It has long been observed that for practically any computational problem that has been intensely studied, different instances are best solved using different algorithms. This is particularly pronounced for computationally hard problems, where in most cases, no single algorithm defines the state of the art; instead, there is a set of algorithms with complementary strengths. This performance complementarity can be exploited in various ways, one of which is based on the idea of selecting, from a set of given algorithms, for each problem instance to be solved the one expected to perform best. The task of automatically selecting an algorithm from a given set is known as the per-instance algorithm selection problem and has been intensely studied over the past 15 years, leading to major improvements in the state of the art in solving a growing number of discrete combinatorial problems, including propositional satisfiability and AI planning. Per-instance algorithm selection also shows much promise for boosting performance in solving continuous and mixed discrete/continuous optimisation problems. This survey provides an overview of research in automated algorithm selection, ranging from early and seminal works to recent and promising application areas. Different from earlier work, it covers applications to discrete and continuous problems, and discusses algorithm selection in context with conceptually related approaches, such as algorithm configuration, scheduling or portfolio selection. Since informative and cheaply computable problem instance features provide the basis for effective per-instance algorithm selection systems, we also provide an overview of such features for discrete and continuous problems. Finally, we provide perspectives on future work in the area and discuss a number of open research challenges.

The growing range of applications of Machine Learning (ML) in a multitude of settings motivates the ability of computing small explanations for predictions made. Small explanations are generally accepted as easier for human decision makers to understand. Most earlier work on computing explanations is based on heuristic approaches, providing no guarantees of quality, in terms of how close such solutions are from cardinality- or subset-minimal explanations. This paper develops a constraint-agnostic solution for computing explanations for any ML model. The proposed solution exploits abductive reasoning, and imposes the requirement that the ML model can be represented as sets of constraints using some target constraint reasoning system for which the decision problem can be answered with some oracle. The experimental results, obtained on well-known datasets, validate the scalability of the proposed approach as well as the quality of the computed solutions.

Several algorithms for solving constraint satisfaction problems are based on survey propagation, a variational inference scheme used to obtain approximate marginal probability estimates for variable assignments. These marginals correspond to how frequently each variable is set to true among satisfying assignments, and are used to inform branching decisions during search; however, marginal estimates obtained via survey propagation are approximate and can be self-contradictory. We introduce a more general branching strategy based on streamlining constraints, which sidestep hard assignments to variables. We show that streamlined solvers consistently outperform decimation-based solvers on random k-SAT instances for several problem sizes, shrinking the gap between empirical performance and theoretical limits of satisfiability by 16.3% on average for k 3, 4, 5, 6.

We study the effect of impairment on stochastic multi-armed bandits and develop new ways to mitigate it. Impairment effect is the phenomena where an agent only accrues reward for an action if they have played it at least a few times in the recent past. It is practically motivated by repetition and recency effects in domains such as advertising (here consumer behavior may require repeat actions by advertisers) and vocational training (here actions are complex skills that can only be mastered with repetition to get a payoff). Impairment can be naturally modelled as a temporal constraint on the strategy space, and we provide two novel algorithms that achieve sublinear regret, each working with different assumptions on the impairment effect. We introduce a new notion called bucketing in our algorithm design, and show how it can effectively address impairment as well as a broader class of temporal constraints. Our regret bounds explicitly capture the cost of impairment and show that it scales (sub-)linearly with the degree of impairment. Our work complements recent work on modeling delays and corruptions, and we provide experimental evidence supporting our claims.

Constrained sequential pattern mining aims at identifying frequent patterns on a sequential database of items while observing constraints defined over the item attributes. We introduce novel techniques for constraint-based sequential pattern mining that rely on a multi-valued decision diagram representation of the database. Specifically, our representation can accommodate multiple item attributes and various constraint types, including a number of non-monotone constraints. To evaluate the applicability of our approach, we develop an MDD-based prefix-projection algorithm and compare its performance against a typical generate-and-check variant, as well as a state-of-the-art constraint-based sequential pattern mining algorithm. Results show that our approach is competitive with or superior to these other methods in terms of scalability and efficiency.

Constraint Programming (CP) is a powerful declarative programming paradigm combining inference and search in order to find solutions to various type of constraint systems. Dealing with highly disjunctive constraint systems is notoriously difficult in CP. Apart from trying to solve each disjunct independently from each other, there is little hope and effort to succeed in constructing intermediate results combining the knowledge originating from several disjuncts. In this paper, we propose If Then Else (ITE), a lightweight approach for implementing stratified constructive disjunction and negation on top of an existing CP solver, namely SICStus Prolog clp(FD). Although constructive disjunction is known for more than three decades, it does not have straightforward implementations in most CP solvers. ITE is a freely available library proposing stratified and constructive reasoning for various operators, including disjunction and negation, implication and conditional. Our preliminary experimental results show that ITE is competitive with existing approaches that handle disjunctive constraint systems.

