Railway is regarded as the most sustainable means of modern transportation. With the fast-growing of fleet size and the railway mileage, the energy consumption of trains is becoming a serious concern globally. The nature of railway offers a unique opportunity to optimize the energy efficiency of locomotives by taking advantage of the undulating terrains along a route. The derivation of an energy-optimal train driving solution, however, proves to be a significant challenge due to the high dimension, nonlinearity, complex constraints, and time-varying characteristic of the problem. An optimized solution can only be attained by considering both the complex environmental conditions of a given route and the inherent characteristics of a locomotive. To tackle the problem, this paper employs a high-order correlation learning method for online generation of the energy optimized train driving solutions. Based on the driving data of experienced human drivers, a hypergraph model is used to learn the optimal embedding from the specified features for the decision of a driving operation. First, we design a feature set capturing the driving status. Next all the training data are formulated as a hypergraph and an inductive learning process is conducted to obtain the embedding matrix. The hypergraph model can be used for real-time generation of driving operation. We also proposed a reinforcement updating scheme, which offers the capability of sustainable enhancement on the hypergraph model in industrial applications. The learned model can be used to determine an optimized driving operation in real-time tested on the Hardware-in-Loop platform. Validation experiments proved that the energy consumption of the proposed solution is around 10% lower than that of average human drivers.

Causal discovery without intervention is well recognized as a challenging yet powerful data analysis tool, boosting the development of other scientific areas, such as biology, astronomy, and social science. The major technical difficulty behind the observation-based causal discovery is to effectively and efficiently identify causes and effects from correlated variables given the existence of significant noises. Previous studies mostly employ two very different methodologies under Bayesian network framework, namely global likelihood maximization and locally complexity analysis over marginal distributions. While these approaches are effective in their respective problem domains, in this paper, we show that they can be combined to formulate a new global optimization model with local statistical significance, called structural equational likelihood framework (or SELF in short). We provide thorough analysis on the soundness of the model under mild conditions and present efficient heuristic-based algorithms for scalable model training. Empirical evaluations using XGBoost validate the superiority of our proposal over state-of-the-art solutions, on both synthetic and real world causal structures.

A classifier’s low confidence in prediction is often indicative of whether its prediction will be wrong; in this case, inputs are called known unknowns. In contrast, unknown unknowns (UUs) are inputs on which a classifier makes a high confidence mistake. Identifying UUs is especially important in safety-critical domains like medicine (diagnosis) and law (recidivism prediction). Previous work by Lakkaraju et al. (2017) on identifying unknown unknowns assumes that the utility of each revealed UU is independent of the others, rather than considering the set holistically. While this assumption yields an efficient discovery algorithm, we argue that it produces an incomplete understanding of the classifier’s limitations. In response, this paper proposes a new class of utility models that rewards how well the discovered UUs cover (or "explain") a sample distribution of expected queries. Although choosing an optimal cover is intractable, even if the UUs were known, our utility model is monotone submodular, affording a greedy discovery strategy. Experimental results on four datasets show that our method outperforms bandit-based approaches and achieves within 60.9% utility of an omniscient, tractable upper bound.

In network analysis, community detection and network embedding are two important topics. Community detection tends to obtain the most noticeable partition, while network embedding aims at seeking node representations which contains as many diverse properties as possible. We observe that the current community detection and network embedding problems are being resolved by a general solution, i.e., "maximizing the consistency between similar nodes while maximizing the distance between the dissimilar nodes." This general solution only exploits the most noticeable structure (facet) of the network, which effectively satisfies the demands of the community detection. Unfortunately, most of the specific embedding algorithms, which are developed from the general solution, cannot achieve the goal of network embedding by exploring only one facet of the network. To improve the general solution for better modeling the real network, we propose a novel network embedding method, Multi-facet Network Embedding (MNE), to capture the multiple facets of the network. MNE learns multiple embeddings simultaneously, with the Hilbert Schmidt Independence Criterion (HSIC) being the a diversity constraint. To efficiently solve the optimization problem, we propose a Binary HSIC with linear complexity and solve the MNE objective function by adopting the Augmented Lagrange Multiplier (ALM) method. The overall complexity is linear with the scale of the network. Extensive results demonstrate that MNE gives efficient performances and outperforms the state-of-the-art network embedding methods.

Many real-life problems require optimizing functions with expensive evaluations. Bayesian Optimization (BO) and Search-based Optimization (SO) are two broad families of algorithms that try to find the global optima of a function with the goal of minimizing the number of function evaluations. A large body of existing work deals with the single-fidelity setting, where function evaluations are very expensive but accurate. However, in many applications, we have access to multiple-fidelity functions that vary in their cost and accuracy of evaluation. In this paper, we propose a novel approach called Multi-fidelity Hybrid (MF-Hybrid) that combines the best attributes of both BO and SO methods to discover the global optima of a black-box function with minimal cost. Our experiments on multiple benchmark functions show that the MF-Hybrid algorithm outperforms existing single-fidelity and multi-fidelity optimization algorithms.

