Online 3-dimensional bin packing problem (O3D-BPP) is getting renewed prominence due to the industrial automation brought by Industry 4.0. However, due to limited attention in the past and its challenging nature, a good approximate algorithm is in scarcity as compared to 1D or 2D problems. This paper considers real-time O$3$D-BPP of cuboidal boxes with partial information (look-ahead) in an automated robotic sorting center. We present two rolling-horizon mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) cum-heuristic based algorithms: MPack (for bench-marking) and MPackLite (for real-time deployment). Additionally, we present a framework OPack that adapts and improves the performance of BP heuristics by utilizing information in an online setting with a look-ahead. We then perform a comparative analysis of BP heuristics (with and without OPack), MPack, and MPackLite on synthetic and industry provided data with increasing look-ahead. MPackLite and the baseline heuristics perform within bounds of robot operations and thus, can be used in real-time.
Controllable generation is one of the key requirements for successful adoption of deep generative models in real-world applications, but it still remains as a great challenge. In particular, the compositional ability to generate novel concept combinations is out of reach for most current models. In this work, we use energy-based models (EBMs) to handle compositional generation over a set of attributes. To make them scalable to high-resolution image generation, we introduce an EBM in the latent space of a pre-trained generative model such as StyleGAN. We propose a novel EBM formulation representing the joint distribution of data and attributes together, and we show how sampling from it is formulated as solving an ordinary differential equation (ODE). Given a pre-trained generator, all we need for controllable generation is to train an attribute classifier. Sampling with ODEs is done efficiently in the latent space and is robust to hyperparameters. Thus, our method is simple, fast to train, and efficient to sample. Experimental results show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art in both conditional sampling and sequential editing. In compositional generation, our method excels at zero-shot generation of unseen attribute combinations. Also, by composing energy functions with logical operators, this work is the first to achieve such compositionality in generating photo-realistic images of resolution 1024x1024.
We present Neural A*, a novel data-driven search method for path planning problems. Despite the recent increasing attention to data-driven path planning, a machine learning approach to search-based planning is still challenging due to the discrete nature of search algorithms. 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 encoding a problem instance to a guidance map and then performing the differentiable A* search with the guidance map. By learning to match the search results with ground-truth paths provided by experts, Neural A* can produce a path consistent with the ground truth accurately and efficiently. Our extensive experiments confirmed that Neural A* outperformed state-of-the-art data-driven planners in terms of the search optimality and efficiency trade-off, and furthermore, successfully predicted realistic human trajectories by directly performing search-based planning on natural image inputs.
The problem of Approximate Nearest Neighbor (ANN) search is fundamental in computer science and has benefited from significant progress in the past couple of decades. However, most work has been devoted to pointsets whereas complex shapes have not been sufficiently treated. Here, we focus on distance functions between discretized curves in Euclidean space: they appear in a wide range of applications, from road segments to time-series in general dimension. For $\ell_p$-products of Euclidean metrics, for any $p$, we design simple and efficient data structures for ANN, based on randomized projections, which are of independent interest. They serve to solve proximity problems under a notion of distance between discretized curves, which generalizes both discrete Fr\'echet and Dynamic Time Warping distances. These are the most popular and practical approaches to comparing such curves. We offer the first data structures and query algorithms for ANN with arbitrarily good approximation factor, at the expense of increasing space usage and preprocessing time over existing methods. Query time complexity is comparable or significantly improved by our algorithms, our algorithm is especially efficient when the length of the curves is bounded.
Detection of malicious behavior is a fundamental problem in security. One of the major challenges in using detection systems in practice is in dealing with an overwhelming number of alerts that are triggered by normal behavior (the so-called false positives), obscuring alerts resulting from actual malicious activity. While numerous methods for reducing the scope of this issue have been proposed, ultimately one must still decide how to prioritize which alerts to investigate, and most existing prioritization methods are heuristic, for example, based on suspiciousness or priority scores. We introduce a novel approach for computing a policy for prioritizing alerts using adversarial reinforcement learning. Our approach assumes that the attackers know the full state of the detection system and dynamically choose an optimal attack as a function of this state, as well as of the alert prioritization policy. The first step of our approach is to capture the interaction between the defender and attacker in a game theoretic model. To tackle the computational complexity of solving this game to obtain a dynamic stochastic alert prioritization policy, we propose an adversarial reinforcement learning framework. In this framework, we use neural reinforcement learning to compute best response policies for both the defender and the adversary to an arbitrary stochastic policy of the other. We then use these in a double-oracle framework to obtain an approximate equilibrium of the game, which in turn yields a robust stochastic policy for the defender. Extensive experiments using case studies in fraud and intrusion detection demonstrate that our approach is effective in creating robust alert prioritization policies.
Because of continuous advances in mathematical programing, Mix Integer Optimization has become a competitive vis-a-vis popular regularization method for selecting features in regression problems. The approach exhibits unquestionable foundational appeal and versatility, but also poses important challenges. We tackle these challenges, reducing computational burden when tuning the sparsity bound (a parameter which is critical for effectiveness) and improving performance in the presence of feature collinearity and of signals that vary in nature and strength. Importantly, we render the approach efficient and effective in applications of realistic size and complexity - without resorting to relaxations or heuristics in the optimization, or abandoning rigorous cross-validation tuning. Computational viability and improved performance in subtler scenarios is achieved with a multi-pronged blueprint, leveraging characteristics of the Mixed Integer Programming framework and by means of whitening, a data pre-processing step.
