Dynamic resource management has become one of the major areas of research in modern computer and communication system design due to lower power consumption and higher performance demands. The number of integrated cores, level of heterogeneity and amount of control knobs increase steadily. As a result, the system complexity is increasing faster than our ability to optimize and dynamically manage the resources. Moreover, offline approaches are sub-optimal due to workload variations and large volume of new applications unknown at design time. This paper first reviews recent online learning techniques for predicting system performance, power, and temperature. Then, we describe the use of predictive models for online control using two modern approaches: imitation learning (IL) and an explicit nonlinear model predictive control (NMPC). Evaluations on a commercial mobile platform with 16 benchmarks show that the IL approach successfully adapts the control policy to unknown applications. The explicit NMPC provides 25% energy savings compared to a state-of-the-art algorithm for multi-variable power management of modern GPU sub-systems.

Swarm Intelligence-based optimization techniques combine systematic exploration of the search space with information available from neighbors and rely strongly on communication among agents. These algorithms are typically employed to solve problems where the function landscape is not adequately known and there are multiple local optima that could result in premature convergence for other algorithms. Applications of such algorithms can be found in communication systems involving design of networks for efficient information dissemination to a target group, targeted drug-delivery where drug molecules search for the affected site before diffusing, and high-value target localization with a network of drones. In several of such applications, the agents face a hostile environment that can result in loss of agents during the search. Such a loss changes the communication topology of the agents and hence the information available to agents, ultimately influencing the performance of the algorithm. In this paper, we present a study of the impact of loss of agents on the performance of such algorithms as a function of the initial network configuration. We use particle swarm optimization to optimize an objective function with multiple sub-optimal regions in a hostile environment and study its performance for a range of network topologies with loss of agents. The results reveal interesting trade-offs between efficiency, robustness, and performance for different topologies that are subsequently leveraged to discover general properties of networks that maximize performance. Moreover, networks with small-world properties are seen to maximize performance under hostile conditions.

We study an urban bike lane planning problem based on the fine-grained bike trajectory data, which is made available by smart city infrastructure such as bike-sharing systems. The key decision is where to build bike lanes in the existing road network. As bike-sharing systems become widespread in the metropolitan areas over the world, bike lanes are being planned and constructed by many municipal governments to promote cycling and protect cyclists. Traditional bike lane planning approaches often rely on surveys and heuristics. We develop a general and novel optimization framework to guide the bike lane planning from bike trajectories. We formalize the bike lane planning problem in view of the cyclists' utility functions and derive an integer optimization model to maximize the utility. To capture cyclists' route choices, we develop a bilevel program based on the Multinomial Logit model. We derive structural properties about the base model and prove that the Lagrangian dual of the bike lane planning model is polynomial-time solvable. Furthermore, we reformulate the route choice based planning model as a mixed integer linear program using a linear approximation scheme. We develop tractable formulations and efficient algorithms to solve the large-scale optimization problem. Via a real-world case study with a city government, we demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed algorithms and quantify the trade-off between the coverage of bike trips and continuity of bike lanes. We show how the network topology evolves according to the utility functions and highlight the importance of understanding cyclists' route choices. The proposed framework drives the data-driven urban planning scheme in smart city operations management.

The ability to prepare non-classical states in a robust manner is essential for quantum sensors beyond the standard quantum limit. We demonstrate that Bayesian optimal control is capable of finding control pulses that drive trapped Rydberg atoms into highly entangled GHZ states. The control sequences have a physically intuitive functionality based on the quasi-integrability of the Ising dynamics. They can be constructed in laboratory experiments resulting in preparation times that scale very favourably with the system size.

Learning algorithms trained on large amounts of data are increasingly adopted in applications with significant individual and social consequences such as selecting loan applicants, filtering resumes of job applicants, estimating the likelihood for a defendant to commit future crimes, or deciding where to deploy police officers. Analyzing the risk of bias in these systems is therefore crucial. In fact, that is also critical for seemingly less socially consequential applications such as ads placement, recommendation systems, speech recognition, and many other common applications of machine learning. Such biases can appear due to the way the training data has been collected, due to an improper choice of the loss function optimized, or as a result of some other algorithmic choices.

