5,117 research outputs found
A Study of the Practical and Tutorial Scheduling Problem
Abstract: The practical and tutorial allocation problem is a problem encountered at tertiary institutions and essentially involves the allocation of students to practical or tutorial groups for the different courses the student is enrolled in. Practical and tutorial scheduling for first year courses is becoming more and more challenging as the number of permissible course combinations and student numbers increase at tertiary institutions, and while this has previously been done manually and independently for each course, this is no longer feasible. The paper firstly presents a formal definition of the practical and tutorial scheduling problem. Low-level construction heuristics for this domain are defined and a heuristic approach for solving this problem is proposed. A tool namely, PRATS, incorporating this approach is described. The performance of PRATS on six sets of real-world data is discussed. The paper also reports on a hyper-heuristic implemented to automatically generate low-level construction heuristics and compares the performance of the generated heuristics to the human intuitive heuristics used
Tutorials at PPSN 2016
PPSN 2016 hosts a total number of 16 tutorials covering a broad range of current research in evolutionary computation. The tutorials range from introductory to advanced and specialized but can all be attended without prior requirements. All PPSN attendees are cordially invited to take this opportunity to learn about ongoing research activities in our field
SHADHO: Massively Scalable Hardware-Aware Distributed Hyperparameter Optimization
Computer vision is experiencing an AI renaissance, in which machine learning
models are expediting important breakthroughs in academic research and
commercial applications. Effectively training these models, however, is not
trivial due in part to hyperparameters: user-configured values that control a
model's ability to learn from data. Existing hyperparameter optimization
methods are highly parallel but make no effort to balance the search across
heterogeneous hardware or to prioritize searching high-impact spaces. In this
paper, we introduce a framework for massively Scalable Hardware-Aware
Distributed Hyperparameter Optimization (SHADHO). Our framework calculates the
relative complexity of each search space and monitors performance on the
learning task over all trials. These metrics are then used as heuristics to
assign hyperparameters to distributed workers based on their hardware. We first
demonstrate that our framework achieves double the throughput of a standard
distributed hyperparameter optimization framework by optimizing SVM for MNIST
using 150 distributed workers. We then conduct model search with SHADHO over
the course of one week using 74 GPUs across two compute clusters to optimize
U-Net for a cell segmentation task, discovering 515 models that achieve a lower
validation loss than standard U-Net.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figure
Reinforcement learning based local search for grouping problems: A case study on graph coloring
Grouping problems aim to partition a set of items into multiple mutually
disjoint subsets according to some specific criterion and constraints. Grouping
problems cover a large class of important combinatorial optimization problems
that are generally computationally difficult. In this paper, we propose a
general solution approach for grouping problems, i.e., reinforcement learning
based local search (RLS), which combines reinforcement learning techniques with
descent-based local search. The viability of the proposed approach is verified
on a well-known representative grouping problem (graph coloring) where a very
simple descent-based coloring algorithm is applied. Experimental studies on
popular DIMACS and COLOR02 benchmark graphs indicate that RLS achieves
competitive performances compared to a number of well-known coloring
algorithms
A matheuristic for customized multi-level multi-criteria university timetabling
Course timetables are the organizational foundation of a university’s educational program. While students and lecturers perceive timetable quality individually according to their preferences, there are also collective criteria derived normatively such as balanced workloads or idle time avoidance. A recent challenge and opportunity in curriculum-based timetabling consists of customizing timetables with respect to individual student preferences and with respect to integrating online courses as part of modern course programs or in reaction to flexibility requirements as posed in pandemic situations. Curricula consisting of (large) lectures and (small) tutorials further open the possibility for optimizing not only the lecture and tutorial plan for all students but also the assignments of individual students to tutorial slots. In this paper, we develop a multi-level planning process for university timetabling: On the tactical level, a lecture and tutorial plan is determined for a set of study programs; on the operational level, individual timetables are generated for each student interlacing the lecture plan through a selection of tutorials from the tutorial plan favoring individual preferences. We utilize this mathematical-programming-based planning process as part of a matheuristic which implements a genetic algorithm in order to improve lecture plans, tutorial plans, and individual timetables so as to find an overall university program with well-balanced timetable performance criteria. Since the evaluation of the fitness function amounts to invoking the entire planning process, we additionally provide a proxy in the form of an artificial neural network metamodel. Computational results exhibit the procedure’s capability of generating high quality schedules
Heuristics for Network Coding in Wireless Networks
Multicast is a central challenge for emerging multi-hop wireless
architectures such as wireless mesh networks, because of its substantial cost
in terms of bandwidth. In this report, we study one specific case of multicast:
broadcasting, sending data from one source to all nodes, in a multi-hop
wireless network. The broadcast we focus on is based on network coding, a
promising avenue for reducing cost; previous work of ours showed that the
performance of network coding with simple heuristics is asymptotically optimal:
each transmission is beneficial to nearly every receiver. This is for
homogenous and large networks of the plan. But for small, sparse or for
inhomogeneous networks, some additional heuristics are required. This report
proposes such additional new heuristics (for selecting rates) for broadcasting
with network coding. Our heuristics are intended to use only simple local
topology information. We detail the logic of the heuristics, and with
experimental results, we illustrate the behavior of the heuristics, and
demonstrate their excellent performance
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