In this paper, we propose an improved quantitative evaluation framework for Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) on generating domain-specific images, where we improve conventional evaluation methods on two levels: the feature representation and the evaluation metric. Unlike most existing evaluation frameworks which transfer the representation of ImageNet inception model to map images onto the feature space, our framework uses a specialized encoder to acquire fine-grained domain-specific representation. Moreover, for datasets with multiple classes, we propose Class-Aware Frechet Distance (CAFD), which employs a Gaussian mixture model on the feature space to better fit the multi-manifold feature distribution. Experiments and analysis on both the feature level and the image level were conducted to demonstrate improvements of our proposed framework over the recently proposed state-of-the-art FID method. To our best knowledge, we are the first to provide counter examples where FID gives inconsistent results with human judgments. It is shown in the experiments that our framework is able to overcome the shortness of FID and improves robustness. Code will be made available.
We consider the task of learning the parameters of a {\em single} component of a mixture model, for the case when we are given {\em side information} about that component, we call this the "search problem" in mixture models. We would like to solve this with computational and sample complexity lower than solving the overall original problem, where one learns parameters of all components. Our main contributions are the development of a simple but general model for the notion of side information, and a corresponding simple matrix-based algorithm for solving the search problem in this general setting. We then specialize this model and algorithm to four common scenarios: Gaussian mixture models, LDA topic models, subspace clustering, and mixed linear regression. For each one of these we show that if (and only if) the side information is informative, we obtain parameter estimates with greater accuracy, and also improved computation complexity than existing moment based mixture model algorithms (e.g. tensor methods). We also illustrate several natural ways one can obtain such side information, for specific problem instances. Our experiments on real data sets (NY Times, Yelp, BSDS500) further demonstrate the practicality of our algorithms showing significant improvement in runtime and accuracy.
Querying graph structured data is a fundamental operation that enables important applications including knowledge graph search, social network analysis, and cyber-network security. However, the growing size of real-world data graphs poses severe challenges for graph databases to meet the response-time requirements of the applications. Planning the computational steps of query processing - Query Planning - is central to address these challenges. In this paper, we study the problem of learning to speedup query planning in graph databases towards the goal of improving the computational-efficiency of query processing via training queries.We present a Learning to Plan (L2P) framework that is applicable to a large class of query reasoners that follow the Threshold Algorithm (TA) approach. First, we define a generic search space over candidate query plans, and identify target search trajectories (query plans) corresponding to the training queries by performing an expensive search. Subsequently, we learn greedy search control knowledge to imitate the search behavior of the target query plans. We provide a concrete instantiation of our L2P framework for STAR, a state-of-the-art graph query reasoner. Our experiments on benchmark knowledge graphs including DBpedia, YAGO, and Freebase show that using the query plans generated by the learned search control knowledge, we can significantly improve the speed of STAR with negligible loss in accuracy.
Modern communication networks have become very complicated and highly dynamic, which makes them hard to model, predict and control. In this paper, we develop a novel experience-driven approach that can learn to well control a communication network from its own experience rather than an accurate mathematical model, just as a human learns a new skill (such as driving, swimming, etc). Specifically, we, for the first time, propose to leverage emerging Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) for enabling model-free control in communication networks; and present a novel and highly effective DRL-based control framework, DRL-TE, for a fundamental networking problem: Traffic Engineering (TE). The proposed framework maximizes a widely-used utility function by jointly learning network environment and its dynamics, and making decisions under the guidance of powerful Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). We propose two new techniques, TE-aware exploration and actor-critic-based prioritized experience replay, to optimize the general DRL framework particularly for TE. To validate and evaluate the proposed framework, we implemented it in ns-3, and tested it comprehensively with both representative and randomly generated network topologies. Extensive packet-level simulation results show that 1) compared to several widely-used baseline methods, DRL-TE significantly reduces end-to-end delay and consistently improves the network utility, while offering better or comparable throughput; 2) DRL-TE is robust to network changes; and 3) DRL-TE consistently outperforms a state-ofthe-art DRL method (for continuous control), Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG), which, however, does not offer satisfying performance.
In this paper we introduce a covariance framework for the analysis of EEG and MEG data that takes into account observed temporal stationarity on small time scales and trial-to-trial variations. We formulate a model for the covariance matrix, which is a Kronecker product of three components that correspond to space, time and epochs/trials, and consider maximum likelihood estimation of the unknown parameter values. An iterative algorithm that finds approximations of the maximum likelihood estimates is proposed. We perform a simulation study to assess the performance of the estimator and investigate the influence of different assumptions about the covariance factors on the estimated covariance matrix and on its components. Apart from that, we illustrate our method on real EEG and MEG data sets. The proposed covariance model is applicable in a variety of cases where spontaneous EEG or MEG acts as source of noise and realistic noise covariance estimates are needed for accurate dipole localization, such as in evoked activity studies, or where the properties of spontaneous EEG or MEG are themselves the topic of interest, such as in combined EEG/fMRI experiments in which the correlation between EEG and fMRI signals is investigated.