Group synchronization asks to recover group elements from their pairwise measurements. It has found numerous applications across various scientific disciplines. In this work, we focus on orthogonal and permutation group synchronization which are widely used in computer vision such as object matching and Structure from Motion. Among many available approaches, spectral methods have enjoyed great popularity due to its efficiency and convenience. We will study the performance guarantees of spectral methods in solving these two synchronization problems by investigating how well the computed eigenvectors approximate each group element individually. We establish our theory by applying the recent popular~\emph{leave-one-out} technique and derive a~\emph{block-wise} performance bound for the recovery of each group element via eigenvectors. In particular, for orthogonal group synchronization, we obtain a near-optimal performance bound for the group recovery in presence of Gaussian noise. For permutation group synchronization under random corruption, we show that the widely-used two-step procedure (spectral method plus rounding) can recover all the group elements exactly if the SNR (signal-to-noise ratio) is close to the information theoretical limit. Our numerical experiments confirm our theory and indicate a sharp phase transition for the exact group recovery.

Machine learning algorithms have been used widely in various applications and areas. To fit a machine learning model into different problems, its hyper-parameters must be tuned. Selecting the best hyper-parameter configuration for machine learning models has a direct impact on the model's performance. It often requires deep knowledge of machine learning algorithms and appropriate hyper-parameter optimization techniques. Although several automatic optimization techniques exist, they have different strengths and drawbacks when applied to different types of problems.

For e-commerce platforms such as Taobao and Amazon, advertisers play an important role in the entire digital ecosystem: their behaviors explicitly influence users' browsing and shopping experience; more importantly, advertiser's expenditure on advertising constitutes a primary source of platform revenue. Therefore, providing better services for advertisers is essential for the long-term prosperity for e-commerce platforms. To achieve this goal, the ad platform needs to have an in-depth understanding of advertisers in terms of both their marketing intents and satisfaction over the advertising performance, based on which further optimization could be carried out to service the advertisers in the correct direction. In this paper, we propose a novel Deep Satisfaction Prediction Network (DSPN), which models advertiser intent and satisfaction simultaneously. It employs a two-stage network structure where advertiser intent vector and satisfaction are jointly learned by considering the features of advertiser's action information and advertising performance indicators. Experiments on an Alibaba advertisement dataset and online evaluations show that our proposed DSPN outperforms state-of-the-art baselines and has stable performance in terms of AUC in the online environment. Further analyses show that DSPN not only predicts advertisers' satisfaction accurately but also learns an explainable advertiser intent, revealing the opportunities to optimize the advertising performance further.

We introduce a new sequential subspace optimization method for large-scale saddle-point problems. It solves iteratively a sequence of auxiliary saddle-point problems in low-dimensional subspaces, spanned by directions derived from first-order information over the primal \emph{and} dual variables. Proximal regularization is further deployed to stabilize the optimization process. Experimental results demonstrate significantly better convergence relative to popular first-order methods. We analyze the influence of the subspace on the convergence of the algorithm, and assess its performance in various deterministic optimization scenarios, such as bi-linear games, ADMM-based constrained optimization and generative adversarial networks.

Multi-category support vector machine (MC-SVM) is one of the most popular machine learning algorithms. There are lots of variants of MC-SVM, although different optimization algorithms were developed for different learning machines. In this study, we developed a new optimization algorithm that can be applied to many of MC-SVM variants. The algorithm is based on the Frank-Wolfe framework that requires two subproblems, direction finding and line search, in each iteration. The contribution of this study is the discovery that both subproblems have a closed form solution if the Frank-Wolfe framework is applied to the dual problem. Additionally, the closed form solutions on both for the direction finding and for the line search exist even for the Moreau envelopes of the loss functions. We use several large datasets to demonstrate that the proposed optimization algorithm converges rapidly and thereby improves the pattern recognition performance.