Most of the existing question answering models can be largely compiled into two categories: i) open domain question answering models that answer generic questions and use large-scale knowledge base along with the targeted web-corpus retrieval and ii) closed domain question answering models that address focused questioning area and use complex deep learning models. Both the above models derive answers through textual comprehension methods. Due to their inability to capture the pedagogical meaning of textual content, these models are not appropriately suited to the educational field for pedagogy. In this paper, we propose an on-the-fly conceptual network model that incorporates educational semantics. The proposed model preserves correlations between conceptual entities by applying intelligent indexing algorithms on the concept network so as to improve answer generation. This model can be utilized for building interactive conversational agents for aiding classroom learning.

Recent methods for training generalized additive models (GAMs) with pairwise interactions achieve state-of-the-art accuracy on a variety of datasets. Adding interactions to GAMs, however, introduces an identifiability problem: effects can be freely moved between main effects and interaction effects without changing the model predictions. In some cases, this can lead to contradictory interpretations of the same underlying function. This is a critical problem because a central motivation of GAMs is model interpretability. In this paper, we use the Functional ANOV A decomposition to uniquely define interaction effects and thus produce identifiable additive models with purified interactions. To compute this decomposition, we present a fast, exact, mass-moving algorithm that transforms any piecewise-constant function (such as a tree-based model) into a purified, canonical representation. We apply this algorithm to several datasets and show large disparity, including contradictions, between the apparent and the purified effects. An important question in data analysis is whether two variables act in concert to affect an outcome. But this unconstrained additive model has fundamental flaws.

The past few years have seen a dramatic rise of academic and societal interest in fair machine learning. While plenty of fair algorithms have been proposed recently to tackle this challenge for discrete variables, only a few ideas exist for continuous ones. The objective in this paper is to ensure some independence level between the outputs of regression models and any given continuous sensitive variables. For this purpose, we use the Hirschfeld-Gebelein-R enyi (HGR) maximal correlation coefficient as a fairness metric. We propose two approaches to minimize the HGR coefficient. First, by reducing an upper bound of the HGR with a neural network estimation of the χ 2 divergence. The idea is to predict the output Y while minimizing the ability of an adversarial neural network to find the estimated transformations which are required to predict the HGR coefficient. We empirically assess and compare our approaches and demonstrate significant improvements on previously presented work in the field. 1 Introduction The use of machine learning algorithms in our day-to-day life has become ubiquitous. However, when trained on biased data, those algorithms are prone to learn, perpetuate or even reinforce these biases [6]. Because many applications have far-reaching consequences (credit rating, insurance pricing, recidivism score, etc.), there is an increasing concern in society that the use of machine learning models could reproduce discrimination based on sensitive attributes such as gender, race, age, weight, or other.

While machine-type communication (MTC) devices generate considerable amounts of data, they often cannot process the data due to limited energy and computation power. To empower MTC with intelligence, edge machine learning has been proposed. However, power allocation in this paradigm requires maximizing the learning performance instead of the communication throughput, for which the celebrated water-filling and max-min fairness algorithms become inefficient. To this end, this paper proposes learning centric power allocation (LCPA), which provides a new perspective to radio resource allocation in learning driven scenarios. By employing an empirical classification error model that is supported by learning theory, the LCPA is formulated as a nonconvex nonsmooth optimization problem, and is solved by majorization minimization (MM) framework. To get deeper insights into LCPA, asymptotic analysis shows that the transmit powers are inversely proportional to the channel gain, and scale exponentially with the learning parameters. This is in contrast to traditional power allocations where quality of wireless channels is the only consideration. Last but not least, to enable LCPA in large-scale settings, two optimization algorithms, termed mirror-prox LCPA and accelerated LCPA, are further proposed. Extensive numerical results demonstrate that the proposed LCPA algorithms outperform traditional power allocation algorithms, and the large-scale algorithms reduce the computation time by orders of magnitude compared with MM-based LCPA but still achieve competing learning performance.

Under dynamic traffic, service function chain (SFC) migration is considered as an effective way to improve resource utilization. However, the lack of future network information leads to non-optimal solutions, which motivates us to study reinforcement learning based SFC migration from a long-term perspective. In this paper, we formulate the SFC migration problem as a minimization problem with the objective of total network operation cost under constraints of users' quality of service. We firstly design a deep Q-network based algorithm to solve single SFC migration problem, which can adjust migration strategy online without knowing future information. Further, a novel multi-agent cooperative framework, called MSDF, is proposed to address the challenge of considering multiple SFC migration on the basis of single SFC migration. MSDF reduces the complexity thus accelerates the convergence speed, especially in large scale networks. Experimental results demonstrate that MSDF outperforms typical heuristic algorithms under various scenarios.

