Energy
Towards Efficient Disaster Response via Cost-effective Unbiased Class Rate Estimation through Neyman Allocation Stratified Sampling Active Learning
Bai, Yanbing, Wu, Xinyi, Xu, Lai, Pei, Jihan, Mas, Erick, Koshimura, Shunichi
With the rapid development of earth observation technology, we have entered an era of massively available satellite remote-sensing data. However, a large amount of satellite remote sensing data lacks a label or the label cost is too high to hinder the potential of AI technology mining satellite data. Especially in such an emergency response scenario that uses satellite data to evaluate the degree of disaster damage. Disaster damage assessment encountered bottlenecks due to excessive focus on the damage of a certain building in a specific geographical space or a certain area on a larger scale. In fact, in the early days of disaster emergency response, government departments were more concerned about the overall damage rate of the disaster area instead of single-building damage, because this helps the government decide the level of emergency response. We present an innovative algorithm that constructs Neyman stratified random sampling trees for binary classification and extends this approach to multiclass problems. Through extensive experimentation on various datasets and model structures, our findings demonstrate that our method surpasses both passive and conventional active learning techniques in terms of class rate estimation and model enhancement with only 30\%-60\% of the annotation cost of simple sampling. It effectively addresses the 'sampling bias' challenge in traditional active learning strategies and mitigates the 'cold start' dilemma. The efficacy of our approach is further substantiated through application to disaster evaluation tasks using Xview2 Satellite imagery, showcasing its practical utility in real-world contexts.
Kernel-based optimally weighted conformal prediction intervals
Lee, Jonghyeok, Xu, Chen, Xie, Yao
Conformal prediction, originated in Vovk et al. [1999, 2005], offers a robust framework explicitly designed for reliable and distribution-free uncertainty quantification. Conformal prediction has become increasingly recognized and adopted within the domains of machine learning and statistics [Lei et al., 2013, Lei and Wasserman, 2014, Kim et al., 2020, Angelopoulos and Bates, 2023]. Assuming nothing beyond the exchangeability of data, conformal prediction excels in generating valid prediction sets under any given significance level, irrespective of the underlying data distribution and model assumptions. This capability makes it particularly valuable for uncertainty quantification in settings characterized by diverse and complex models. Going beyond the exchangeability assumption has been a research challenge, particularly as many real-world datasets (such as time-series data) are inherently non-exchangeable. Tibshirani et al. [2019] addresses situations where a feature distribution shifts between training and test data and restores valid coverage through weighted quantiles based on the likelihood ratio of the distributions. More recently, Barber et al. [2023] bounds the coverage gap using the total
Reinforcement Learning for Jump-Diffusions
Gao, Xuefeng, Li, Lingfei, Zhou, Xun Yu
We study continuous-time reinforcement learning (RL) for stochastic control in which system dynamics are governed by jump-diffusion processes. We formulate an entropy-regularized exploratory control problem with stochastic policies to capture the exploration--exploitation balance essential for RL. Unlike the pure diffusion case initially studied by Wang et al. (2020), the derivation of the exploratory dynamics under jump-diffusions calls for a careful formulation of the jump part. Through a theoretical analysis, we find that one can simply use the same policy evaluation and q-learning algorithms in Jia and Zhou (2022a, 2023), originally developed for controlled diffusions, without needing to check a priori whether the underlying data come from a pure diffusion or a jump-diffusion. However, we show that the presence of jumps ought to affect parameterizations of actors and critics in general. Finally, we investigate as an application the mean-variance portfolio selection problem with stock price modelled as a jump-diffusion, and show that both RL algorithms and parameterizations are invariant with respect to jumps.
High-dimensional multidisciplinary design optimization for aircraft eco-design / Optimisation multi-disciplinaire en grande dimension pour l'\'eco-conception avion en avant-projet
The objective of this Philosophiae Doctor (Ph.D) thesis is to propose an efficient approach for optimizing a multidisciplinary black-box model when the optimization problem is constrained and involves a large number of mixed integer design variables (typically 100 variables). The targeted optimization approach, called EGO, is based on a sequential enrichment of an adaptive surrogate model and, in this context, GP surrogate models are one of the most widely used in engineering problems to approximate time-consuming high fidelity models. EGO is a heuristic BO method that performs well in terms of solution quality. However, like any other global optimization method, EGO suffers from the curse of dimensionality, meaning that its performance is satisfactory on lower dimensional problems, but deteriorates as the dimensionality of the optimization search space increases. For realistic aircraft design problems, the typical size of the design variables can even exceed 100 and, thus, trying to solve directly the problems using EGO is ruled out. The latter is especially true when the problems involve both continuous and categorical variables increasing even more the size of the search space. In this Ph.D thesis, effective parameterization tools are investigated, including techniques like partial least squares regression, to significantly reduce the number of design variables. Additionally, Bayesian optimization is adapted to handle discrete variables and high-dimensional spaces in order to reduce the number of evaluations when optimizing innovative aircraft concepts such as the "DRAGON" hybrid airplane to reduce their climate impact.
A Systematic Review of Federated Generative Models
Gargary, Ashkan Vedadi, De Cristofaro, Emiliano
Federated Learning (FL) has emerged as a solution for distributed systems that allow clients to train models on their data and only share models instead of local data. Generative Models are designed to learn the distribution of a dataset and generate new data samples that are similar to the original data. Many prior works have tried proposing Federated Generative Models. Using Federated Learning and Generative Models together can be susceptible to attacks, and designing the optimal architecture remains challenging. This survey covers the growing interest in the intersection of FL and Generative Models by comprehensively reviewing research conducted from 2019 to 2024. We systematically compare nearly 100 papers, focusing on their FL and Generative Model methods and privacy considerations. To make this field more accessible to newcomers, we highlight the state-of-the-art advancements and identify unresolved challenges, offering insights for future research in this evolving field.
