Data-driven decision making is becoming an integral part of manufacturing companies. Data is collected and commonly used to improve efficiency and produce high quality items for the customers. IoT-based and other forms of object tracking are an emerging tool for collecting movement data of objects/entities (e.g. human workers, moving vehicles, trolleys etc.) over space and time. Movement data can provide valuable insights like process bottlenecks, resource utilization, effective working time etc. that can be used for decision making and improving efficiency. Turning movement data into valuable information for industrial management and decision making requires analysis methods. We refer to this process as movement analytics. The purpose of this document is to review the current state of work for movement analytics both in manufacturing and more broadly. We survey relevant work from both a theoretical perspective and an application perspective. From the theoretical perspective, we put an emphasis on useful methods from two research areas: machine learning, and logic-based knowledge representation. We also review their combinations in view of movement analytics, and we discuss promising areas for future development and application. Furthermore, we touch on constraint optimization. From an application perspective, we review applications of these methods to movement analytics in a general sense and across various industries. We also describe currently available commercial off-the-shelf products for tracking in manufacturing, and we overview main concepts of digital twins and their applications.

Multi-label classification, which predicts a set of labels for an input, has many applications. However, multiple recent studies showed that multi-label classification is vulnerable to adversarial examples. In particular, an attacker can manipulate the labels predicted by a multi-label classifier for an input via adding carefully crafted, human-imperceptible perturbation to it. Existing provable defenses for multi-class classification achieve sub-optimal provable robustness guarantees when generalized to multi-label classification. In this work, we propose MultiGuard, the first provably robust defense against adversarial examples to multi-label classification. Our MultiGuard leverages randomized smoothing, which is the state-of-the-art technique to build provably robust classifiers. Specifically, given an arbitrary multi-label classifier, our MultiGuard builds a smoothed multi-label classifier via adding random noise to the input. We consider isotropic Gaussian noise in this work. Our major theoretical contribution is that we show a certain number of ground truth labels of an input are provably in the set of labels predicted by our MultiGuard when the $\ell_2$-norm of the adversarial perturbation added to the input is bounded. Moreover, we design an algorithm to compute our provable robustness guarantees. Empirically, we evaluate our MultiGuard on VOC 2007, MS-COCO, and NUS-WIDE benchmark datasets. Our code is available at: \url{https://github.com/quwenjie/MultiGuard}

As a prevalent distributed learning paradigm, Federated Learning (FL) trains a global model on a massive amount of devices with infrequent communication. This paper investigates a class of composite optimization and statistical recovery problems in the FL setting, whose loss function consists of a data-dependent smooth loss and a non-smooth regularizer. Examples include sparse linear regression using Lasso, low-rank matrix recovery using nuclear norm regularization, etc. In the existing literature, federated composite optimization algorithms are designed only from an optimization perspective without any statistical guarantees. In addition, they do not consider commonly used (restricted) strong convexity in statistical recovery problems. We advance the frontiers of this problem from both optimization and statistical perspectives. From optimization upfront, we propose a new algorithm named \textit{Fast Federated Dual Averaging} for strongly convex and smooth loss and establish state-of-the-art iteration and communication complexity in the composite setting. In particular, we prove that it enjoys a fast rate, linear speedup, and reduced communication rounds. From statistical upfront, for restricted strongly convex and smooth loss, we design another algorithm, namely \textit{Multi-stage Federated Dual Averaging}, and prove a high probability complexity bound with linear speedup up to optimal statistical precision. Experiments in both synthetic and real data demonstrate that our methods perform better than other baselines. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work providing fast optimization algorithms and statistical recovery guarantees for composite problems in FL.

Humans and other animals are capable of improving their learning performance as they solve related tasks from a given problem domain, to the point of being able to learn from extremely limited data. While synaptic plasticity is generically thought to underlie learning in the brain, the precise neural and synaptic mechanisms by which learning processes improve through experience are not well understood. Here, we present a general-purpose, biologically-plausible meta-learning rule which estimates gradients with respect to the parameters of an underlying learning algorithm by simply running it twice. Our rule may be understood as a generalization of contrastive Hebbian learning to meta-learning and notably, it neither requires computing second derivatives nor going backwards in time, two characteristic features of previous gradient-based methods that are hard to conceive in physical neural circuits. We demonstrate the generality of our rule by applying it to two distinct models: a complex synapse with internal states which consolidate task-shared information, and a dual-system architecture in which a primary network is rapidly modulated by another one to learn the specifics of each task. For both models, our meta-learning rule matches or outperforms reference algorithms on a wide range of benchmark problems, while only using information presumed to be locally available at neurons and synapses. We corroborate these findings with a theoretical analysis of the gradient estimation error incurred by our rule.

