The way heuristic optimizers are designed has evolved over the decades, as computing power has increased. Initially, trajectory metaheuristics used to shape the state of the art in many problems, whereas today, population-based mechanisms tend to be more effective.Such has been the case for the Linear Ordering Problem (LOP), a field in which strategies such as Iterated Local Search and Variable Neighborhood Search led the way during the 1990s, but which have now been surpassed by evolutionary and memetic schemes. This paper focuses on understanding how the design of LOP optimizers will change in the future, as computing power continues to increase, yielding two main contributions. On the one hand, a metaheuristic was designed that is capable of effectively exploiting a large amount of computational resources, specifically, computing power equivalent to what a recent core can output during runs lasting over four months. Our analysis of this aspect relied on parallelization, and allowed us to conclude that as the power of the computational resources increases, it will be necessary to boost the capacities of the intensification methods applied in the memetic algorithms to keep the population from stagnating. And on the other, the best-known results for today's most challenging set of instances (xLOLIB2) were significantly outperformed. Instances with sizes ranging from 300 to 1000 were analyzed, and new bounds were established that provide a frame of reference for future research.
The waste of electrical and electronic equipment has been increased due to the fast evolution of technology products and competition of many IT sectors. Every year millions of tons of electronic waste are thrown into the environment which causes high consequences for human health. Therefore, it is crucial to control this waste flow using technology, especially using Artificial Intelligence but also reclamation of critical raw materials for new production processes. In this paper, we focused on the measurement of recyclability of waste electronic components (WECs) from waste printed circuit boards (WPCBs) using mathematical innovation model. This innovative approach evaluates both the recyclability and recycling difficulties of WECs, integrating an AI model for improved disassembly and sorting. Assessing the recyclability of individual electronic components present on WPCBs provides insight into the recovery potential of valuable materials and indicates the level of complexity involved in recycling in terms of economic worth and production utility. This novel measurement approach helps AI models in accurately determining the number of classes to be identified and sorted during the automated disassembly of discarded PCBs. It also facilitates the model in iterative training and validation of individual electronic components.
Knowledge distillation (KD) has proven to be a successful strategy to improve the performance of a smaller model in many NLP tasks. However, most of the work in KD only explores monolingual scenarios. In this paper, we investigate the value of KD in multilingual settings. We find the significance of KD and model initialization by analyzing how well the student model acquires multilingual knowledge from the teacher model. Our proposed method emphasizes copying the teacher model's weights directly to the student model to enhance initialization. Our finding shows that model initialization using copy-weight from the fine-tuned teacher contributes the most compared to the distillation process itself across various multilingual settings. Furthermore, we demonstrate that efficient weight initialization preserves multilingual capabilities even in low-resource scenarios.
Matrix scaling problems with sparse cost matrices arise frequently in various domains, such as optimal transport, image processing, and machine learning. The Sinkhorn-Knopp algorithm is a popular iterative method for solving these problems, but its convergence properties in the presence of sparsity have not been thoroughly analyzed. This paper presents a theoretical analysis of the convergence rate of the Sinkhorn-Knopp algorithm specifically for sparse cost matrices. We derive novel bounds on the convergence rate that explicitly depend on the sparsity pattern and the degree of nonsparsity of the cost matrix. These bounds provide new insights into the behavior of the algorithm and highlight the potential for exploiting sparsity to develop more efficient solvers. We also explore connections between our sparse convergence results and existing convergence results for dense matrices, showing that our bounds generalize the dense case. Our analysis reveals that the convergence rate improves as the matrix becomes less sparse and as the minimum entry of the cost matrix increases relative to its maximum entry. These findings have important practical implications, suggesting that the Sinkhorn-Knopp algorithm may be particularly well-suited for large-scale matrix scaling problems with sparse cost matrices arising in real-world applications. Future research directions include investigating tighter bounds based on more sophisticated sparsity patterns, developing algorithm variants that actively exploit sparsity, and empirically validating the benefits of our theoretical results on real-world datasets. This work advances our understanding of the Sinkhorn-Knopp algorithm for an important class of matrix scaling problems and lays the foundation for designing more efficient and scalable solutions in practice.
Software engineering (SE) is a dynamic field that involves multiple phases all of which are necessary to develop sustainable software systems. Machine learning (ML), a branch of artificial intelligence (AI), has drawn a lot of attention in recent years thanks to its ability to analyze massive volumes of data and extract useful patterns from data. Several studies have focused on examining, categorising, and assessing the application of ML in SE processes. We conducted a literature review on primary studies to address this gap. The study was carried out following the objective and the research questions to explore the current state of the art in applying machine learning techniques in software engineering processes. The review identifies the key areas within software engineering where ML has been applied, including software quality assurance, software maintenance, software comprehension, and software documentation. It also highlights the specific ML techniques that have been leveraged in these domains, such as supervised learning, unsupervised learning, and deep learning. Keywords: machine learning, deep learning, software engineering, natural language processing, source code
Quantum computing is a cutting-edge field of information technology that harnesses the principles of quantum mechanics to perform computations. It has major implications for the cyber security industry. Existing cyber protection applications are working well, but there are still challenges and vulnerabilities in computer networks. Sometimes data and privacy are also compromised. These complications lead to research questions asking what kind of cyber protection applications of quantum computing are there and what potential methods or techniques can be used for cyber protection? These questions will reveal how much power quantum computing has and to what extent it can outperform the conventional computing systems. This scoping review was conducted by considering 815 papers. It showed the possibilities that can be achievedif quantum technologies are implemented in cyber environments. This scoping review discusses various domains such as algorithms and applications, bioinformatics, cloud and edge computing, the organization of complex systems, application areas focused on security and threats, and the broader quantum computing ecosystem. In each of these areas, there is significant scope for quantum computing to be implemented and to revolutionize the working environment. Numerous quantum computing applications for cyber protection and a number of techniques to protect our data and privacy were identified. The results are not limited to network security but also include data security. This paper also discusses societal aspects, e.g., the applications of quantum computing in the social sciences. This scoping review discusses how to enhance the efficiency and security of quantum computing in various cyber security domains. Additionally, it encourages the reader to think about what kind of techniques and methods can be deployed to secure the cyber world.
