AutoML provides tools to automatically discover good machine learning model pipelines for a dataset with very little user intervention. It is ideal for domain experts new to machine learning or machine learning practitioners looking to get good results quickly for a predictive modeling task. Open-source libraries are available for using AutoML methods with popular machine learning libraries in Python, such as the scikit-learn machine learning library. In this tutorial, you will discover how to use top open-source AutoML libraries for scikit-learn in Python. Automated Machine Learning (AutoML) Libraries for Python Photo by Michael Coghlan, some rights reserved.

AutoML provides tools to automatically discover good machine learning model pipelines for a dataset with very little user intervention. It is ideal for domain experts new to machine learning or machine learning practitioners looking to get good results quickly for a predictive modeling task. Open-source libraries are available for using AutoML methods with popular machine learning libraries in Python, such as the scikit-learn machine learning library. In this tutorial, you will discover how to use top open-source AutoML libraries for scikit-learn in Python. Automated Machine Learning (AutoML) Libraries for Python Photo by Michael Coghlan, some rights reserved.

Recent progress in Game AI has demonstrated that given enough data from human gameplay, or experience gained via simulations, machines can rival or surpass the most skilled human players in classic games such as Go, or commercial computer games such as Starcraft. We review the current state-of-the-art through the lens of wargaming, and ask firstly what features of wargames distinguish them from the usual AI testbeds, and secondly which recent AI advances are best suited to address these wargame-specific features.

I have done an introduction to Artificial Intelligence (AI) course and I want to share my learning experience. This post covers my notes and summaries of the content of the course. On the early sixties, there was a gathering between several investigators interested on artificial intelligence, neural networks and automats theory as a consequence of the first works made on the field. The problem resolution was based on a general purpose search engine with high cost. To lower that cost, the first search algorithms were developed, like Heuristic Search and Alpha Beta Search.

We present Neural A*, a novel data-driven search algorithm for path planning problems. Although data-driven planning has received much attention in recent years, little work has focused on how search-based methods can learn from demonstrations to plan better. In this work, we reformulate a canonical A* search algorithm to be differentiable and couple it with a convolutional encoder to form an end-to-end trainable neural network planner. Neural A* solves a path planning problem by (1) encoding a visual representation of the problem to estimate a movement cost map and (2) performing the A* search on the cost map to output a solution path. By minimizing the difference between the search results and ground-truth paths in demonstrations, the encoder learns to capture a variety of visual planning cues in input images, such as shapes of dead-end obstacles, bypasses, and shortcuts, which makes estimated cost maps informative. Our extensive experiments confirmed that Neural A* (a) outperformed state-of-the-art data-driven planners in terms of the search optimality and efficiency trade-off and (b) predicted realistic pedestrian paths by directly performing a search on raw image inputs.

A challenging problem in both engineering and computer science is that of minimising a function for which we have no mathematical formulation available, that is expensive to evaluate, and that contains continuous and integer variables, for example in automatic algorithm configuration. Surrogate-based algorithms are very suitable for this type of problem, but most existing techniques are designed with only continuous or only discrete variables in mind. Mixed-Variable ReLU-based Surrogate Modelling (MVRSM) is a surrogate-based algorithm that uses a linear combination of rectified linear units, defined in such a way that (local) optima satisfy the integer constraints. This method outperforms the state of the art on several synthetic benchmarks with up to 238 continuous and integer variables, and achieves competitive performance on two real-life benchmarks: XGBoost hyperparameter tuning and Electrostatic Precipitator optimisation.

Data-driven design of mechanical metamaterials is an increasingly popular method to combat costly physical simulations and immense, often intractable, geometrical design spaces. Using a precomputed dataset of unit cells, a multiscale structure can be quickly filled via combinatorial search algorithms, and machine learning models can be trained to accelerate the process. However, the dependence on data induces a unique challenge: An imbalanced dataset containing more of certain shapes or physical properties can be detrimental to the efficacy of data-driven approaches. In answer, we posit that a smaller yet diverse set of unit cells leads to scalable search and unbiased learning. To select such subsets, we propose METASET, a methodology that 1) uses similarity metrics and positive semi-definite kernels to jointly measure the closeness of unit cells in both shape and property spaces, and 2) incorporates Determinantal Point Processes for efficient subset selection. Moreover, METASET allows the trade-off between shape and property diversity so that subsets can be tuned for various applications. Through the design of 2D metamaterials with target displacement profiles, we demonstrate that smaller, diverse subsets can indeed improve the search process as well as structural performance. By eliminating inherent overlaps in a dataset of 3D unit cells created with symmetry rules, we also illustrate that our flexible method can distill unique subsets regardless of the metric employed. Our diverse subsets are provided publicly for use by any designer.

In this paper we explore the application of simultaneous move Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) based online framework for tactical maneuvering between two unmanned aircrafts. Compared to other techniques, MCTS enables efficient search over long horizons and uses self-play to select best maneuver in the current state while accounting for the opponent aircraft tactics. We explore different algorithmic choices in MCTS and demonstrate the framework numerically in a simulated 2D tactical maneuvering application.

In the flowshop problem, one has to schedule jobs, where each job has to follow the same route of machines. The goal is to find a job order that minimizes some criteria. The permutation flowshop, also called PFSP, is a common (and fundamental) variant that imposes the machines to process jobs in the same order (thus, a permutation of jobs is enough to describe a solution). The permutation flowshop has been one of the most studied problems in the literature [35, 30] and has been considered on various industrial applications [16, 42]. We may also note that the permutation flowshop is at the origin of multiple other variants, for instance, the blocking permutation flowshop [45], the multiobjective permutation flowshop [20], the distributed permutation flowshop [11], the no-idle permutation flowshop [31], the permutation flowshop with buffers [28] and many others. Regarding the criteria to minimize, we study in this paper, two of the most studied objectives: the makespan (minimizing the completion time of the last job on the last machine) and the flowtime (minimizing the sum of completion times of each job on the last machine).

Stratega, a general strategy games framework, has been designed to foster research on computational intelligence for strategy games. In contrast to other strategy game frameworks, Stratega allows to create a wide variety of turn-based and real-time strategy games using a common API for agent development. While the current version supports the development of turn-based strategy games and agents, we will add support for real-time strategy games in future updates. Flexibility is achieved by utilising YAML-files to configure tiles, units, actions, and levels. Therefore, the user can design and run a variety of games to test developed agents without specifically adjusting it to the game being generated. The framework has been built with a focus of statistical forward planning (SFP) agents. For this purpose, agents can access and modify game-states and use the forward model to simulate the outcome of their actions. While SFP agents have shown great flexibility in general game-playing, their performance is limited in case of complex state and action-spaces. Finally, we hope that the development of this framework and its respective agents helps to better understand the complex decision-making process in strategy games. Stratega can be downloaded at: https://github.research.its.qmul.ac.uk/eecsgameai/Stratega