Corporate mobility is often based on fixed assignments of vehicles to employees. Relaxing these fixed assignments while including alternatives such as public transportation, bike sharing, and taxis for the employees' business and private trips could increase fleet utilization, foster the use of battery electric vehicles, and lower the costs for the companies' transportation needs. A system in which all employees specify their mobility demands gives rise to optimization problems concerning the assignment of company cars or alternative modes of transport to satisfy the needs of the users. In this work we introduce the NP-hard mobility offer allocation problem which has similarities to interval scheduling problems. We propose an integer linear programming model and heuristic solution approaches based on large neighborhood search. The efficiency of these methods is based on the usage of suitable conflict graphs. In a computational study, the approaches are evaluated and it is demonstrated that, depending on instances and run-time requirements, either solving the model exactly using a general purpose integer linear programming solver, fast greedy heuristics, or the adaptive large neighborhood search outperforms the others.

Good parameter settings are crucial to achieve high performance in many areas of artificial intelligence (AI), such as propositional satisfiability solving, AI planning, scheduling, and machine learning (in particular deep learning). Automated algorithm configuration methods have recently received much attention in the AI community since they replace tedious, irreproducible and error-prone manual parameter tuning and can lead to new state-of-the-art performance. However, practical applications of algorithm configuration are prone to several (often subtle) pitfalls in the experimental design that can render the procedure ineffective. We identify several common issues and propose best practices for avoiding them. As one possibility for automatically handling as many of these as possible, we also propose a tool called GenericWrapper4AC.

In many settings, a decision-maker wishes to learn a rule, or policy, that maps from observable characteristics of an individual to an action. Examples include selecting offers, prices, advertisements, or emails to send to consumers, as well as the problem of determining which medication to prescribe to a patient. While there is a growing body of literature devoted to this problem, most existing results are focused on the case where data comes from a randomized experiment, and further, there are only two possible actions, such as giving a drug to a patient or not. In this paper, we study the offline multi-action policy learning problem with observational data and where the policy may need to respect budget constraints or belong to a restricted policy class such as decision trees. We build on the theory of efficient semi-parametric inference in order to propose and implement a policy learning algorithm that achieves asymptotically minimax-optimal regret. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first result of this type in the multi-action setup, and it provides a substantial performance improvement over the existing learning algorithms. We then consider additional computational challenges that arise in implementing our method for the case where the policy is restricted to take the form of a decision tree. We propose two different approaches, one using a mixed integer program formulation and the other using a tree-search based algorithm.

In this paper, we take a closer look at data augmentation for images, and describe a simple procedure called AutoAugment to search for improved data augmentation policies. Our key insight is to create a search space of data augmentation policies, evaluating the quality of a particular policy directly on the dataset of interest. In our implementation, we have designed a search space where a policy consists of many sub-policies, one of which is randomly chosen for each image in each mini-batch. A sub-policy consists of two operations, each operation being an image processing function such as translation, rotation, or shearing, and the probabilities and magnitudes with which the functions are applied. We use a search algorithm to find the best policy such that the neural network yields the highest validation accuracy on a target dataset. Our method achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, SVHN, and ImageNet (without additional data). On ImageNet, we attain a Top-1 accuracy of 83.54%. On CIFAR-10, we achieve an error rate of 1.48%, which is 0.65% better than the previous state-of-the-art. Finally, policies learned from one dataset can be transferred to work well on other similar datasets. For example, the policy learned on ImageNet allows us to achieve state-of-the-art accuracy on the fine grained visual classification dataset Stanford Cars, without fine-tuning weights pre-trained on additional data. Code to train Wide-ResNet, Shake-Shake and ShakeDrop models with AutoAugment policies can be found at https://github.com/tensorflow/models/tree/master/research/autoaugment

Decision trees usefully represent sparse, high dimensional and noisy data. Having learned a function from this data, we may want to thereafter integrate the function into a larger decision-making problem, e.g., for picking the best chemical process catalyst. We study a large-scale, industrially-relevant mixed-integer nonlinear nonconvex optimization problem involving both gradient-boosted trees and penalty functions mitigating risk. This mixed-integer optimization problem with convex penalty terms broadly applies to optimizing pre-trained regression tree models. Decision makers may wish to optimize discrete models to repurpose legacy predictive models, or they may wish to optimize a discrete model that particularly well-represents a data set. We develop several heuristic methods to find feasible solutions, and an exact, branch-and-bound algorithm leveraging structural properties of the gradient-boosted trees and penalty functions. We computationally test our methods on concrete mixture design instance and a chemical catalysis industrial instance.

