonstrates how the convex optimization apparatus is used to solve the problem of Reinforcement Learning (RL). In particular, it is shown how the concept of strong duality allows us to naturally modify the formulation of the RL problem, showing the equivalence between maximizing the agent’s reward and finding his optimal strategy. The paper also discusses the complexity of MDP optimization with respect to the number of state–action–reward triples obtained as a result of interaction with the environment. The optimal limits of the MDP solution complexity are presented in the case of an ergodic process with an infinite horizon, as well as in the case of a non-stationary process with a finite horizon, which can be restarted several times in a row or immediately run in parallel in several threads. The review also reviews the latest results on reducing the gap between the lower and upper estimates of the complexity of MDP optimization with average remuneration (Averaged MDP, AMDP). In conclusion, the real-valued parametrization of agent policy and a class of gradient optimization methods through maximizing the $Q$-function of value are considered. In particular, a special class of MDPs with restrictions on the value of policy (Constrained Markov Decision Process, CMDP) is presented, for which a general direct-dual approach to optimization with strong duality is proposed.

The article gives the example of finite-element modeling of the structural element is a flexible woven composites. The reinforcing cloth is a plain weave of threads of assembled harness. Threads are represented by elastic material. The matrix of the material is a soft polymer with the possibility of irreversible deformations. Taken into account the possibility of the occurrence of damage in the structure of the material under high loads. Built detailed diagram of deformation under uniaxial tension. The accuracy of the model is conrmed by in situ experiments.

Technical carbon (soot) is a product obtained by thermal decomposition (pyrolysis) of hydrocarbons (usually oil) in a stream of heat carrier gas. Technical carbon is widely used as a reinforcing component in the production of rubber and plastic masses. Tire production uses 70% of all carbon produced. In furnace carbon production, the liquid hydrocarbon feedstock is injected into the natural gas combustion product stream through nozzles. The raw material is atomized and vaporized with further pyrolysis. It is important for the raw material to be completely evaporated before the pyrolysis process starts, otherwise coke, that contaminates the product, will be produced. It is impossible to operate without mathematical modeling of the process itself in order to improve the carbon production technology, in particular, to provide the complete evaporation of the raw material prior to the pyrolysis process. Mathematical modelling is the most important way to obtain the most complete and detailed information about the peculiarities of reactor operation.

A three-dimensional mathematical model and calculation method for raw material atomization and evaporation in the thermal gas flow are being developed in the FlowVision software package PC. Water is selected as a raw material to work out the modeling technique. The working substances in the reactor chamber are the combustion products of natural gas. The motion of raw material droplets and evaporation in the gas stream are modeled in the framework of the Eulerian approach of interaction between dispersed and continuous media. The simulation results of raw materials atomization and evaporation in a real reactor for technical carbon production are presented. Numerical method allows to determine an important atomization characteristic: average Sauter diameter. That parameter could be defined from distribution of droplets of raw material at each time of spray forming.

This work provides a new approach for constructing high-precision routes based on data from transport detectors inside the SUMO traffic modeling package. Existing tools such as flowrouter and routeSampler have a number of disadvantages, such as the lack of interaction with the network in the process of building routes. Our rlRouter uses multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), where the agents are incoming lanes and the environment is the road network. By performing actions to launch vehicles, agents receive a reward for matching data from transport detectors. Parameter Sharing DQN with the LSTM backbone of the Q-function was used as an algorithm for multi-agent reinforcement learning.

Since the rlRouter is trained inside the SUMO simulation, it can restore routes better by taking into account the interaction of vehicles within the network with each other and with the network infrastructure. We have modeled diverse traffic situations on three different junctions in order to compare the performance of SUMO’s routers with the rlRouter. We used Mean Absoluter Error (MAE) as the measure of the deviation from both cumulative detectors and routes data. The rlRouter achieved the highest compliance with the data from the detectors. We also found that by maximizing the reward for matching detectors, the resulting routes also get closer to the real ones. Despite the fact that the routes recovered using rlRouter are superior to the routes obtained using SUMO tools, they do not fully correspond to the real ones, due to the natural limitations of induction-loop detectors. To achieve more plausible routes, it is necessary to equip junctions with other types of transport counters, for example, camera detectors.

In this paper, we propose an adaptive traffic signal control method invariant to the configuration of the traffic signal. The proposed method uses one neural network model to control traffic signals of various configurations, differing both in the number of controlled lanes and in the used traffic light control cycle (set of phases). To describe the state space, both dynamic information about the current state of the traffic flow and static data about the configuration of a controlled intersection are used. To increase the speed of model training and reduce the required amount of data required for model convergence, it is proposed to use an “expert” who provides additional data for model training. As an expert, we propose to use an adaptive control method based on maximizing the weighted flow of vehicles through an intersection. Experimental studies of the effectiveness of the developed method were carried out in a microscopic simulation software package. The obtained results confirmed the effectiveness of the proposed method in different simulation scenarios. The possibility of using the developed method in a simulation scenario that is not used in the training process was shown. We provide a comparison of the proposed method with other baseline solutions, including the method used as an “expert”. In most scenarios, the developed method showed the best results by average travel time and average waiting time criteria. The advantage over the method used as an expert, depending on the scenario under study, ranged from 2% to 12% according to the criterion of average vehicle waiting time and from 1% to 7% according to the criterion of average travel time.

Distributed saddle point problems (SPPs) have numerous applications in optimization, matrix games and machine learning. For example, the training of generated adversarial networks is represented as a min-max optimization problem, and training regularized linear models can be reformulated as an SPP as well. This paper studies distributed nonsmooth SPPs with Lipschitz-continuous objective functions. The objective function is represented as a sum of several components that are distributed between groups of computational nodes. The nodes, or agents, exchange information through some communication network that may be centralized or decentralized. A centralized network has a universal information aggregator (a server, or master node) that directly communicates to each of the agents and therefore can coordinate the optimization process. In a decentralized network, all the nodes are equal, the server node is not present, and each agent only communicates to its immediate neighbors.

We assume that each of the nodes locally holds its objective and can compute its value at given points, i. e. has access to zero-order oracle. Zero-order information is used when the gradient of the function is costly, not possible to compute or when the function is not differentiable. For example, in reinforcement learning one needs to generate a trajectory to evaluate the current policy. This policy evaluation process can be interpreted as the computation of the function value. We propose an approach that uses a smoothing technique, i. e., applies a first-order method to the smoothed version of the initial function. It can be shown that the stochastic gradient of the smoothed function can be viewed as a random two-point gradient approximation of the initial function. Smoothing approaches have been studied for distributed zero-order minimization, and our paper generalizes the smoothing technique on SPPs.

The problem is to automate the correction of LaTeX documents. Each document is represented as a parse tree. The modified Zhang-Shasha algorithm is used to construct a mapping of tree vertices of the original document to the tree vertices of the edited document, which corresponds to the minimum editing distance. Vertex to vertex maps form the training set, which is used to generate rules for automatic correction. The statistics of the applicability to the edited documents is collected for each rule. It is used for quality assessment and improvement of the rules.