Getting the software right is important when developing machine learning models, such as recommendation or classification systems. But at eBay, optimizing the software to run on a particular piece of hardware using distillation and quantization techniques was absolutely essential to ensure scalability. "[I]n order to build a truly global marketplace that is driven by state of the art and powerful and scalable AI services," Kopru said, "you have to do a lot of optimizations after model training, and specifically for the target hardware." With 1.5 billion active listings from more than 19 million active sellers trying to reach 159 million active buyers, the ecommerce giant has a global reach that is matched by only a handful of firms. Machine learning and other AI techniques, such as natural language processing (NLP), play big roles in scaling eBay's operations to reach its massive audience. For instance, automatically generated descriptions of product listings is crucial for displaying information on the small screens of smart phones, Kopru said.

Interest in applying Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques to compiler optimizations is increasing rapidly, but compiler research has a high entry barrier. Unlike in other domains, compiler and AI researchers do not have access to the datasets and frameworks that enable fast iteration and development of ideas, and getting started requires a significant engineering investment. What is needed is an easy, reusable experimental infrastructure for real world compiler optimization tasks that can serve as a common benchmark for comparing techniques, and as a platform to accelerate progress in the field. We introduce CompilerGym, a set of environments for real world compiler optimization tasks, and a toolkit for exposing new optimization tasks to compiler researchers. CompilerGym enables anyone to experiment on production compiler optimization problems through an easy-to-use package, regardless of their experience with compilers. We build upon the popular OpenAI Gym interface enabling researchers to interact with compilers using Python and a familiar API. We describe the CompilerGym architecture and implementation, characterize the optimization spaces and computational efficiencies of three included compiler environments, and provide extensive empirical evaluations. Compared to prior works, CompilerGym offers larger datasets and optimization spaces, is 27x more computationally efficient, is fault-tolerant, and capable of detecting reproducibility bugs in the underlying compilers. In making it easy for anyone to experiment with compilers - irrespective of their background - we aim to accelerate progress in the AI and compiler research domains.

In this paper, we develop a distributionally robust chance-constrained formulation of the Optimal Power Flow problem (OPF) whereby the system operator can leverage contextual information. For this purpose, we exploit an ambiguity set based on probability trimmings and optimal transport through which the dispatch solution is protected against the incomplete knowledge of the relationship between the OPF uncertainties and the context that is conveyed by a sample of their joint probability distribution. We provide an exact reformulation of the proposed distributionally robust chance-constrained OPF problem under the popular conditional-value-at-risk approximation. By way of numerical experiments run on a modified IEEE-118 bus network with wind uncertainty, we show how the power system can substantially benefit from taking into account the well-known statistical dependence between the point forecast of wind power outputs and its associated prediction error. Furthermore, the experiments conducted also reveal that the distributional robustness conferred on the OPF solution by our probability-trimmings-based approach is superior to that bestowed by alternative approaches in terms of expected cost and system reliability.

Cloud networks are difficult to monitor because they grow rapidly and the budgets for monitoring them are limited. We propose a framework for estimating network metrics, such as latency and packet loss, with guarantees on estimation errors for a fixed monitoring budget. Our proposed algorithms produce a distribution of probes across network paths, which we then monitor; and are based on A- and E-optimal experimental designs in statistics. Unfortunately, these designs are too computationally costly to use at production scale. We propose their scalable and near-optimal approximations based on the Frank-Wolfe algorithm. We validate our approaches in simulation on real network topologies, and also using a production probing system in a real cloud network. We show major gains in reducing the probing budget compared to both production and academic baselines, while maintaining low estimation errors, even with very low probing budgets.

We propose a new computationally-efficient first-order algorithm for Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning (MAML). The key enabling technique is to interpret MAML as a bilevel optimization (BLO) problem and leverage the sign-based SGD(signSGD) as a lower-level optimizer of BLO. We show that MAML, through the lens of signSGD-oriented BLO, naturally yields an alternating optimization scheme that just requires first-order gradients of a learned meta-model. We term the resulting MAML algorithm Sign-MAML. Compared to the conventional first-order MAML (FO-MAML) algorithm, Sign-MAML is theoretically-grounded as it does not impose any assumption on the absence of second-order derivatives during meta training. In practice, we show that Sign-MAML outperforms FO-MAML in various few-shot image classification tasks, and compared to MAML, it achieves a much more graceful tradeoff between classification accuracy and computation efficiency.