Numerous urban planners advocate for differentiated transit pricing to improve both ridership and service equity. Several metropolitan cities are considering switching to a more "fair fare system," where passengers pay according to the distance travelled, rather than a flat fare or zone boundary scheme that discriminates against various marginalized groups. In this paper, we present a two-part optimal pricing formula for switching to distance-based transit fares: the first formula maximizes forecasted revenue given a target ridership, and the second formula maximizes forecasted ridership given a target revenue. Both formulas hold for all price elasticities. Our theory has been successfully tested on the SkyTrain mass transit network in Metro Vancouver, British Columbia, with over 400,000 daily passengers. This research has served Metro Vancouver's transportation authority as they consider changing their fare structure for the first time in over 30 years.

Over the years, government service provision in China has been plagued by inefficiencies. Previous attempts to address this challenge following a toolbox e-government system model in China were not effective. In this paper, we report on a successful experience in improving government service provision in the domain of social insurance in Shandong Province, China. Through standardization of service workflows following the Complete Contract Theory (CCT) and the infusion of an artificial intelligence (AI) engine to maximize the expected quality of service while reducing waiting time, the Smart Human-resource Services (SmartHS) platform transcends organizational boundaries and improves system efficiency. Deployments in 3 cities involving 2,000 participating civil servants and close to 3 million social insurance service cases over a 1 year period demonstrated that SmartHS significantly improves user experience with roughly a third of the original front desk staff. This new AI-enhanced mode of operation is useful for informing current policy discussions in many domains of government service provision.

Recently, saliency detection in a single image and co-saliency detection in multiple images have drawn extensive research interest in the vision community. In this paper, we investigate a new problem of co-saliency detection within a single image, i.e., detecting within-image co-saliency. By identifying common saliency within an image, e.g., highlighting multiple occurrences of an object class with similar appearance, this work can benefit many important applications, such as the detection of objects of interest, more robust object recognition, reduction of information redundancy, and animation synthesis. We propose a new bottom-up method to address this problem. Specifically, a large number of object proposals are first detected from the image. Then we develop an optimization algorithm to derive a set of proposal groups, each of which contains multiple proposals showing good common saliency in the original image. For each proposal group, we calculate a co-saliency map and then use a low-rank based algorithm to fuse the maps calculated from all the proposal groups for the final co-saliency map in the image. In the experiment, we collect a new dataset of 364 color images with within-image cosaliency. Experiment results show that the proposed method can better detect the within-image co-saliency than existing algorithms.

Person re-identification is widely studied in visible spectrum, where all the person images are captured by visible cameras. However, visible cameras may not capture valid appearance information under poor illumination conditions, e.g, at night. In this case, thermal camera is superior since it is less dependent on the lighting by using infrared light to capture the human body. To this end, this paper investigates a cross-modal re-identification problem, namely visible-thermal person re-identification (VT-REID). Existing cross-modal matching methods mainly focus on modeling the cross-modality discrepancy, while VT-REID also suffers from cross-view variations caused by different camera views. Therefore, we propose a hierarchical cross-modality matching model by jointly optimizing the modality-specific and modality-shared metrics. The modality-specific metrics transform two heterogenous modalities into a consistent space that modality-shared metric can be subsequently learnt. Meanwhile, the modality-specific metric compacts features of the same person within each modality to handle the large intra-modality intra-person variations (e.g. viewpoints, pose). Additionally, an improved two-stream CNN network is presented to learn the multi-modality sharable feature representations. Identity loss and contrastive loss are integrated to enhance the discriminability and modality-invariance with partially shared layer parameters. Extensive experiments illustrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method.

Tracking target of interests is an important step for motion perception in intelligent video surveillance systems. While most recently developed tracking algorithms are grounded in RGB image sequences, it should be noted that information from RGB modality is not always reliable (e.g. in a dark environment with poor lighting condition), which urges the need to integrate information from infrared modality for effective tracking because of the insensitivity to illumination condition of infrared thermal camera. However, several issues encountered during the tracking process limit the fusing performance of these heterogeneous modalities: 1) the cross-modality discrepancy of visual and motion characteristics, 2) the uncertainty of degree of reliability in different modalities, and 3) large target appearance variations and background distractions within each modality. To address these issues, this paper proposes a novel and optimal discriminative learning framework for multi-modality tracking. In particular, the proposed discriminative learning framework is able to: 1) jointly eliminate outlier samples caused by large variations and learn discriminability-consistent features from heterogeneous modalities, and 2) collaboratively perform modality reliability measurement and target-background separation. Extensive experiments on RGB-infrared image sequences demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.