Autonomous vehicles face the problem of optimizing the expected performance of subsequent maneuvers while bounding the risk of collision with surrounding dynamic obstacles. These obstacles, such as agent vehicles, often exhibit stochastic transitions that should be accounted for in a timely and safe manner. The Constrained Stochastic Shortest Path problem (C-SSP) is a formalism for planning in stochastic environments under certain types of operating constraints. While C-SSP allows specifying constraints in the planning problem, it does not allow for bounding the probability of constraint violation, which is desired in safety-critical applications. This work's first contribution is an exact integer linear programming formulation for Chance-constrained SSP (CC-SSP) that attains deterministic policies. Second, a randomized rounding procedure is presented for stochastic policies. Third, we show that the CC-SSP formalism can be generalized to account for constraints that span through multiple time steps. Evaluation results show the usefulness of our approach in benchmark problems compared to existing approaches.

Due to the sweeping digitalization of processes, increasingly vast amounts of time series data are being produced. Accurate classification of such time series facilitates decision making in multiple domains. State-of-the-art classification accuracy is often achieved by ensemble learning where results are synthesized from multiple base models. This characteristic implies that ensemble learning needs substantial computing resources, preventing their use in resource-limited environments, such as in edge devices. To extend the applicability of ensemble learning, we propose the LightTS framework that compresses large ensembles into lightweight models while ensuring competitive accuracy. First, we propose adaptive ensemble distillation that assigns adaptive weights to different base models such that their varying classification capabilities contribute purposefully to the training of the lightweight model. Second, we propose means of identifying Pareto optimal settings w.r.t. model accuracy and model size, thus enabling users with a space budget to select the most accurate lightweight model. We report on experiments using 128 real-world time series sets and different types of base models that justify key decisions in the design of LightTS and provide evidence that LightTS is able to outperform competitors.

This paper introduces a general framework for iterative optimization algorithms and establishes under general assumptions that their convergence is asymptotically geometric. We also prove that under appropriate assumptions, the rate of convergence can be lower bounded. The convergence is then only geometric, and we provide the exact asymptotic convergence rate. This framework allows to deal with constrained optimization and encompasses the Expectation Maximization algorithm and the mirror descent algorithm, as well as some variants such as the alpha-Expectation Maximization or the Mirror Prox algorithm.Furthermore, we establish sufficient conditions for the convergence of the Mirror Prox algorithm, under which the method converges systematically to the unique minimizer of a convex function on a convex compact set.

Federated edge learning is a promising technology to deploy intelligence at the edge of wireless networks in a privacy-preserving manner. Under such a setting, multiple clients collaboratively train a global generic model under the coordination of an edge server. But the training efficiency is often throttled by challenges arising from limited communication and data heterogeneity. This paper presents a distributed training paradigm that employs analog over-the-air computation to address the communication bottleneck. Additionally, we leverage a bi-level optimization framework to personalize the federated learning model so as to cope with the data heterogeneity issue. As a result, it enhances the generalization and robustness of each client's local model. We elaborate on the model training procedure and its advantages over conventional frameworks. We provide a convergence analysis that theoretically demonstrates the training efficiency. We also conduct extensive experiments to validate the efficacy of the proposed framework.

In real-world decision-making, uncertainty is important yet difficult to handle. Stochastic dominance provides a theoretically sound approach for comparing uncertain quantities, but optimization with stochastic dominance constraints is often computationally expensive, which limits practical applicability. In this paper, we develop a simple yet efficient approach for the problem, the Light Stochastic Dominance Solver (light-SD), that leverages useful properties of the Lagrangian. We recast the inner optimization in the Lagrangian as a learning problem for surrogate approximation, which bypasses apparent intractability and leads to tractable updates or even closed-form solutions for gradient calculations. We prove convergence of the algorithm and test it empirically. The proposed light-SD demonstrates superior performance on several representative problems ranging from finance to supply chain management.

As people pay more and more attention to privacy protection, Federated Learning (FL), as a promising distributed machine learning paradigm, is receiving more and more attention. However, due to the biased distribution of data on devices in real life, federated learning has lower classification accuracy than traditional machine learning in Non-IID scenarios. Although there are many optimization algorithms, the local model aggregation in the parameter server is still relatively traditional. In this paper, a new algorithm FedPDC is proposed to optimize the aggregation mode of local models and the loss function of local training by using the shared data sets in some industries. In many benchmark experiments, FedPDC can effectively improve the accuracy of the global model in the case of extremely unbalanced data distribution, while ensuring the privacy of the client data. At the same time, the accuracy improvement of FedPDC does not bring additional communication costs.

We define "robotic contact juggling" to be the purposeful control of the motion of a three-dimensional smooth object as it rolls freely on a motion-controlled robot manipulator, or "hand." While specific examples of robotic contact juggling have been studied before, in this paper we provide the first general formulation and solution method for the case of an arbitrary smooth object in single-point rolling contact on an arbitrary smooth hand. Our formulation splits the problem into four subproblems: (1) deriving the second-order rolling kinematics; (2) deriving the three-dimensional rolling dynamics; (3) planning rolling motions that satisfy the rolling dynamics; and (4) feedback stabilization of planned rolling trajectories. The theoretical results are demonstrated in simulation and experiment using feedback from a high-speed vision system.

Runtime energy management has become quintessential for multi-sensor autonomous systems at the edge for achieving high performance given the platform constraints. Typical for such systems, however, is to have their controllers designed with formal guarantees on safety that precede in priority such optimizations, which in turn limits their application in real settings. In this paper, we propose a novel energy optimization framework that is aware of the autonomous system's safety state, and leverages it to regulate the application of energy optimization methods so that the system's formal safety properties are preserved. In particular, through the formal characterization of a system's safety state as a dynamic processing deadline, the computing workloads of the underlying models can be adapted accordingly. For our experiments, we model two popular runtime energy optimization methods, offloading and gating, and simulate an autonomous driving system (ADS) use-case in the CARLA simulation environment with performance characterizations obtained from the standard Nvidia Drive PX2 ADS platform. Our results demonstrate that through a formal awareness of the perceived risks in the test case scenario, energy efficiency gains are still achieved (reaching 89.9%) while maintaining the desired safety properties.

In sponsored search advertising (SSA), keywords serve as the basic unit of business model, linking three stakeholders: consumers, advertisers and search engines. This paper presents an overarching framework for keyword decisions that highlights the touchpoints in search advertising management, including four levels of keyword decisions, i.e., domain-specific keyword pool generation, keyword targeting, keyword assignment and grouping, and keyword adjustment. Using this framework, we review the state-of-the-art research literature on keyword decisions with respect to techniques, input features and evaluation metrics. Finally, we discuss evolving issues and identify potential gaps that exist in the literature and outline novel research perspectives for future exploration.

Developing large-scale distributed methods that are robust to the presence of adversarial or corrupted workers is an important part of making such methods practical for real-world problems. In this paper, we propose an iterative approach that is adversary-tolerant for convex optimization problems. By leveraging simple statistics, our method ensures convergence and is capable of adapting to adversarial distributions. Additionally, the efficiency of the proposed methods for solving convex problems is shown in simulations with the presence of adversaries. Through simulations, we demonstrate the efficiency of our approach in the presence of adversaries and its ability to identify adversarial workers with high accuracy and tolerate varying levels of adversary rates.