Binary Neural Networks (BNNs) have received significant attention due to their promising efficiency. Currently, most BNN studies directly adopt widely-used CNN architectures, which can be suboptimal for BNNs. This paper proposes a novel Binary ARchitecture Search (BARS) flow to discover superior binary architecture in a large design space. Specifically, we design a two-level (Macro \& Micro) search space tailored for BNNs and apply a differentiable neural architecture search (NAS) to explore this search space efficiently. The macro-level search space includes depth and width decisions, which is required for better balancing the model performance and capacity. And we also make modifications to the micro-level search space to strengthen the information flow for BNN. A notable challenge of BNN architecture search lies in that binary operations exacerbate the "collapse" problem of differentiable NAS, and we incorporate various search and derive strategies to stabilize the search process. On CIFAR-10, \method achieves $1.5\%$ higher accuracy with $2/3$ binary Ops and $1/10$ floating-point Ops. On ImageNet, with similar resource consumption, \method-discovered architecture achieves $3\%$ accuracy gain than hand-crafted architectures, while removing the full-precision downsample layer.

Following decades of sustained improvement, metaheuristics are one of the great success stories of optimization research. However, in order for research in metaheuristics to avoid fragmentation and a lack of reproducibility, there is a pressing need for stronger scientific and computational infrastructure to support the development, analysis and comparison of new approaches. We argue that, via principled choice of infrastructure support, the field can pursue a higher level of scientific enquiry. We describe our vision and report on progress, showing how the adoption of common protocols for all metaheuristics can help liberate the potential of the field, easing the exploration of the design space of metaheuristics.

Most Professional Machine Learning practitioners follow the ML Pipeline as a standard, to keep their work efficient and to keep the flow of work. A pipeline is created to allow data flow from its raw format to some useful information. All sub-fields in this pipeline's modules are equally important for us to produce quality results, and one of them is Hyper-Parameter Tuning. Most of us know the best way to proceed with Hyper-Parameter Tuning is to use the GridSearchCV or RandomSearchCV from the sklearn module. But apart from these algorithms, there are many other Advanced methods for Hyper-Parameter Tuning.

The assumption of complete domain knowledge is not warranted for robot planning and decision-making in the real world. It could be due to design flaws or arise from domain ramifications or qualifications. In such cases, existing planning and learning algorithms could produce highly undesirable behaviors. This problem is more challenging than partial observability in the sense that the agent is unaware of certain knowledge, in contrast to it being partially observable: the difference between known unknowns and unknown unknowns. In this work, we formulate it as the problem of Domain Concretization, an inverse problem to domain abstraction. Based on an incomplete domain model provided by the designer and teacher traces from human users, our algorithm searches for a candidate model set under a minimalistic model assumption. It then generates a robust plan with the maximum probability of success under the set of candidate models. In addition to a standard search formulation in the model-space, we propose a sample-based search method and also an online version of it to improve search time. We tested our approach on IPC domains and a simulated robotics domain where incompleteness was introduced by removing domain features from the complete model. Results show that our planning algorithm increases the plan success rate without impacting the cost much.

Personalization and recommendations are now accepted as core competencies in just about every online setting, ranging from media platforms to e-commerce to social networks. While the challenge of estimating user preferences has garnered significant attention, the operational problem of using such preferences to construct personalized offer sets to users is still a challenge, particularly in modern settings where a massive number of items and a millisecond response time requirement mean that even enumerating all of the items is impossible. Faced with such settings, existing techniques are either (a) entirely heuristic with no principled justification, or (b) theoretically sound, but simply too slow to work. Thus motivated, we propose an algorithm for personalized offer set optimization that runs in time sub-linear in the number of items while enjoying a uniform performance guarantee. Our algorithm works for an extremely general class of problems and models of user choice that includes the mixed multinomial logit model as a special case. We achieve a sub-linear runtime by leveraging the dimensionality reduction from learning an accurate latent factor model, along with existing sub-linear time approximate near neighbor algorithms. Our algorithm can be entirely data-driven, relying on samples of the user, where a `sample' refers to the user interaction data typically collected by firms. We evaluate our approach on a massive content discovery dataset from Outbrain that includes millions of advertisements. Results show that our implementation indeed runs fast and with increased performance relative to existing fast heuristics.