Smart contracts are pivotal for implementing various functions due to their interactivity with external data. However, this interactivity also presents challenges in terms of security and reliability. There is a lack of statistical and quantitative research on the interaction between smart contracts and external data. To fill this gap, we thoroughly examine 10,500 actual smart contracts to select 9,356 valid samples, excluding those that are outdated or have compilation errors. Utilizing code parsing techniques, the study transformed contract code into Abstract Syntax Trees (ASTs) and extracted keywords related to external data dependency through code analysis. By comparing the ASTs with the keyword list, we conduct a quantitative analysis of the number and proportion of contracts involving external data interaction. Furthermore, we collect over 3,600 security audit reports and manually filter 249 (approximately 9%) reports related to external data interaction, categorizing the external data dependency in these contracts. We also explore the relationship between the complexity of smart contracts and their dependence on external data.
The problem of pure exploration in Markov decision processes has been cast as maximizing the entropy over the state distribution induced by the agent's policy, an objective that has been extensively studied. However, little attention has been dedicated to state entropy maximization under partial observability, despite the latter being ubiquitous in applications, e.g., finance and robotics, in which the agent only receives noisy observations of the true state governing the system's dynamics. How can we address state entropy maximization in those domains? In this paper, we study the simple approach of maximizing the entropy over observations in place of true latent states. First, we provide lower and upper bounds to the approximation of the true state entropy that only depends on some properties of the observation function. Then, we show how knowledge of the latter can be exploited to compute a principled regularization of the observation entropy to improve performance. With this work, we provide both a flexible approach to bring advances in state entropy maximization to the POMDP setting and a theoretical characterization of its intrinsic limits.
This work presents a procedure to solve the Euler equations by explicitly updating, in a conservative manner, a generic thermodynamic variable such as temperature, pressure or entropy instead of the total energy. The presented procedure is valid for any equation of state and spatial discretization. When using complex equations of state such as Span-Wagner, choosing the temperature as the generic thermodynamic variable yields great reductions in the computational costs associated to thermodynamic evaluations. Results computed with a state of the art thermodynamic model are presented, and computational times are analyzed. Particular attention is dedicated to the conservation of total energy, the propagation speed of shock waves and jump conditions. The procedure is thoroughly tested using the Span-Wagner equation of state through the CoolProp thermodynamic library and the Van der Waals equation of state, both in the ideal and non-ideal compressible fluid-dynamics regimes, by comparing it to the standard total energy update and analytical solutions where available.
Tensor network contractions are widely used in statistical physics, quantum computing, and computer science. We introduce a method to efficiently approximate tensor network contractions using low-rank approximations, where each intermediate tensor generated during the contractions is approximated as a low-rank binary tree tensor network. The proposed algorithm has the flexibility to incorporate a large portion of the environment when performing low-rank approximations, which can lead to high accuracy for a given rank. Here, the environment refers to the remaining set of tensors in the network, and low-rank approximations with larger environments can generally provide higher accuracy. For contracting tensor networks defined on lattices, the proposed algorithm can be viewed as a generalization of the standard boundary-based algorithms. In addition, the algorithm includes a cost-efficient density matrix algorithm for approximating a tensor network with a general graph structure into a tree structure, whose computational cost is asymptotically upper-bounded by that of the standard algorithm that uses canonicalization. Experimental results indicate that the proposed technique outperforms previously proposed approximate tensor network contraction algorithms for multiple problems in terms of both accuracy and efficiency.
Generative AI has demonstrated unprecedented creativity in the field of computer vision, yet such phenomena have not been observed in natural language processing. In particular, large language models (LLMs) can hardly produce written works at the level of human experts due to the extremely high complexity of literature writing. In this paper, we present HoLLMwood, an automated framework for unleashing the creativity of LLMs and exploring their potential in screenwriting, which is a highly demanding task. Mimicking the human creative process, we assign LLMs to different roles involved in the real-world scenario. In addition to the common practice of treating LLMs as ${Writer}$, we also apply LLMs as ${Editor}$, who is responsible for providing feedback and revision advice to ${Writer}$. Besides, to enrich the characters and deepen the plots, we introduce a role-playing mechanism and adopt LLMs as ${Actors}$ that can communicate and interact with each other. Evaluations on automatically generated screenplays show that HoLLMwood substantially outperforms strong baselines in terms of coherence, relevance, interestingness and overall quality.