The Electron-Ion Collider (EIC), a state-of-the-art facility for studying the strong force, is expected to begin commissioning its first experiments in 2028. This is an opportune time for artificial intelligence (AI) to be included from the start at this facility and in all phases that lead up to the experiments. The second annual workshop organized by the AI4EIC working group, which recently took place, centered on exploring all current and prospective application areas of AI for the EIC. This workshop is not only beneficial for the EIC, but also provides valuable insights for the newly established ePIC collaboration at EIC. This paper summarizes the different activities and R&D projects covered across the sessions of the workshop and provides an overview of the goals, approaches and strategies regarding AI/ML in the EIC community, as well as cutting-edge techniques currently studied in other experiments.

This paper presents a new, provably-convergent algorithm for computing the flag-mean and flag-median of a set of points on a flag manifold under the chordal metric. The flag manifold is a mathematical space consisting of flags, which are sequences of nested subspaces of a vector space that increase in dimension. The flag manifold is a superset of a wide range of known matrix spaces, including Stiefel and Grassmanians, making it a general object that is useful in a wide variety computer vision problems. To tackle the challenge of computing first order flag statistics, we first transform the problem into one that involves auxiliary variables constrained to the Stiefel manifold. The Stiefel manifold is a space of orthogonal frames, and leveraging the numerical stability and efficiency of Stiefel-manifold optimization enables us to compute the flag-mean effectively. Through a series of experiments, we show the competence of our method in Grassmann and rotation averaging, as well as principal component analysis. We release our source code under https://github.com/nmank/FlagAveraging.

Algorithmic and data-driven decisions and recommendations are commonly used in high-stakes decision-making settings such as criminal justice, medicine, and public policy. We investigate whether it would have been possible to improve a security assessment algorithm employed during the Vietnam War, using outcomes measured immediately after its introduction in late 1969. This empirical application raises several methodological challenges that frequently arise in high-stakes algorithmic decision-making. First, before implementing a new algorithm, it is essential to characterize and control the risk of yielding worse outcomes than the existing algorithm. Second, the existing algorithm is deterministic, and learning a new algorithm requires transparent extrapolation. Third, the existing algorithm involves discrete decision tables that are common but difficult to optimize over. To address these challenges, we introduce the Average Conditional Risk (ACRisk), which first quantifies the risk that a new algorithmic policy leads to worse outcomes for subgroups of individual units and then averages this over the distribution of subgroups. We also propose a Bayesian policy learning framework that maximizes the posterior expected value while controlling the posterior expected ACRisk. This framework separates the estimation of heterogeneous treatment effects from policy optimization, enabling flexible estimation of effects and optimization over complex policy classes. We characterize the resulting chance-constrained optimization problem as a constrained linear programming problem. Our analysis shows that compared to the actual algorithm used during the Vietnam War, the learned algorithm assesses most regions as more secure and emphasizes economic and political factors over military factors.

The emergence of microgrids (MGs) has provided a promising solution for decarbonizing and decentralizing the power grid, mitigating the challenges posed by climate change. However, MG operations often involve considering multiple objectives that represent the interests of different stakeholders, leading to potentially complex conflicts. To tackle this issue, we propose a novel multi-objective reinforcement learning framework that explores the high-dimensional objective space and uncovers the tradeoffs between conflicting objectives. This framework leverages exogenous information and capitalizes on the data-driven nature of reinforcement learning, enabling the training of a parametric policy without the need for long-term forecasts or knowledge of the underlying uncertainty distribution. The trained policies exhibit diverse, adaptive, and coordinative behaviors with the added benefit of providing interpretable insights on the dynamics of their information use. We employ this framework on the Cornell University MG (CU-MG), which is a combined heat and power MG, to evaluate its effectiveness. The results demonstrate performance improvements in all objectives considered compared to the status quo operations and offer more flexibility in navigating complex operational tradeoffs.

One of the main risks accompanying the use of artificial intelligence in decision making is that the algorithms that are used are biased, and as a result can lead to unfair outcomes (Pessach and Shmueli, 2020). In particular, artificial intelligence is prone to (unintentionally) indirectly discriminate against certain groups. Machine learning systems (a type of AI) are fitted to data and find patterns in that data in order to predict a target variable. In doing so, they often use correlations present in the data (e.g. between ethnicity and zip codes, as with segregated neighbourhoods the zip code is a good predictor for ethnicity) to select on a problematic property (ethnicity) not directly but through the use of information on an unproblematic property (zip codes). This means that often these systems do not have direct access to variables that would be unfair to select on, but they still produce outputs that would lead to unfair treatment of certain groups. Put more precisely, indirect discrimination is the situation where a group A (e.g.

