109,676 research outputs found
Human-Machine Collaborative Optimization via Apprenticeship Scheduling
Coordinating agents to complete a set of tasks with intercoupled temporal and
resource constraints is computationally challenging, yet human domain experts
can solve these difficult scheduling problems using paradigms learned through
years of apprenticeship. A process for manually codifying this domain knowledge
within a computational framework is necessary to scale beyond the
``single-expert, single-trainee" apprenticeship model. However, human domain
experts often have difficulty describing their decision-making processes,
causing the codification of this knowledge to become laborious. We propose a
new approach for capturing domain-expert heuristics through a pairwise ranking
formulation. Our approach is model-free and does not require enumerating or
iterating through a large state space. We empirically demonstrate that this
approach accurately learns multifaceted heuristics on a synthetic data set
incorporating job-shop scheduling and vehicle routing problems, as well as on
two real-world data sets consisting of demonstrations of experts solving a
weapon-to-target assignment problem and a hospital resource allocation problem.
We also demonstrate that policies learned from human scheduling demonstration
via apprenticeship learning can substantially improve the efficiency of a
branch-and-bound search for an optimal schedule. We employ this human-machine
collaborative optimization technique on a variant of the weapon-to-target
assignment problem. We demonstrate that this technique generates solutions
substantially superior to those produced by human domain experts at a rate up
to 9.5 times faster than an optimization approach and can be applied to
optimally solve problems twice as complex as those solved by a human
demonstrator.Comment: Portions of this paper were published in the Proceedings of the
International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) in 2016 and
in the Proceedings of Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) in 2016. The paper
consists of 50 pages with 11 figures and 4 table
The 2014 International Planning Competition: Progress and Trends
We review the 2014 International Planning Competition (IPC-2014), the eighth
in a series of competitions starting in 1998. IPC-2014 was held in three separate
parts to assess state-of-the-art in three prominent areas of planning research: the
deterministic (classical) part (IPCD), the learning part (IPCL), and the probabilistic
part (IPPC). Each part evaluated planning systems in ways that pushed the edge of
existing planner performance by introducing new challenges, novel tasks, or both.
The competition surpassed again the number of competitors than its predecessor,
highlighting the competition’s central role in shaping the landscape of ongoing
developments in evaluating planning systems
A New Approach to Speeding Up Topic Modeling
Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) is a widely-used probabilistic topic
modeling paradigm, and recently finds many applications in computer vision and
computational biology. In this paper, we propose a fast and accurate batch
algorithm, active belief propagation (ABP), for training LDA. Usually batch LDA
algorithms require repeated scanning of the entire corpus and searching the
complete topic space. To process massive corpora having a large number of
topics, the training iteration of batch LDA algorithms is often inefficient and
time-consuming. To accelerate the training speed, ABP actively scans the subset
of corpus and searches the subset of topic space for topic modeling, therefore
saves enormous training time in each iteration. To ensure accuracy, ABP selects
only those documents and topics that contribute to the largest residuals within
the residual belief propagation (RBP) framework. On four real-world corpora,
ABP performs around to times faster than state-of-the-art batch LDA
algorithms with a comparable topic modeling accuracy.Comment: 14 pages, 12 figure
Single machine scheduling with general positional deterioration and rate-modifying maintenance
We present polynomial-time algorithms for single machine problems with generalized positional deterioration effects and machine maintenance. The decisions should be taken regarding possible sequences of jobs and on the number of maintenance activities to be included into a schedule in order to minimize the overall makespan. We deal with general non-decreasing functions to represent deterioration rates of job processing times. Another novel extension of existing models is our assumption that a maintenance activity does not necessarily fully restore the machine to its original perfect state. In the resulting schedules, the jobs are split into groups, a particular group to be sequenced after a particular maintenance period, and the actual processing time of a job is affected by the group that job is placed into and its position within the group
ERA: A Framework for Economic Resource Allocation for the Cloud
Cloud computing has reached significant maturity from a systems perspective,
but currently deployed solutions rely on rather basic economics mechanisms that
yield suboptimal allocation of the costly hardware resources. In this paper we
present Economic Resource Allocation (ERA), a complete framework for scheduling
and pricing cloud resources, aimed at increasing the efficiency of cloud
resources usage by allocating resources according to economic principles. The
ERA architecture carefully abstracts the underlying cloud infrastructure,
enabling the development of scheduling and pricing algorithms independently of
the concrete lower-level cloud infrastructure and independently of its
concerns. Specifically, ERA is designed as a flexible layer that can sit on top
of any cloud system and interfaces with both the cloud resource manager and
with the users who reserve resources to run their jobs. The jobs are scheduled
based on prices that are dynamically calculated according to the predicted
demand. Additionally, ERA provides a key internal API to pluggable algorithmic
modules that include scheduling, pricing and demand prediction. We provide a
proof-of-concept software and demonstrate the effectiveness of the architecture
by testing ERA over both public and private cloud systems -- Azure Batch of
Microsoft and Hadoop/YARN. A broader intent of our work is to foster
collaborations between economics and system communities. To that end, we have
developed a simulation platform via which economics and system experts can test
their algorithmic implementations
On human motion prediction using recurrent neural networks
Human motion modelling is a classical problem at the intersection of graphics
and computer vision, with applications spanning human-computer interaction,
motion synthesis, and motion prediction for virtual and augmented reality.
Following the success of deep learning methods in several computer vision
tasks, recent work has focused on using deep recurrent neural networks (RNNs)
to model human motion, with the goal of learning time-dependent representations
that perform tasks such as short-term motion prediction and long-term human
motion synthesis. We examine recent work, with a focus on the evaluation
methodologies commonly used in the literature, and show that, surprisingly,
state-of-the-art performance can be achieved by a simple baseline that does not
attempt to model motion at all. We investigate this result, and analyze recent
RNN methods by looking at the architectures, loss functions, and training
procedures used in state-of-the-art approaches. We propose three changes to the
standard RNN models typically used for human motion, which result in a simple
and scalable RNN architecture that obtains state-of-the-art performance on
human motion prediction.Comment: Accepted at CVPR 1
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