30,134 research outputs found
Interval-valued soft constraint problems
Constraints and quantitative preferences, or costs, are very useful for
modelling many real-life problems. However, in many settings, it is difficult to specify
precise preference values, and it is much more reasonable to allow for preference
intervals. We define several notions of optimal solutions for such problems, providing
algorithms to find optimal solutions and also to test whether a solution is optimal.
Most of the time these algorithms just require the solution of soft constraint prob-
lems, which suggests that it may be possible to handle this form of uncertainty in
soft constraints without significantly increasing the computational effort needed to
reason with such problems. This is supported also by experimental results. We also
identify classes of problems where the same results hold if users are allowed to use
multiple disjoint intervals rather than a single one
Hybrid tractability of soft constraint problems
The constraint satisfaction problem (CSP) is a central generic problem in
computer science and artificial intelligence: it provides a common framework
for many theoretical problems as well as for many real-life applications. Soft
constraint problems are a generalisation of the CSP which allow the user to
model optimisation problems. Considerable effort has been made in identifying
properties which ensure tractability in such problems. In this work, we
initiate the study of hybrid tractability of soft constraint problems; that is,
properties which guarantee tractability of the given soft constraint problem,
but which do not depend only on the underlying structure of the instance (such
as being tree-structured) or only on the types of soft constraints in the
instance (such as submodularity). We present several novel hybrid classes of
soft constraint problems, which include a machine scheduling problem,
constraint problems of arbitrary arities with no overlapping nogoods, and the
SoftAllDiff constraint with arbitrary unary soft constraints. An important tool
in our investigation will be the notion of forbidden substructures.Comment: A full version of a CP'10 paper, 26 page
An Analysis of the Value of Information when Exploring Stochastic, Discrete Multi-Armed Bandits
In this paper, we propose an information-theoretic exploration strategy for
stochastic, discrete multi-armed bandits that achieves optimal regret. Our
strategy is based on the value of information criterion. This criterion
measures the trade-off between policy information and obtainable rewards. High
amounts of policy information are associated with exploration-dominant searches
of the space and yield high rewards. Low amounts of policy information favor
the exploitation of existing knowledge. Information, in this criterion, is
quantified by a parameter that can be varied during search. We demonstrate that
a simulated-annealing-like update of this parameter, with a sufficiently fast
cooling schedule, leads to an optimal regret that is logarithmic with respect
to the number of episodes.Comment: Entrop
Soft Concurrent Constraint Programming
Soft constraints extend classical constraints to represent multiple
consistency levels, and thus provide a way to express preferences, fuzziness,
and uncertainty. While there are many soft constraint solving formalisms, even
distributed ones, by now there seems to be no concurrent programming framework
where soft constraints can be handled. In this paper we show how the classical
concurrent constraint (cc) programming framework can work with soft
constraints, and we also propose an extension of cc languages which can use
soft constraints to prune and direct the search for a solution. We believe that
this new programming paradigm, called soft cc (scc), can be also very useful in
many web-related scenarios. In fact, the language level allows web agents to
express their interaction and negotiation protocols, and also to post their
requests in terms of preferences, and the underlying soft constraint solver can
find an agreement among the agents even if their requests are incompatible.Comment: 25 pages, 4 figures, submitted to the ACM Transactions on
Computational Logic (TOCL), zipped file
Diagnosis and Repair for Synthesis from Signal Temporal Logic Specifications
We address the problem of diagnosing and repairing specifications for hybrid
systems formalized in signal temporal logic (STL). Our focus is on the setting
of automatic synthesis of controllers in a model predictive control (MPC)
framework. We build on recent approaches that reduce the controller synthesis
problem to solving one or more mixed integer linear programs (MILPs), where
infeasibility of a MILP usually indicates unrealizability of the controller
synthesis problem. Given an infeasible STL synthesis problem, we present
algorithms that provide feedback on the reasons for unrealizability, and
suggestions for making it realizable. Our algorithms are sound and complete,
i.e., they provide a correct diagnosis, and always terminate with a non-trivial
specification that is feasible using the chosen synthesis method, when such a
solution exists. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on the
synthesis of controllers for various cyber-physical systems, including an
autonomous driving application and an aircraft electric power system
A Declarative Semantics for CLP with Qualification and Proximity
Uncertainty in Logic Programming has been investigated during the last
decades, dealing with various extensions of the classical LP paradigm and
different applications. Existing proposals rely on different approaches, such
as clause annotations based on uncertain truth values, qualification values as
a generalization of uncertain truth values, and unification based on proximity
relations. On the other hand, the CLP scheme has established itself as a
powerful extension of LP that supports efficient computation over specialized
domains while keeping a clean declarative semantics. In this paper we propose a
new scheme SQCLP designed as an extension of CLP that supports qualification
values and proximity relations. We show that several previous proposals can be
viewed as particular cases of the new scheme, obtained by partial
instantiation. We present a declarative semantics for SQCLP that is based on
observables, providing fixpoint and proof-theoretical characterizations of
least program models as well as an implementation-independent notion of goal
solutions.Comment: 17 pages, 26th Int'l. Conference on Logic Programming (ICLP'10
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