173 research outputs found
Improved Peel-and-Bound: Methods for Generating Dual Bounds with Multivalued Decision Diagrams
Decision diagrams are an increasingly important tool in cutting-edge solvers
for discrete optimization. However, the field of decision diagrams is
relatively new, and is still incorporating the library of techniques that
conventional solvers have had decades to build. We drew inspiration from the
warm-start technique used in conventional solvers to address one of the major
challenges faced by decision diagram based methods. Decision diagrams become
more useful the wider they are allowed to be, but also become more costly to
generate, especially with large numbers of variables. In the original version
of this paper, we presented a method of peeling off a sub-graph of previously
constructed diagrams and using it as the initial diagram for subsequent
iterations that we call peel-and-bound. We tested the method on the sequence
ordering problem, and our results indicate that our peel-and-bound scheme
generates stronger bounds than a branch-and-bound scheme using the same
propagators, and at significantly less computational cost. In this extended
version of the paper, we also propose new methods for using relaxed decision
diagrams to improve the solutions found using restricted decision diagrams,
discuss the heuristic decisions involved with the parallelization of
peel-and-bound, and discuss how peel-and-bound can be hyper-optimized for
sequencing problems. Furthermore, we test the new methods on the sequence
ordering problem and the traveling salesman problem with time-windows (TSPTW),
and include an updated and generalized implementation of the algorithm capable
of handling any discrete optimization problem. The new results show that
peel-and-bound outperforms ddo (a decision diagram based branch-and-bound
solver) on the TSPTW. We also close 15 open benchmark instances of the TSPTW.Comment: 50 pages, 31 figures, published by JAIR, supplementary materials at
https://github.com/IsaacRudich/ImprovedPnB. arXiv admin note: substantial
text overlap with arXiv:2205.0521
Decision Diagram-Based Branch-and-Bound with Caching for Dominance and Suboptimality Detection
The branch-and-bound algorithm based on decision diagrams introduced by
Bergman et al. in 2016 is a framework for solving discrete optimization
problems with a dynamic programming formulation. It works by compiling a series
of bounded-width decision diagrams that can provide lower and upper bounds for
any given subproblem. Eventually, every part of the search space will be either
explored or pruned by the algorithm, thus proving optimality. This paper
presents new ingredients to speed up the search by exploiting the structure of
dynamic programming models. The key idea is to prevent the repeated expansion
of nodes corresponding to the same dynamic programming states by querying
expansion thresholds cached throughout the search. These thresholds are based
on dominance relations between partial solutions previously found and on the
pruning inequalities of the filtering techniques introduced by Gillard et al.
in 2021. Computational experiments show that the pruning brought by this
caching mechanism allows significantly reducing the number of nodes expanded by
the algorithm. This results in more benchmark instances of difficult
optimization problems being solved in less time while using narrower decision
diagrams.Comment: Accepted to INFORMS Journal on Computin
Probabilistic logic programming in 2P-KT
The work introduces an elastic and platform-agnostic approach to probabilistic logic programming aimed at linking this paradigm with modern mainstream programming platforms, thus widening its usability and portability (e.g. towards the JVM, Android, Python, and JavaScript platforms). We design our solution as an extension of the 2P-Kt symbolic AI ecosystem to inherit its multi-platform and multi-paradigm nature
Knowledge compilation for online decision-making : application to the control of autonomous systems = Compilation de connaissances pour la décision en ligne : application à la conduite de systèmes autonomes
La conduite de systèmes autonomes nécessite de prendre des décisions en fonction des observations et des objectifs courants : cela implique des tâches à effectuer en ligne, avec les moyens de calcul embarqués. Cependant, il s'agit généralement de tâches combinatoires, gourmandes en temps de calcul et en espace mémoire. Réaliser ces tâches intégralement en ligne dégrade la réactivité du système ; les réaliser intégralement hors ligne, en anticipant toutes les situations possibles, nuit à son embarquabilité. Les techniques de compilation de connaissances sont susceptibles d'apporter un compromis, en déportant au maximum l'effort de calcul avant la mise en situation du système. Ces techniques consistent à traduire un problème dans un certain langage, fournissant une forme compilée de ce problème, dont la résolution est facile et la taille aussi compacte que possible. La traduction peut être très longue, mais n'est effectuée qu'une seule fois, hors ligne. Il existe de nombreux langages-cible de compilation, notamment le langage des diagrammes de décision binaires (BDDs), qui ont été utilisés avec succès dans divers domaines (model-checking, configuration, planification).
