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Fact-Alternating Mutex Groups for Classical Planning

Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research

Mutex groups are defined in the context of STRIPS planning as sets of facts out of which, maximally, one can be true in any state reachable from the initial state. The importance of computing and exploiting mutex groups was repeatedly pointed out in many studies. However, the theoretical analysis of mutex groups is sparse in current literature. This work provides a complexity analysis showing that inference of mutex groups is as hard as planning itself (PSPACE-Complete) and it also shows a tight relationship between mutex groups and graph cliques. This result motivates us to propose a new type of mutex group called a fact-alternating mutex group (fam-group) of which inference is NP-Complete. Moreover, we introduce an algorithm for the inference of fam-groups based on integer linear programming that is complete with respect to the maximal fam-groups and we demonstrate how beneficial fam-groups can be in the translation of planning tasks into finite domain representation. Finally, we show that fam-groups can be used for the detection of dead-end states and we propose a simple algorithm for the pruning of operators and facts as a preprocessing step that takes advantage of the properties of fam-groups. The experimental evaluation of the pruning algorithm shows a substantial increase in a number of solved tasks in domains from the optimal deterministic track of the last two planning competitions (IPC 2011 and 2014).


Coordinating Measurements in Uncertain Participatory Sensing Settings

Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research

Environmental monitoring allows authorities to understand the impact of potentially harmful phenomena, such as air pollution, excessive noise, and radiation. Recently, there has been considerable interest in participatory sensing as a paradigm for such large-scale data collection because it is cost-effective and able to capture more fine-grained data than traditional approaches that use stationary sensors scattered in cities. In this approach, ordinary citizens (non-expert contributors) collect environmental data using low-cost mobile devices. However, these participants are generally self-interested actors that have their own goals and make local decisions about when and where to take measurements. This can lead to highly inefficient outcomes, where observations are either taken redundantly or do not provide sufficient information about key areas of interest. To address these challenges, it is necessary to guide and to coordinate participants, so they take measurements when it is most informative. To this end, we develop a computationally-efficient coordination algorithm (adaptive Best-Match) that suggests to users when and where to take measurements. Our algorithm exploits probabilistic knowledge of human mobility patterns, but explicitly considers the uncertainty of these patterns and the potential unwillingness of people to take measurements when requested to do so. In particular, our algorithm uses a local search technique, clustering and random simulations to map participants to measurements that need to be taken in space and time. We empirically evaluate our algorithm on a real-world human mobility and air quality dataset and show that it outperforms the current state of the art by up to 24% in terms of utility gained.


The astonishing moment a robot solves a Rubik's cube in .38 seconds

Daily Mail - Science & tech

A pair of hardware hackers have beat the world record for solving a Rubik's cube robotically, completing the task in almost half the time. The Guinness World Record was set just over a year ago by a Hungarian architect and his'Sub1 Reloaded' machine when it solved a Rubik's cube in 0.637 seconds. That record, however, has now been demolished. Software developer Jared Di Carlo and MIT Biometrics Lab Master's student Ben Katz devised a contraption that can solve a Rubik's cube in a stunning 0.38 seconds. Software developer Jared Di Carlo and MIT Biometrics Lab Master's student Ben Katz built a'Rubik's Contraption' that's capable of solving the complicated puzzle in a mere 0.38 seconds The researchers discovered that they could easily beat the world record by using a different kind of motor on their'Rubik's Contraption.' 'We noticed that all of the fast Rubik's Cube solvers were using stepper motors, and thought that we could do better if we used better motors,' Di Carlo wrote in a blog post.


A novel model-based heuristic for energy optimal motion planning for automated driving

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Predictive motion planning is the key to achieve energy-efficient driving, which is one of the main benefits of automated driving. Researchers have been studying the planning of velocity trajectories, a simpler form of motion planning, for over a decade now and many different methods are available. Dynamic programming has shown to be the most common choice due to its numerical background and ability to include nonlinear constraints and models. Although planning of an optimal trajectory is done in a systematic way, dynamic programming does not use any knowledge about the considered problem to guide the exploration and therefore explores all possible trajectories. A* is a search algorithm which enables using knowledge about the problem to guide the exploration to the most promising solutions first. Knowledge has to be represented in a form of a heuristic function, which gives an optimistic estimate of cost for transitioning to the final state, which is not a straightforward task. This paper presents a novel heuristics incorporating air drag and auxiliary power as well as operational costs of the vehicle, besides kinetic and potential energy and rolling resistance known in the literature. Furthermore, optimal cruising velocity, which depends on vehicle aerodynamic properties and auxiliary power, is derived. Results are compared for different variants of heuristic functions and dynamic programming as well.


