We present a generalized linear structural causal model, coupled with a novel data-adaptive linear regularization, to recover causal directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) from time series. By leveraging a recently developed stochastic monotone Variational Inequality (VI) formulation, we cast the causal discovery problem as a general convex optimization. Furthermore, we develop a non-asymptotic recovery guarantee and quantifiable uncertainty by solving a linear program to establish confidence intervals for a wide range of non-linear monotone link functions. We validate our theoretical results and show the competitive performance of our method via extensive numerical experiments. Most importantly, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in recovering highly interpretable causal DAGs over Sepsis Associated Derangements (SADs) while achieving comparable prediction performance to powerful ``black-box'' models such as XGBoost. Thus, the future adoption of our proposed method to conduct continuous surveillance of high-risk patients by clinicians is much more likely.

E-mobility, or electric mobility, has emerged as a pivotal solution to address pressing environmental and sustainability concerns in the transportation sector. The depletion of fossil fuels, escalating greenhouse gas emissions, and the imperative to combat climate change underscore the significance of transitioning to electric vehicles (EVs). This paper seeks to explore the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) in addressing various challenges related to effective energy management in e-mobility systems (EMS). These challenges encompass critical factors such as range anxiety, charge rate optimization, and the longevity of energy storage in EVs. By analyzing existing literature, we delve into the role that AI can play in tackling these challenges and enabling efficient energy management in EMS. Our objectives are twofold: to provide an overview of the current state-of-the-art in this research domain and propose effective avenues for future investigations. Through this analysis, we aim to contribute to the advancement of sustainable and efficient e-mobility solutions, shaping a greener and more sustainable future for transportation.

Scene flow estimation is the task of describing the 3D motion field between temporally successive point clouds. State-of-the-art methods use strong priors and test-time optimization techniques, but require on the order of tens of seconds to process full-size point clouds, making them unusable as computer vision primitives for real-time applications such as open world object detection. Feedforward methods are considerably faster, running on the order of tens to hundreds of milliseconds for full-size point clouds, but require expensive human supervision. To address both limitations, we propose Scene Flow via Distillation, a simple, scalable distillation framework that uses a label-free optimization method to produce pseudo-labels to supervise a feedforward model. Our instantiation of this framework, ZeroFlow, achieves state-of-the-art performance on the Argoverse 2 Self-Supervised Scene Flow Challenge while using zero human labels by simply training on large-scale, diverse unlabeled data. At test-time, ZeroFlow is over 1000x faster than label-free state-of-the-art optimization-based methods on full-size point clouds (34 FPS vs 0.028 FPS) and over 1000x cheaper to train on unlabeled data compared to the cost of human annotation (\$394 vs ~\$750,000). To facilitate further research, we will release our code, trained model weights, and high quality pseudo-labels for the Argoverse 2 and Waymo Open datasets.

This paper explores the challenges of implementing Federated Learning (FL) in practical scenarios featuring isolated nodes with data heterogeneity, which can only be connected to the server through wireless links in an infrastructure-less environment. To overcome these challenges, we propose a novel mobilizing personalized FL approach, which aims to facilitate mobility and resilience. Specifically, we develop a novel optimization algorithm called Random Walk Stochastic Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (RWSADMM). RWSADMM capitalizes on the server's random movement toward clients and formulates local proximity among their adjacent clients based on hard inequality constraints rather than requiring consensus updates or introducing bias via regularization methods. To mitigate the computational burden on the clients, an efficient stochastic solver of the approximated optimization problem is designed in RWSADMM, which provably converges to the stationary point almost surely in expectation. Our theoretical and empirical results demonstrate the provable fast convergence and substantial accuracy improvements achieved by RWSADMM compared to baseline methods, along with its benefits of reduced communication costs and enhanced scalability.

Machine learning (ML) methods offer a wide range of configurable hyperparameters that have a significant influence on their performance. While accuracy is a commonly used performance objective, in many settings, it is not sufficient. Optimizing the ML models with respect to multiple objectives such as accuracy, confidence, fairness, calibration, privacy, latency, and memory consumption is becoming crucial. To that end, hyperparameter optimization, the approach to systematically optimize the hyperparameters, which is already challenging for a single objective, is even more challenging for multiple objectives. In addition, the differences in objective scales, the failures, and the presence of outlier values in objectives make the problem even harder. We propose a multi-objective Bayesian optimization (MoBO) algorithm that addresses these problems through uniform objective normalization and randomized weights in scalarization. We increase the efficiency of our approach by imposing constraints on the objective to avoid exploring unnecessary configurations (e.g., insufficient accuracy). Finally, we leverage an approach to parallelize the MoBO which results in a 5x speed-up when using 16x more workers.