L'objectif de la thèse était d'étudier l'application de la compilation de connaissances à la conduite de systèmes autonomes. Nous nous sommes intéressés à des problèmes réels de planification, qui impliquent souvent des variables continues ou à grand domaine énuméré (temps ou mémoire par exemple). Nous avons orienté notre travail vers la recherche et l'étude de langages-cible de compilation assez expressifs pour permettre de représenter de tels problèmes.Controlling autonomous systems requires to make decisions depending on current observations and objectives. This involves some tasks that must be executed online-with the embedded computational power only. However, these tasks are generally combinatory; their computation is long and requires a lot of memory space. Entirely executing them online thus compromises the system's reactivity. But entirely executing them offline, by anticipating every possible situation, can lead to a result too large to be embedded. A tradeoff can be provided by knowledge compilation techniques, which shift as much as possible of the computational effort before the system's launching. These techniques consists in a translation of a problem into some language, obtaining a compiled form of the problem, which is both easy to solve and as compact as possible. The translation step can be very long, but it is only executed once, and offline. There are numerous target compilation languages, among which the language of binary decision diagrams (BDDs), which have been successfully used in various domains of artificial intelligence, such as model-checking, configuration, or planning.
The objective of the thesis was to study how knowledge compilation could be applied to the control of autonomous systems. We focused on realistic planning problems, which often involve variables with continuous domains or large enumerated domains (such as time or memory space). We oriented our work towards the search for target compilation languages expressive enough to represent such problems
Oblivious Bounds on the Probability of Boolean Functions
This paper develops upper and lower bounds for the probability of Boolean
functions by treating multiple occurrences of variables as independent and
assigning them new individual probabilities. We call this approach dissociation
and give an exact characterization of optimal oblivious bounds, i.e. when the
new probabilities are chosen independent of the probabilities of all other
variables. Our motivation comes from the weighted model counting problem (or,
equivalently, the problem of computing the probability of a Boolean function),
which is #P-hard in general. By performing several dissociations, one can
transform a Boolean formula whose probability is difficult to compute, into one
whose probability is easy to compute, and which is guaranteed to provide an
upper or lower bound on the probability of the original formula by choosing
appropriate probabilities for the dissociated variables. Our new bounds shed
light on the connection between previous relaxation-based and model-based
approximations and unify them as concrete choices in a larger design space. We
also show how our theory allows a standard relational database management
system (DBMS) to both upper and lower bound hard probabilistic queries in
guaranteed polynomial time.Comment: 34 pages, 14 figures, supersedes: http://arxiv.org/abs/1105.281
Interactive Cost Configuration Over Decision Diagrams
Abstract In many AI domains such as product configuration, a user should interactively specify a solution that must satisfy a set of constraints. In such scenarios, offline compilation of feasible solutions into a tractable representation is an important approach to delivering efficient backtrack-free user interaction online. In particular, binary decision diagrams (BDDs) have been successfully used as a compilation target for product and service configuration. In this paper we discuss how to extend BDD-based configuration to scenarios involving cost functions which express user preferences. We first show that an efficient, robust and easy to implement extension is possible if the cost function is additive, and feasible solutions are represented using multi-valued decision diagrams (MDDs). We also discuss the effect on MDD size if the cost function is non-additive or if it is encoded explicitly into MDD. We then discuss interactive configuration in the presence of multiple cost functions. We prove that even in its simplest form, multiple-cost configuration is NP-hard in the input MDD. However, for solving two-cost configuration we develop a pseudo-polynomial scheme and a fully polynomial approximation scheme. The applicability of our approach is demonstrated through experiments over real-world configuration models and product-catalogue datasets. Response times are generally within a fraction of a second even for very large instances
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