Does a quantised surrogate make a design search cheaper in finite-element solves than searching with the simulator alone?

research/accel-surrogateloop

Does a quantised surrogate make a design search cheaper in FE solves than searching with the simulator alone? At 150 FE evaluations a surrogate-assisted loop is 2.3 to 2.8 % from a best-known design against 6 to 8 % for an FE-only evolution strategy and 14 to 20 % for random search (float and 6-bit surrogates indistinguishable; stylised, 8 seeds).

4 tests

What it found

Minimum-mass design of the 2D Q6 cantilever of accel-surrogatelock under a tip-deflection limit, with the 64×8 FE solve as the expensive evaluator and 150 evaluations per run (8 seeds, two limits). Gap to a best-known design at 150 evaluations: random search 14–20 %, an FE-only evolution strategy 6–8 %, a surrogate-assisted loop 2.3–2.8 % with either a float or a 6-bit QAT MLP (not distinguishable at 8 seeds). At 100 evaluations the assisted loops already match the FE-only strategy at 150. 15–21 % of the surrogate's picks broke the limit when the FE solve checked them. Stylised: one 8-variable problem, a weak ES baseline (no CMA-ES or Bayesian optimisation), no confidence intervals.

A figure from its own output

Figure produced by research/accel-surrogateloop: figure — accel-surrogateloop/experiments/figure.svg, written by the project's own experiment code.

Paper, code and results

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Produced with AI assistance (Claude). Results are from the code in this repository and are simulated or stylised unless the abstract says otherwise; nothing here implies affiliation with or endorsement by any lab, researcher or company cited. MIT licensed.