Terahertz communication networks and intelligent reflecting surfaces exhibit significant potential in advancing wireless networks, particularly within the domain of aerial-based multi-access edge computing systems. These technologies enable efficient offloading of computational tasks from user electronic devices to Unmanned Aerial Vehicles or local execution. For the generation of high-quality task-offloading allocations, conventional numerical optimization methods often struggle to solve challenging combinatorial optimization problems within the limited channel coherence time, thereby failing to respond quickly to dynamic changes in system conditions. To address this challenge, we propose a deep learning-based optimization framework called Iterative Order-Preserving policy Optimization (IOPO), which enables the generation of energy-efficient task-offloading decisions within milliseconds. Unlike exhaustive search methods, IOPO provides continuous updates to the offloading decisions without resorting to exhaustive search, resulting in accelerated convergence and reduced computational complexity, particularly when dealing with complex problems characterized by extensive solution spaces. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework can generate energy-efficient task-offloading decisions within a very short time period, outperforming other benchmark methods.

In this paper, we propose the Bi-Sub-Gradient (Bi-SG) method, which is a generalization of the classical sub-gradient method to the setting of convex bi-level optimization problems. This is a first-order method that is very easy to implement in the sense that it requires only a computation of the associated proximal mapping or a sub-gradient of the outer non-smooth objective function, in addition to a proximal gradient step on the inner optimization problem. We show, under very mild assumptions, that Bi-SG tackles bi-level optimization problems and achieves sub-linear rates both in terms of the inner and outer objective functions. Moreover, if the outer objective function is additionally strongly convex (still could be non-smooth), the outer rate can be improved to a linear rate. Last, we prove that the distance of the generated sequence to the set of optimal solutions of the bi-level problem converges to zero.

It is used to tighten the Linear Programming (LP) relaxation of (1). Cuts are generated in rounds, where we refer to the process of computing cuts, applying a subset of the computed cuts, and resolving the LP as a separation round. In general, cuts are cheap to compute, and more are computed than actually applied to the LP. The process of deciding which cuts to add to the LP is called cut selection, and is the focus of this paper, in which we introduce a new cut selection algorithm. Cut selection was considered largely "solved", following computational results on a variety of MILP solvers [1, 2, 3], in that cheap heuristic selection rules were sufficient for good performance.

The nuclear fuel loading pattern optimization problem belongs to the class of large-scale combinatorial optimization. It is also characterized by multiple objectives and constraints, which makes it impossible to solve explicitly. Stochastic optimization methodologies including Genetic Algorithms and Simulated Annealing are used by different nuclear utilities and vendors, but hand-designed solutions continue to be the prevalent method in the industry. To improve the state-of-the-art, Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL), in particular, Proximal Policy Optimization is leveraged. This work presents a first-of-a-kind approach to utilize deep RL to solve the loading pattern problem and could be leveraged for any engineering design optimization. This paper is also to our knowledge the first to propose a study of the behavior of several hyper-parameters that influence the RL algorithm. The algorithm is highly dependent on multiple factors such as the shape of the objective function derived for the core design that behaves as a fudge factor that affects the stability of the learning. But also, an exploration/exploitation trade-off that manifests through different parameters such as the number of loading patterns seen by the agents per episode, the number of samples collected before a policy update nsteps, and an entropy factor ent_coef that increases the randomness of the policy during training. We found that RL must be applied similarly to a Gaussian Process in which the acquisition function is replaced by a parametrized policy. Then, once an initial set of hyper-parameters is found, reducing nsteps and ent_coef until no more learning is observed will result in the highest sample efficiency robustly and stably. This resulted in an economic benefit of 535,000- 642,000 $/year/plant.

We study the problem of generating diverse candidates in the context of Multi-Objective Optimization. In many applications of machine learning such as drug discovery and material design, the goal is to generate candidates which simultaneously optimize a set of potentially conflicting objectives. Moreover, these objectives are often imperfect evaluations of some underlying property of interest, making it important to generate diverse candidates to have multiple options for expensive downstream evaluations. We propose Multi-Objective GFlowNets (MOGFNs), a novel method for generating diverse Pareto optimal solutions, based on GFlowNets. We introduce two variants of MOGFNs: MOGFN-PC, which models a family of independent sub-problems defined by a scalarization function, with reward-conditional GFlowNets, and MOGFN-AL, which solves a sequence of sub-problems defined by an acquisition function in an active learning loop. Our experiments on wide variety of synthetic and benchmark tasks demonstrate advantages of the proposed methods in terms of the Pareto performance and importantly, improved candidate diversity, which is the main contribution of this work.