Predictions obtained by, e.g., artificial neural networks have a high accuracy but humans often perceive the models as black boxes. Insights about the decision making are mostly opaque for humans. Particularly understanding the decision making in highly sensitive areas such as healthcare or fifinance, is of paramount importance. The decision-making behind the black boxes requires it to be more transparent, accountable, and understandable for humans. This survey paper provides essential definitions, an overview of the different principles and methodologies of explainable Supervised Machine Learning (SML). We conduct a state-of-the-art survey that reviews past and recent explainable SML approaches and classifies them according to the introduced definitions. Finally, we illustrate principles by means of an explanatory case study and discuss important future directions.

Particle physics experiments often require the reconstruction of decay patterns through a hierarchical clustering of the observed final-state particles. We show that this task can be phrased as a Markov Decision Process and adapt reinforcement learning algorithms to solve it. In particular, we show that Monte-Carlo Tree Search guided by a neural policy can construct high-quality hierarchical clusterings and outperform established greedy and beam search baselines.

Class Scheduling is a highly constrained task. Educational institutes spend a lot of resources, in the form of time and manual computation, to find a satisficing schedule that fulfills all the requirements. A satisficing class schedule accommodates all the students to all their desired courses at convenient timing. The scheduler also needs to take into account the availability of course teachers on the given slots. With the added limitation of available classrooms, the number of solutions satisfying all constraints in this huge search-space, further decreases. This paper proposes an efficient system to generate class schedules that can fulfill every possible need of a typical university. Though it is primarily a fixed-credit scheduler, it can be adjusted for open-credit systems as well. The model is designed in MiniZinc and solved using various off-the-shelf solvers. The proposed scheduling system can find a balanced schedule for a moderate-sized educational institute in less than a minute.

Data driven algorithm design is an important aspect of modern data science and algorithm design. Rather than using off the shelf algorithms that only have worst case performance guarantees, practitioners often optimize over large families of parametrized algorithms and tune the parameters of these algorithms using a training set of problem instances from their domain to determine a configuration with high expected performance over future instances. However, most of this work comes with no performance guarantees. The challenge is that for many combinatorial problems of significant importance including partitioning, subset selection, and alignment problems, a small tweak to the parameters can cause a cascade of changes in the algorithm's behavior, so the algorithm's performance is a discontinuous function of its parameters. In this chapter, we survey recent work that helps put data-driven combinatorial algorithm design on firm foundations. We provide strong computational and statistical performance guarantees, both for the batch and online scenarios where a collection of typical problem instances from the given application are presented either all at once or in an online fashion, respectively.

The difficulty of optimizing interplanetary trajectory design problem is caused by extremely sensitive and highly nonlinear search space [3]. Figure 1 shows a highly nonlinear search space of Messenger (full) problem around the current known best solution. The real interplanetary exploration mission usually has to consider two basic objectives: minimum mission period and minimum fuel consumption. However, even though only one objective function is considered for mission optimization, the optimum is still very hard to be found. In 2005, the GTOP database published by ESA includes some interplanetary transfer trajectory design problems, which can be simply divided by multiple gravity-assist (MGA) problems and multiple gravity assists with deep space manoeuvre (MGA-1DSM) problems. In the GTOP database, MGA problem includes Cassini1 and GTOC1; MGA-1DSM problem includes Sagas, Rosetta, Cassini2, Messenger (reduced) and Messenger (full). With the given search space and special boundaries on each variable, the GTOP problems have shown big challenges on global optimization. Three aspects of the challenge can be described as follows: - The attraction basin of global optimum is rather smaller than those of other local optima, and unluckily, this optimal basin is usually hidden in the "not promising" local spaces. During the evolutionary process, it is so difficult to locate these not promising local spaces when considering the population motivation based on greedy gradient information. This causes a result that the general swarm intelligent algorithms can only find sub-optimal results, and the difference between global optimum and found local optima is not acceptable.