One of the typical purposes of using lower-limb exoskeleton robots is to provide assistance to the wearer by supporting their weight and augmenting their physical capabilities according to a given task and human motion intentions. The generalizability of robots across different wearers in multiple tasks is important to ensure that the robot can provide correct and effective assistance in actual implementation. However, most lower-limb exoskeleton robots exhibit only limited generalizability. Therefore, this paper proposes a human-in-the-loop learning and adaptation framework for exoskeleton robots to improve their performance in various tasks and for different wearers. To suit different wearers, an individualized walking trajectory is generated online using dynamic movement primitives and Bayes optimization. To accommodate various tasks, a task translator is constructed using a neural network to generalize a trajectory to more complex scenarios. These generalization techniques are integrated into a unified variable impedance model, which regulates the exoskeleton to provide assistance while ensuring safety. In addition, an anomaly detection network is developed to quantitatively evaluate the wearer's comfort, which is considered in the trajectory learning procedure and contributes to the relaxation of conflicts in impedance control. The proposed framework is easy to implement, because it requires proprioceptive sensors only to perform and deploy data-efficient learning schemes. This makes the exoskeleton practical for deployment in complex scenarios, accommodating different walking patterns, habits, tasks, and conflicts. Experiments and comparative studies on a lower-limb exoskeleton robot are performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.

The NSGA-II is one of the most prominent algorithms to solve multi-objective optimization problems. Despite numerous successful applications, several studies have shown that the NSGA-II is less effective for larger numbers of objectives. In this work, we use mathematical runtime analyses to rigorously demonstrate and quantify this phenomenon. We show that even on the simple $m$-objective generalization of the discrete OneMinMax benchmark, where every solution is Pareto optimal, the NSGA-II also with large population sizes cannot compute the full Pareto front (objective vectors of all Pareto optima) in sub-exponential time when the number of objectives is at least three. The reason for this unexpected behavior lies in the fact that in the computation of the crowding distance, the different objectives are regarded independently. This is not a problem for two objectives, where any sorting of a pair-wise incomparable set of solutions according to one objective is also such a sorting according to the other objective (in the inverse order).

Event cameras are motion-activated sensors that capture pixel-level illumination changes instead of the intensity image with a fixed frame rate. Compared with the standard cameras, it can provide reliable visual perception during high-speed motions and in high dynamic range scenarios. However, event cameras output only a little information or even noise when the relative motion between the camera and the scene is limited, such as in a still state. While standard cameras can provide rich perception information in most scenarios, especially in good lighting conditions. These two cameras are exactly complementary. In this paper, we proposed a robust, high-accurate, and real-time optimization-based monocular event-based visual-inertial odometry (VIO) method with event-corner features, line-based event features, and point-based image features. The proposed method offers to leverage the point-based features in the nature scene and line-based features in the human-made scene to provide more additional structure or constraints information through well-design feature management. Experiments in the public benchmark datasets show that our method can achieve superior performance compared with the state-of-the-art image-based or event-based VIO. Finally, we used our method to demonstrate an onboard closed-loop autonomous quadrotor flight and large-scale outdoor experiments. Videos of the evaluations are presented on our project website: https://b23.tv/OE3QM6j

Bayesian optimization (BO) is a promising approach for hyperparameter optimization of deep neural networks (DNNs), where each model training can take minutes to hours. In BO, a computationally cheap surrogate model is employed to learn the relationship between parameter configurations and their performance such as accuracy. Parallel BO methods often adopt single manager/multiple workers strategies to evaluate multiple hyperparameter configurations simultaneously. Despite significant hyperparameter evaluation time, the overhead in such centralized schemes prevents these methods to scale on a large number of workers. We present an asynchronous-decentralized BO, wherein each worker runs a sequential BO and asynchronously communicates its results through shared storage. We scale our method without loss of computational efficiency with above 95% of worker's utilization to 1,920 parallel workers (full production queue of the Polaris supercomputer) and demonstrate improvement in model accuracy as well as faster convergence on the CANDLE benchmark from the Exascale computing project.

We investigate the fundamental optimization question of minimizing a target function $f$, whose gradients are expensive to compute or have limited availability, given access to some auxiliary side function $h$ whose gradients are cheap or more available. This formulation captures many settings of practical relevance, such as i) re-using batches in SGD, ii) transfer learning, iii) federated learning, iv) training with compressed models/dropout, etc. We propose two generic new algorithms that apply in all these settings and prove that we can benefit from this framework using only an assumption on the Hessian similarity between the target and side information. A benefit is obtained when this similarity measure is small, we also show a potential benefit from stochasticity when the auxiliary noise is correlated with that of the target function.