Building surrogate models is one common approach when we attempt to learn unknown black-box functions. Bayesian optimization provides a framework which allows us to build surrogate models based on sequential samples drawn from the function and find the optimum. Tuning algorithmic parameters to optimize the performance of large, complicated "black-box" application codes is a specific important application, which aims at finding the optima of black-box functions. Within the Bayesian optimization framework, the Gaussian process model produces smooth or continuous sample paths. However, the black-box function in the tuning problem is often non-smooth. This difficult tuning problem is worsened by the fact that we usually have limited sequential samples from the black-box function. Motivated by these issues encountered in tuning, we propose a novel additive Gaussian process model called clustered Gaussian process (cGP), where the additive components are induced by clustering. In the examples we studied, the performance can be improved by as much as 90% among repetitive experiments. By using this surrogate model, we want to capture the non-smoothness of the black-box function. In addition to an algorithm for constructing this model, we also apply the model to several artificial and real applications to evaluate it.

Getting the software right is important when developing machine learning models, such as recommendation or classification systems. But at eBay, optimizing the software to run on a particular piece of hardware using distillation and quantization techniques was absolutely essential to ensure scalability. "[I]n order to build a truly global marketplace that is driven by state of the art and powerful and scalable AI services," Kopru said, "you have to do a lot of optimizations after model training, and specifically for the target hardware." With 1.5 billion active listings from more than 19 million active sellers trying to reach 159 million active buyers, the ecommerce giant has a global reach that is matched by only a handful of firms. Machine learning and other AI techniques, such as natural language processing (NLP), play big roles in scaling eBay's operations to reach its massive audience. For instance, automatically generated descriptions of product listings is crucial for displaying information on the small screens of smart phones, Kopru said.

This paper explores techniques to quickly solve the maximum weight clique problem (MWCP) in very large scale sparse graphs. Due to their size, and the hardness of MWCP, it is infeasible to solve many of these graphs with exact algorithms. Although recent heuristic algorithms make progress in solving MWCP in large graphs, they still need considerable time to get a high-quality solution. In this work, we focus on solving MWCP for large sparse graphs within a short time limit. We propose a new method for MWCP which interleaves clique finding with data reduction rules. We propose novel ideas to make this process efficient, and develop an algorithm called FastWClq. Experiments on a broad range of large sparse graphs show that FastWClq finds better solutions than state-of-the-art algorithms while the running time of FastWClq is much shorter than the competitors for most instances. Further, FastWClq proves the optimality of its solutions for roughly half of the graphs, all with at least 105 vertices, with an average time of 21 seconds.

We study the design of autonomous agents that are capable of deceiving outside observers about their intentions while carrying out tasks in stochastic, complex environments. By modeling the agent's behavior as a Markov decision process, we consider a setting where the agent aims to reach one of multiple potential goals while deceiving outside observers about its true goal. We propose a novel approach to model observer predictions based on the principle of maximum entropy and to efficiently generate deceptive strategies via linear programming. The proposed approach enables the agent to exhibit a variety of tunable deceptive behaviors while ensuring the satisfaction of probabilistic constraints on the behavior. We evaluate the performance of the proposed approach via comparative user studies and present a case study on the streets of Manhattan, New York, using real travel time distributions.

Cross-lingual entity alignment (EA) aims to find the equivalent entities between crosslingual KGs, which is a crucial step for integrating KGs. Recently, many GNN-based EA methods are proposed and show decent performance improvements on several public datasets. Meanwhile, existing GNN-based EA methods inevitably inherit poor interpretability and low efficiency from neural networks. Motivated by the isomorphic assumption of GNNbased methods, we successfully transform the cross-lingual EA problem into the assignment problem. Based on this finding, we propose a frustratingly Simple but Effective Unsupervised entity alignment method (SEU) without neural networks. Extensive experiments show that our proposed unsupervised method even beats advanced supervised methods across all public datasets and has high efficiency, interpretability, and stability.