In this paper, we study the problem of sampling from a graphical model when the model itself is changing dynamically with time. This problem derives its interest from a variety of inference, learning, and sampling settings in machine learning, computer vision, statistical physics, and theoretical computer science. While the problem of sampling from a static graphical model has received considerable attention, theoretical works for its dynamic variants have been largely lacking. The main contribution of this paper is an algorithm that can sample dynamically from a broad class of graphical models over discrete random variables. Our algorithm is parallel and Las Vegas: it knows when to stop and it outputs samples from the exact distribution. We also provide sufficient conditions under which this algorithm runs in time proportional to the size of the update, on general graphical models as well as well-studied specific spin systems. In particular we obtain, for the Ising model (ferromagnetic or anti-ferromagnetic) and for the hardcore model the first dynamic sampling algorithms that can handle both edge and vertex updates (addition, deletion, change of functions), both efficient within regimes that are close to the respective uniqueness regimes, beyond which, even for the static and approximate sampling, no local algorithms were known or the problem itself is intractable. Our dynamic sampling algorithm relies on a local resampling algorithm and a new "equilibrium" property that is shown to be satisfied by our algorithm at each step, and enables us to prove its correctness. This equilibrium property is robust enough to guarantee the correctness of our algorithm, helps us improve bounds on fast convergence on specific models, and should be of independent interest.

We analyze to what extent the random SAT and Max-SAT problems differ in their properties. Our findings suggest that for random $k$-CNF with ratio in a certain range, Max-SAT can be solved by any SAT algorithm with subexponential slowdown, while for formulae with ratios greater than some constant, algorithms under the random walk framework require substantially different heuristics. In light of these results, we propose a novel probabilistic approach for random Max-SAT called ProMS. Experimental results illustrate that ProMS outperforms many state-of-the-art local search solvers on random Max-SAT benchmarks.

There is huge demand for robots to work alongside humans in heterogeneous teams. To achieve a high degree of fluidity, robots must be able to (1) recognize their human co-worker's intent, and (2) adapt to this intent accordingly, providing useful aid as a teammate. The literature to date has made great progress in these two areas -- recognition and adaptation -- but largely as separate research activities. In this work, we present a unified approach to these two problems, in which recognition and adaptation occur concurrently and holistically within the same framework. We introduce Pike, an executive for human-robot teams, that allows the robot to continuously and concurrently reason about what a human is doing as execution proceeds, as well as adapt appropriately. The result is a mixed-initiative execution where humans and robots interact fluidly to complete task goals.Key to our approach is our task model: a contingent, temporally-flexible team-plan with explicit choices for both the human and robot. This allows a single set of algorithms to find implicit constraints between sets of choices for the human and robot (as determined via causal link analysis and temporal reasoning), narrowing the possible decisions a rational human would take (hence achieving intent recognition) as well as the possible actions a robot could consistently take (hence achieving adaptation). Pike makes choices based on the preconditions of actions in the plan, temporal constraints, unanticipated disturbances, and choices made previously (by either agent).Innovations of this work include (1) a framework for concurrent intent recognition and adaptation for contingent, temporally-flexible plans, (2) the generalization of causal links for contingent, temporally-flexible plans along with related extraction algorithms, and (3) extensions to a state-of-the-art dynamic execution system to utilize these causal links for decision making.

In the era of big data, logistic planning can be made data-driven to take advantage of accumulated knowledge in the past. While in the movie industry, movie planning can also exploit the existing online movie knowledge library to achieve better results. However, it is ineffective to solely rely on conventional heuristics for movie planning, due to a large number of existing movies and various real-world factors that contribute to the success of each movie, such as the movie genre, available budget, production team (involving actor, actress, director, and writer), etc. In this paper, we study a "Blockbuster Planning" (BP) problem to learn from previous movies and plan for low budget yet high return new movies in a totally data-driven fashion. After a thorough investigation of an online movie knowledge library, a novel movie planning framework "Blockbuster Planning with Maximized Movie Configuration Acquaintance" (BigMovie) is introduced in this paper. From the investment perspective, BigMovie maximizes the estimated gross of the planned movies with a given budget. It is able to accurately estimate the movie gross with a 0.26 mean absolute percentage error (and 0.16 for budget). Meanwhile, from the production team's perspective, BigMovie is able to formulate an optimized team with people/movie genres that team members are acquainted with. Historical collaboration records are utilized to estimate acquaintance scores of movie configuration factors via an acquaintance tensor. We formulate the BP problem as a non-linear binary programming problem and prove its NP-hardness. To solve it in polynomial time, BigMovie relaxes the hard binary constraints and addresses the BP problem as a cubic programming problem. Extensive experiments conducted on IMDB movie database demonstrate the capability of BigMovie for an effective data-driven blockbuster planning.