Optimization
Optimizing Ethical Risk Reduction for Medical Intelligent Systems with Constraint Programming
Brayé, Clotilde, Bricout, Aurélien, Gotlieb, Arnaud, Lazaar, Nadjib, Vallet, Quentin
Medical Intelligent Systems (MIS) are increasingly integrated into healthcare workflows, offering significant benefits but also raising critical safety and ethical concerns. According to the European Union AI Act, most MIS will be classified as high-risk systems, requiring a formal risk management process to ensure compliance with the ethical requirements of trustworthy AI. In this context, we focus on risk reduction optimization problems, which aim to reduce risks with ethical considerations by finding the best balanced assignment of risk assessment values according to their coverage of trustworthy AI ethical requirements. We formalize this problem as a constrained optimization task and investigate three resolution paradigms: Mixed Integer Programming (MIP), Satisfiability (SAT), and Constraint Programming(CP).Our contributions include the mathematical formulation of this optimization problem, its modeling with the Minizinc constraint modeling language, and a comparative experimental study that analyzes the performance, expressiveness, and scalability of each approach to solving. From the identified limits of the methodology, we draw some perspectives of this work regarding the integration of the Minizinc model into a complete trustworthy AI ethical risk management process for MIS.
Bayesian Optimization of Multi-Bit Pulse Encoding in In2O3/Al2O3 Thin-film Transistors for Temporal Data Processing
Meza-Arroyo, Javier, Dunn, Benius, Xu, Weijie, Chen, Yu-Chieh, Chen, Jen-Sue, Hsu, Julia W. P.
Utilizing the intrinsic history-dependence and nonlinearity of hardware, physical reservoir computing is a promising neuromorphic approach to encode time-series data for in-sensor computing. The accuracy of this encoding critically depends on the distinguishability of multi-state outputs, which is often limited by suboptimal and empirically chosen reservoir operation conditions. In this work, we demonstrate a machine learning approach, Bayesian optimization, to improve the encoding fidelity of solution-processed Al2O3/In2O3 thin-film transistors (TFTs). We show high-fidelity 6-bit temporal encoding by exploring five key pulse parameters and using the normalized degree of separation (nDoS) as the metric of output state separability. Additionally, we show that a model trained on simpler 4-bit data can effectively guide optimization of more complex 6-bit encoding tasks, reducing experimental cost. Specifically, for the encoding and reconstruction of binary-patterned images of a moving car across 6 sequential frames, we demonstrate that the encoding is more accurate when operating the TFT using optimized pulse parameters and the 4-bit optimized operating condition performs almost as well as the 6-bit optimized condition. Finally, interpretability analysis via Shapley Additive Explanations (SHAP) reveals that gate pulse amplitude and drain voltage are the most influential parameters in achieving higher state separation. This work presents the first systematic method to identify optimal operating conditions for reservoir devices, and the approach can be extended to other physical reservoir implementations across different material platforms.
OmniRetarget: Interaction-Preserving Data Generation for Humanoid Whole-Body Loco-Manipulation and Scene Interaction
Yang, Lujie, Huang, Xiaoyu, Wu, Zhen, Kanazawa, Angjoo, Abbeel, Pieter, Sferrazza, Carmelo, Liu, C. Karen, Duan, Rocky, Shi, Guanya
A dominant paradigm for teaching humanoid robots complex skills is to retarget human motions as kinematic references to train reinforcement learning (RL) policies. However, existing retargeting pipelines often struggle with the significant embodiment gap between humans and robots, producing physically implausible artifacts like foot-skating and penetration. More importantly, common retargeting methods neglect the rich human-object and human-environment interactions essential for expressive locomotion and loco-manipulation. To address this, we introduce OmniRetarget, an interaction-preserving data generation engine based on an interaction mesh that explicitly models and preserves the crucial spatial and contact relationships between an agent, the terrain, and manipulated objects. By minimizing the Laplacian deformation between the human and robot meshes while enforcing kinematic constraints, OmniRetarget generates kinematically feasible trajectories. Moreover, preserving task-relevant interactions enables efficient data augmentation, from a single demonstration to different robot embodiments, terrains, and object configurations. We comprehensively evaluate OmniRetarget by retargeting motions from OMOMO, LAFAN1, and our in-house MoCap datasets, generating over 8-hour trajectories that achieve better kinematic constraint satisfaction and contact preservation than widely used baselines. Such high-quality data enables proprioceptive RL policies to successfully execute long-horizon (up to 30 seconds) parkour and loco-manipulation skills on a Unitree G1 humanoid, trained with only 5 reward terms and simple domain randomization shared by all tasks, without any learning curriculum.
Tuning the Tuner: Introducing Hyperparameter Optimization for Auto-Tuning
Willemsen, Floris-Jan, van Nieuwpoort, Rob V., van Werkhoven, Ben
Abstract--Automatic performance tuning (auto-tuning) is widely used to optimize performance-critical applications across many scientific domains by finding the best program variant among many choices. Efficient optimization algorithms are crucial for navigating the vast and complex search spaces in auto-tuning. As is well known in the context of machine learning and similar fields, hyperparameters critically shape optimization algorithm efficiency. Y et for auto-tuning frameworks, these hyperparameters are almost never tuned, and their potential performance impact has not been studied. We present a novel method for general hyperparameter tuning of optimization algorithms for auto-tuning, thus "tuning the tuner". In particular, we propose a robust statistical method for evaluating hyperparameter performance across search spaces, publish a F AIR data set and software for reproducibility, and present a simulation mode that replays previously recorded tuning data, lowering the costs of hyperparameter tuning by two orders of magnitude. We show that even limited hyperparam-eter tuning can improve auto-tuner performance by 94.8% on average, and establish that the hyperparameters themselves can be optimized efficiently with meta-strategies (with an average improvement of 204.7%), demonstrating the often overlooked hyperparameter tuning as a powerful technique for advancing auto-tuning research and practice. UTOMA TIC performance tuning, or auto-tuning, is a widely established method for optimizing the performance of applications in many scientific domains, including radio astronomy [1]-[4], image processing [5]-[7], fluid dynamics [8]-[10], and climate modeling [11]-[13]. Auto-tuning automates the process of exploring the myriad of implementation choices that arise in performance optimization, such as the number of threads, tile sizes used in loop blocking, and other code optimization parameters [14]. At the heart of the auto-tuning method is a search space of functionally-equivalent code variants that is explored by an optimization algorithm.