Memetic Computing is a subject in computer science which considers complex structures as the combination of simple agents, memes, whose evolutionary interactions lead to intelligent structures capable of problem-solving. This paper focuses on Memetic Computing optimization algorithms and proposes a counter-tendency approach for algorithmic design. Research in the field tends to go in the direction of improving existing algorithms by combining different methods or through the formulation of more complicated structures. Contrary to this trend, we instead focus on simplicity, proposing a structurally simple algorithm with emphasis on processing only one solution at a time. The proposed algorithm, namely Three Stage Optimal Memetic Exploration, is composed of three memes; the first stochastic and with a long search radius, the second stochastic and with a moderate search radius and the third deterministic and with a short search radius. This is suggestive of the fact that complexity in algorithmic structures can be unnecessary, if not detrimental, and that simple bottom-up approaches are likely to be competitive is here invoked as an extension to Memetic Computing basing on the philosophical concept of Ockham's Razor. An extensive experimental setup on various test problems and one digital signal processing application is presented. Numerical results show that the proposed approach, despite its simplicity and low computational cost displays a very good performance on several problems, and is competitive with sophisticated algorithms representing the-state-of-the-art in computational intelligence optimization. Key words: Memetic Computing, Evolutionary Algorithms, Memetic Algorithms, Computational intelligence Optimization 1. Introduction Emerging technologies in computer science and engineering, as well as the demands of the market and the society, often impose the solution, in the every day life, of complex optimization problems. The complexity of today's problems is due to various reasons such as high non-linearities, high multi-modality, large scale, noisy fitness landscape, computationally expensive fitness functions, real-time demands, and limited hardware available(e.g. when the computational device is portable and cheap). In these cases, the use of exact methods is unsuitable because, in general, there is not sufficient prior knowledge (hypotheses) on the optimization problem; thus, computational intelligence approaches become not only advisable but often the only alternative to face the optimization. Scientific research in computational intelligence optimization can be classified into two general categories.

A scientist has built a Rubik's cube that can solve itself. The toy, which has a 3D-printed robotic core, creepily completes its own iconic puzzle in just 30 seconds. Containing two internal servo motors, the entire system runs on a micro-controlling Arduino board which is small enough to fit inside the original product's dimensions. The new incarnation of the game, which first launched in 1974, is the product of Japanese creator and YouTube vlogger the'human controller'. Uploading footage of his creation, last month, the impressive scenes - which show the cube flipping and self-rotating - has already racked-up nearly 500,000 views.

Policy optimization struggles when the reward feedback signal is very sparse and essentially becomes a random search algorithm until the agent accidentally stumbles upon a rewarding or the goal state. Recent works utilize intrinsic motivation to guide the exploration via generative models, predictive forward models, or more ad-hoc measures of surprise. We propose EMI, which is an exploration method that constructs embedding representation of states and actions that does not rely on generative decoding of the full observation but extracts predictive signals that can be used to guide exploration based on forward prediction in the representation space. Our experiments show the state of the art performance on challenging locomotion task with continuous control and on image-based exploration tasks with discrete actions on Atari.

Mining dense quasi-cliques is a well-known clustering task with applications ranging from social networks over collaboration graphs to document analysis. Recent work has extended this task to multiple graphs; i.e. the goal is to find groups of vertices highly dense among multiple graphs. In this paper, we argue that in a multi-graph scenario the sparsity is valuable for knowledge extraction as well. We introduce the concept of contrasting quasi-clique patterns: a collection of vertices highly dense in one graph but highly sparse (i.e. less connected) in a second graph. Thus, these patterns specifically highlight the difference/contrast between the considered graphs. Based on our novel model, we propose an algorithm that enables fast computation of contrasting patterns by exploiting intelligent traversal and pruning techniques. We showcase the potential of contrasting patterns on a variety of synthetic and real-world datasets.

Deep neuroevolution and deep reinforcement learning (deep RL) algorithms are two popular approaches to policy search. The former is widely applicable and rather stable, but suffers from low sample efficiency. By contrast, the latter is more sample efficient, but the most sample efficient variants are also rather unstable and highly sensitive to hyper-parameter setting. So far, these families of methods have mostly been compared as competing tools. However, an emerging approach consists in combining them so as to get the best of both worlds. Two previously existing combinations use either a standard evolutionary algorithm or a goal exploration process together with the DDPG algorithm, a sample efficient off-policy deep RL algorithm. In this paper, we propose a different combination scheme using the simple cross-entropy method (CEM) and TD3, another off-policy deep RL algorithm which improves over DDPG. We evaluate the resulting algorithm, CEM-RL, on a set of benchmarks classically used in deep RL. We show that CEM-RL benefits from several advantages over its competitors and offers a satisfactory trade-off between performance and sample efficiency.