Efficient bifurcation and parameterization of multi-dimensional combustion manifolds using deep mixture of experts: an a priori study

TL;DR

This paper introduces an automatic bifurcation method for turbulent combustion manifolds using a deep mixture of experts framework, improving accuracy and inference speed by specializing neural networks in different input regions.

Contribution

It presents a novel, data-driven bifurcation technique for high-dimensional combustion manifolds using MoE, outperforming heuristic methods and enhancing interpretability.

Findings

Reduced errors with specialized neural networks for each manifold region

Inference speed doubled by increasing experts from 1 to 8

MoE divides input space in a physically meaningful manner

Abstract

This work describes and validates an approach for autonomously bifurcating turbulent combustion manifolds to divide regression tasks amongst specialized artificial neural networks (ANNs). This approach relies on the mixture of experts (MoE) framework, where each neural network is trained to be specialized in a given portion of the input space. The assignment of different input regions to the experts is determined by a gating network, which is a neural network classifier. In some previous studies, it has been demonstrated that bifurcation of a complex combustion manifold and fitting different ANNs for each part leads to better fits or faster inference speeds. However, the manner of bifurcation in these studies was based on heuristic approaches or clustering techniques. In contrast, the proposed technique enables automatic bifurcation using non-linear planes in high-dimensional turbulent combustion manifolds that are often associated with complex behavior due to different dominating physics in various zones. The proposed concept is validated using 4-dimensional (4D) and 5D flamelet tables, showing that the errors obtained with a given network size, or conversely the network size required to achieve a given accuracy, is considerably reduced. The effect of the number of experts on inference speed is also investigated, showing that by increasing the number of experts from 1 to 8, the inference time can be approximately reduced by a factor of two. Moreover, it is shown that the MoE approach divides the input manifold in a physically intuitive manner, suggesting that the MoE framework can elucidate high-dimensional datasets in a physically meaningful way.