Graph neural networks with configuration cross-attention for tensor compilers
Khizbullin, Dmitrii, de Andrade, Eduardo Rocha, Nguyen, Thanh Hau, Ferreira, Matheus Pedroza, Pugh, David R.
With the recent popularity of neural networks comes the need for efficient serving of inference workloads. A neural network inference workload can be represented as a computational graph with nodes as operators transforming multidimensional tensors. The tensors can be transposed and/or tiled in a combinatorially large number of ways, some configurations leading to accelerated inference. We propose TGraph, a neural graph architecture that allows screening for fast configurations of the target computational graph, thus representing an artificial intelligence (AI) tensor compiler in contrast to the traditional heuristics-based compilers. The proposed solution improves mean Kendall's $\tau$ across layout collections of TpuGraphs from 29.8% of the reliable baseline to 67.4% of TGraph. We estimate the potential CO$_2$ emission reduction associated with our work to be equivalent to over 50% of the total household emissions in the areas hosting AI-oriented data centers.
GAMEOPT+: Improving Fuel Efficiency in Unregulated Heterogeneous Traffic Intersections via Optimal Multi-agent Cooperative Control
Suriyarachchi, Nilesh, Chandra, Rohan, Anantula, Arya, Baras, John S., Manocha, Dinesh
Better fuel efficiency leads to better financial security as well as a cleaner environment. We propose a novel approach for improving fuel efficiency in unstructured and unregulated traffic environments. Existing intelligent transportation solutions for improving fuel efficiency, however, apply only to traffic intersections with sparse traffic or traffic where drivers obey the regulations, or both. We propose GameOpt+, a novel hybrid approach for cooperative intersection control in dynamic, multi-lane, unsignalized intersections. GameOpt+ is a hybrid solution that combines an auction mechanism and an optimization-based trajectory planner. It generates a priority entrance sequence for each agent and computes velocity controls in real-time, taking less than 10 milliseconds even in high-density traffic with over 10,000 vehicles per hour. Compared to fully optimization-based methods, it operates 100 times faster while ensuring fairness, safety, and efficiency. Tested on the SUMO simulator, our algorithm improves throughput by at least 25%, reduces the time to reach the goal by at least 70%, and decreases fuel consumption by 50% compared to auction-based and signaled approaches using traffic lights and stop signs. GameOpt+ is also unaffected by unbalanced traffic inflows, whereas some of the other baselines encountered a decrease in performance in unbalanced traffic inflow environments.
Model Ensembling for Constrained Optimization
Globus-Harris, Ira, Gupta, Varun, Kearns, Michael, Roth, Aaron
There is a long history in machine learning of model ensembling, beginning with boosting and bagging and continuing to the present day. Much of this history has focused on combining models for classification and regression, but recently there is interest in more complex settings such as ensembling policies in reinforcement learning. Strong connections have also emerged between ensembling and multicalibration techniques. In this work, we further investigate these themes by considering a setting in which we wish to ensemble models for multidimensional output predictions that are in turn used for downstream optimization. More precisely, we imagine we are given a number of models mapping a state space to multidimensional real-valued predictions. These predictions form the coefficients of a linear objective that we would like to optimize under specified constraints. The fundamental question we address is how to improve and combine such models in a way that outperforms the best of them in the downstream optimization problem. We apply multicalibration techniques that lead to two provably efficient and convergent algorithms. The first of these (the white box approach) requires being given models that map states to output predictions, while the second (the \emph{black box} approach) requires only policies (mappings from states to solutions to the optimization problem). For both, we provide convergence and utility guarantees. We conclude by investigating the performance and behavior of the two algorithms in a controlled experimental setting.
Machine Learning and Data Analysis Using Posets: A Survey
Posets are discrete mathematical structures which are ubiquitous in a broad range of data analysis and machine learning applications. Research connecting posets to the data science domain has been ongoing for many years. In this paper, a comprehensive review of a wide range of studies on data analysis and machine learning using posets are examined in terms of their theory, algorithms and applications. In addition, the applied lattice theory domain of formal concept analysis will also be highlighted in terms of its machine learning applications.
Skater: A Novel Bi-modal Bi-copter Robot for Adaptive Locomotion in Air and Diverse Terrain
Lin, Junxiao, Zhang, Ruibin, Pan, Neng, Xu, Chao, Gao, Fei
In this letter, we present a novel bi-modal bi-copter robot called Skater, which is adaptable to air and various ground surfaces. Skater consists of a bi-copter moving along its longitudinal direction with two passive wheels on both sides. Using a longitudinally arranged bi-copter as the unified actuation system for both aerial and ground modes, this robot not only keeps a concise and lightweight mechanism but also possesses exceptional terrain traversing capability and strong steering capacity. Moreover, leveraging the vectored thrust characteristic of bi-copters, the Skater can actively generate the centripetal force needed for steering, enabling it to achieve stable movement even on slippery surfaces. Furthermore, we model the comprehensive dynamics of the Skater, analyze its differential flatness, and introduce a controller using nonlinear model predictive control for trajectory tracking. The outstanding performance of the system is verified by extensive real-world experiments and benchmark comparisons.