We study a type of Online Linear Programming (OLP) problem that maximizes the objective function with stochastic inputs. The performance of various algorithms that analyze this type of OLP is well studied when the stochastic inputs follow some i.i.d distribution. The two central questions to ask are: (i) can the algorithms achieve the same efficiency if the stochastic inputs are not i.i.d but still stationary, and (ii) how can we modify our algorithms if we know the stochastic inputs are trendy, hence not stationary. We answer the first question by analyzing a regenerative type of input and show the regrets of two popular algorithms are bounded by the same orders as their i.i.d counterparts. We discuss the second question in the context of linearly growing inputs and propose a trend-adaptive algorithm. We provide numerical simulations to illustrate the performance of our algorithms under both regenerative and trendy inputs.

We develop a novel formulation of the Performance Estimation Problem (PEP) for decentralized optimization whose size is independent of the number of agents in the network. The PEP approach allows computing automatically the worst-case performance and worst-case instance of first-order optimization methods by solving an SDP. Unlike previous work, the size of our new PEP formulation is independent of the network size. For this purpose, we take a global view of the decentralized problem and we also decouple the consensus subspace and its orthogonal complement. We apply our methodology to different decentralized methods such as DGD, DIGing and EXTRA and obtain numerically tight performance guarantees that are valid for any network size.

Graph coarsening is a widely used dimensionality reduction technique for approaching large-scale graph machine learning problems. Given a large graph, graph coarsening aims to learn a smaller-tractable graph while preserving the properties of the originally given graph. Graph data consist of node features and graph matrix (e.g., adjacency and Laplacian). The existing graph coarsening methods ignore the node features and rely solely on a graph matrix to simplify graphs. In this paper, we introduce a novel optimization-based framework for graph dimensionality reduction. The proposed framework lies in the unification of graph learning and dimensionality reduction. It takes both the graph matrix and the node features as the input and learns the coarsen graph matrix and the coarsen feature matrix jointly while ensuring desired properties. The proposed optimization formulation is a multi-block non-convex optimization problem, which is solved efficiently by leveraging block majorization-minimization, $\log$ determinant, Dirichlet energy, and regularization frameworks. The proposed algorithms are provably convergent and practically amenable to numerous tasks. It is also established that the learned coarsened graph is $\epsilon\in(0,1)$ similar to the original graph. Extensive experiments elucidate the efficacy of the proposed framework for real-world applications.

Stochastic convex optimization is a well-studied area with numerous applications in algorithms, machine learning, and beyond. Various algorithms have been shown to converge for many classes of functions including Lipschitz functions, smooth functions, and their linear combinations. However, one curious gap remains in the understanding of their convergence with high probability compared with convergence in expectation. Classical results show that in expectation, the function value gap of the final solution is proportional to the distance between the original solution and the optimal solution. On the other hand, classical results for convergence with high probability could only show that the function value gap of the final solution is proportional to the diameter of the domain, which could be much larger or even unbounded.

In Bayesian optimization (BO) for expensive black-box optimization tasks, acquisition function (AF) guides sequential sampling and plays a pivotal role for efficient convergence to better optima. Prevailing AFs usually rely on artificial experiences in terms of preferences for exploration or exploitation, which runs a risk of a computational waste or traps in local optima and resultant re-optimization. To address the crux, the idea of data-driven AF selection is proposed, and the sequential AF selection task is further formalized as a Markov decision process (MDP) and resort to powerful reinforcement learning (RL) technologies. Appropriate selection policy for AFs is learned from superior BO trajectories to balance between exploration and exploitation in real time, which is called reinforcement-learning-assisted Bayesian optimization (RLABO). Competitive and robust BO evaluations on five benchmark problems demonstrate RL's recognition of the implicit AF selection pattern and imply the proposal's potential practicality for intelligent AF selection as well as efficient optimization in expensive black-box problems.

When solving a real-world optimization problem we often have no information about the analytic form of the objective function. Evaluation of such black-box functions is frequently expensive in terms of time and money (Baerns and Holeňa, 2009; Lee et al., 2016; Zaefferer et al., 2016), which has been for two decades the driving force of research into surrogate modeling of black-box objective functions (Büche et al., 2005; Forrester and Keane, 2009; Jin, 2011). Given a set of observations, a surrogate model can be fitted to approximate the landscape of the black-box function. The Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy (CMA-ES) by Hansen (2006), which we consider the state-of-the-art evolutionary black-box optimizer, has been frequently combined with surrogate models.