Matched Filters for Noisy Induced Subgraph Detection

arXiv.org Machine Learning

We consider the problem of finding the vertex correspondence between two graphs with different number of vertices where the smaller graph is still potentially large. We propose a solution to this problem via a graph matching matched filter: padding the smaller graph in different ways and then using graph matching methods to align it to the larger network. Under a statistical model for correlated pairs of graphs, which yields a noisy copy of the small graph within the larger graph, the resulting optimization problem can be guaranteed to recover the true vertex correspondence between the networks, though there are currently no efficient algorithms for solving this problem. We consider an approach that exploits a partially known correspondence and show via varied simulations and applications to the Drosophila connectome that in practice this approach can achieve good performance.


Fast Best Subset Selection: Coordinate Descent and Local Combinatorial Optimization Algorithms

arXiv.org Machine Learning

We consider the canonical $L_0$-regularized least squares problem (aka best subsets) which is generally perceived as a `gold-standard' for many sparse learning regimes. In spite of worst-case computational intractability results, recent work has shown that advances in mixed integer optimization can be used to obtain near-optimal solutions to this problem for instances where the number of features $p \approx 10^3$. While these methods lead to estimators with excellent statistical properties, often there is a price to pay in terms of a steep increase in computation times, especially when compared to highly efficient popular algorithms for sparse learning (e.g., based on $L_1$-regularization) that scale to much larger problem sizes. Bridging this gap is a main goal of this paper. We study the computational aspects of a family of $L_0$-regularized least squares problems with additional convex penalties. We propose a hierarchy of necessary optimality conditions for these problems. We develop new algorithms, based on coordinate descent and local combinatorial optimization schemes, and study their convergence properties. We demonstrate that the choice of an algorithm determines the quality of solutions obtained; and local combinatorial optimization-based algorithms generally result in solutions of superior quality. We show empirically that our proposed framework is relatively fast for problem instances with $p\approx 10^6$ and works well, in terms of both optimization and statistical properties (e.g., prediction, estimation, and variable selection), compared to simpler heuristic algorithms. A version of our algorithm reaches up to a three-fold speedup (with $p$ up to $10^6$) when compared to state-of-the-art schemes for sparse learning such as glmnet and ncvreg.


Artificial Intelligence vs Business Intelligence - Learn 6 Useful Comparison

#artificialintelligence

Business Intelligence is a technology that is used to gather, store, access and analyzes data to help business users in making better decisions, on the other hand, Artificial Intelligence is a way to make a computer, a computer-controlled robot, or a software that think intelligently like humans.Artificial Intelligence is based on the study that how human thinks, learn, decide and work in order to resolve an issue and then using the outcome of this study as a basis of developing intelligent software and systems. It starts from root node and explores neighbor nodes first and moves to the next level neighbor nodes.It provides the shortest path to the solution and can be implemented using FIFO This algorithm is implemented using LIFO(Last in first out)data structure.It creates nodes same as breadth-first search but it differs in only order.In each iteration, it stores the nodes from root to leaf and also it cannot check duplicate nodes. It makes predictions by using Bayes algorithm, which derives probability prediction from the underlying evidence, as observed in data. In this algorithm, sorting is done in increasing cost of the path to a node.It always expands the least cost node.This search is identical to the Breadth-first search if each transition has the same cost.It explores the path in the increasing order of cost. It implements logistic regression for classification of binary targets and linear regression for continuous targets.It supports confidence bounds for prediction probabilities and also supports confidence bounds for prediction. It performs the depth-first search at level-1 and starts over, then executes a complete depth-first search to level 2, and continues till it gets the solution.


Learning From Scratch by Thinking Fast and Slow with Deep Learning and Tree Search

#artificialintelligence

According to dual process theory human reasoning consists of two different kinds of thinking. System 1 is a fast, unconscious and automatic mode of thought, also known as intuition. System 2 is a slow, conscious, explicit and rule-based mode of reasoning that is believed to be an evolutionarily recent process. When learning to complete a challenging planning task, such as playing a board game, humans exploit both processes: strong intuitions allow for more effective analytic reasoning by rapidly selecting interesting lines of play for consideration. Repeated deep study gradually improves intuitions.


Binary Search Algorithms explained using security camera footage

#artificialintelligence

I used to live in a building that had a communal kitchen for over 100 students. As you might imagine, there were almost always dishes that weren't washed in the sink. A group at my school pitched the idea to put up a Nest Cam to catch culprits and call them out on it using the Nest Cam feed. To illustrate my point, let's say you found dirty dishes at 12 pm, and you hadn't been in the kitchen for a day. Think about the way that you would search for the person who left the dishes.


Minimax rates for cost-sensitive learning on manifolds with approximate nearest neighbours

arXiv.org Machine Learning

We study the approximate nearest neighbour method for cost-sensitive classification on low-dimensional manifolds embedded within a high-dimensional feature space. We determine the minimax learning rates for distributions on a smooth manifold, in a cost-sensitive setting. This generalises a classic result of Audibert and Tsybakov. Building upon recent work of Chaudhuri and Dasgupta we prove that these minimax rates are attained by the approximate nearest neighbour algorithm, where neighbours are computed in a randomly projected low-dimensional space. In addition, we give a bound on the number of dimensions required for the projection which depends solely upon the reach and dimension of the manifold, combined with the regularity of the marginal.