Project scheduling includes various problems of high pract ical relevance. Such problems arise in many areas and include different constraints and objectives. Usually pro ject scheduling problems require scheduling of a set of proj ect activities over a period of time and assignment of resources to these activities. Typical constraints include time windows for activities, precedence constraints between the ac tivities, assignment of appropriate resources etc. The aim is to find feasible schedules that optimize several criteria su ch as the minimization of total completion time. In this paper we investigate solving a real-world project sc heduling problem that arises in an industrial test laborato ry of a large company. This problem, Industrial Test Laborator y Scheduling (TLSP), which is an extension of the well known Resource-Constrained Project Scheduling Problem (R CPSP), was originally described in [1, 2]. It consists of a grouping stage, where smaller activities (tasks) are join ed into larger jobs, and a scheduling stage, where those jobs are scheduled and have resources assigned to them. In this wo rk, we deal with the second stage and assume that a grouping of tasks into jobs is already provided.

This study focuses on the prediction of missing six semantic relations (such as is_a and has_part) between two given nodes in RezoJDM a French lexical-semantic network. The output of this prediction is a set of pairs in which the first entries are semantic relations and the second entries are the probabilities of existence of such relations. Due to the statement of the problem we choose the random forest (RF) predictor classifier approach to tackle this problem. We take for granted the existing semantic relations, for training/test dataset, gathered and validated by crowdsourcing. We describe how all of the mentioned ideas can be followed after using the node2vec approach in the feature extraction phase. We show how this approach can lead to acceptable results.

We address the problem of applying Task and Motion Planning (TAMP) in real world environments. TAMP combines symbolic and geometric reasoning to produce sequential manipulation plans, typically specified as joint-space trajectories, which are valid only as long as the environment is static and perception and control are highly accurate. In case of any changes in the environment, slow re-planning is required. We propose a TAMP algorithm that optimizes over Cartesian frames defined relative to target objects. The resulting plan then remains valid even if the objects are moving and can be executed by reactive controllers that adapt to these changes in real time. We apply our TAMP framework to a torque-controlled robot in a pick and place setting and demonstrate its ability to adapt to changing environments, inaccurate perception, and imprecise control, both in simulation and the real world.

Latest research in industrial robotics is aimed at making human robot collaboration possible seamlessly. For this purpose, industrial robots are expected to work on the fly in unstructured and cluttered environments and hence the subject of perception driven motion planning plays a vital role. Sampling bas ed motion planners are proven to be the most effective for such high dimensional planning problems with real time constraints . Unluckily r andom stochastic samplers suffer from the phenomenon of'narrow passages' or bottleneck regions which need targeted sa mpling to improve their convergence rate . Also identifying these bottleneck regions in a diverse set of planning problems is a challenge. In this paper an attempt has been made to address these two problems by designing an intelligent'bottleneck guided' h euristic for a Rapidly Exploring Random Tree Star (RRT*) planner which is based on relevant context extracted from the planning scenario using a 3D Convolutional Neural Network and it is also proven that the proposed technique generalizes to unseen problem instances. This paper benchmarks the technique (bottleneck guided RRT*) against a 10% Goal biased RRT* planner, show s significant improvement in planning time and memory requirement and uses ABB 1410 industrial manipulator as a platform for implantation a nd validation of the results.

Abstract-- Logic synthesis requires extensive tuning of the synthesis optimization flow where the quality of results (QoR) depends on the sequence of optimizations used. Efficient design space exploration is challenging due to the exponential number of possible optimization permutations. Therefore, automating the optimization process is necessary. In this work, we propose a novel reinforcement learning-based methodology that navigates the optimization space without human intervention. We demonstrate the training of an Advantage Actor Critic (A2C) agent that seeks to minimize area subject to a timing constraint. Using the proposed methodology, designs can be optimized autonomously with no-humans in-loop. Evaluation on the comprehensive EPFL benchmark suite shows that the agent outperforms existing exploration methodologies and improves QoRs by an average of 13%. Logic synthesis transforms a high-level description of a design into an optimized gate-level representation. Modern logic synthesis tools represent a given design as an And-Inverter Graph (AIG), which encodes representative characteristics for optimizing Boolean functions.