With increasingly volatile market conditions and rapid product innovations, operational decision-making for large-scale systems entails solving thousands of problems with limited data. Data aggregation is proposed to combine the data across problems to improve the decisions obtained by solving those problems individually. We propose a novel cluster-based shrunken-SAA approach that can exploit the cluster structure among problems when implementing the data aggregation approaches. We prove that, as the number of problems grows, leveraging the known cluster structure among problems yields additional benefits over the data aggregation approaches that neglect such structure. When the cluster structure is unknown, we show that unveiling the cluster structure, even at the cost of a few data points, can be beneficial, especially when the distance between clusters of problems is substantial. Our proposed approach can be extended to general cost functions under mild conditions. When the number of problems gets large, the optimality gap of our proposed approach decreases exponentially in the distance between the clusters. We explore the performance of the proposed approach through the application of managing newsvendor systems via numerical experiments. We investigate the impacts of distance metrics between problem instances on the performance of the cluster-based Shrunken-SAA approach with synthetic data. We further validate our proposed approach with real data and highlight the advantages of cluster-based data aggregation, especially in the small-data large-scale regime, compared to the existing approaches.
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The increasing demand for autonomous machines in construction environments necessitates the development of robust object detection algorithms that can perform effectively across various weather and environmental conditions. This paper introduces a new semantic segmentation dataset specifically tailored for construction sites, taking into account the diverse challenges posed by adverse weather and environmental conditions. The dataset is designed to enhance the training and evaluation of object detection models, fostering their adaptability and reliability in real-world construction applications. Our dataset comprises annotated images captured under a wide range of different weather conditions, including but not limited to sunny days, rainy periods, foggy atmospheres, and low-light situations. Additionally, environmental factors such as the existence of dirt/mud on the camera lens are integrated into the dataset through actual captures and synthetic generation to simulate the complex conditions prevalent in construction sites. We also generate synthetic images of the annotations including precise semantic segmentation masks for various objects commonly found in construction environments, such as wheel loader machines, personnel, cars, and structural elements. To demonstrate the dataset's utility, we evaluate state-of-the-art object detection algorithms on our proposed benchmark. The results highlight the dataset's success in adversarial training models across diverse conditions, showcasing its efficacy compared to existing datasets that lack such environmental variability.
The classical path planners, such as sampling-based path planners, have the limitations of sensitivity to the initial solution and slow convergence to the optimal solution. However, finding a near-optimal solution in a short period is challenging in many applications such as the autonomous vehicle with limited power/fuel. To achieve an end-to-end near-optimal path planner, we first divide the path planning problem into two subproblems, which are path's space segmentation and waypoints generation in the given path's space. We further propose a two-level cascade neural network named Path Planning Network (PPNet) to solve the path planning problem by solving the abovementioned subproblems. Moreover, we propose a novel efficient data generation method for path planning named EDaGe-PP. The results show the total computation time is less than 1/33 and the success rate of PPNet trained by the dataset that is generated by EDaGe-PP is about $2 \times$ compared to other methods. We validate PPNet against state-of-the-art path planning methods. The results show PPNet can find a near-optimal solution in 15.3ms, which is much shorter than the state-of-the-art path planners.
Contemporary approaches to data management are increasingly relying on unified analytics and AI platforms to foster collaboration, interoperability, seamless access to reliable data, and high performance. Data Lakes featuring open standard table formats such as Delta Lake, Apache Hudi, and Apache Iceberg are central components of these data architectures. Choosing the right format for managing a table is crucial for achieving the objectives mentioned above. The challenge lies in selecting the best format, a task that is onerous and can yield temporary results, as the ideal choice may shift over time with data growth, evolving workloads, and the competitive development of table formats and processing engines. Moreover, restricting data access to a single format can hinder data sharing resulting in diminished business value over the long term. The ability to seamlessly interoperate between formats and with negligible overhead can effectively address these challenges. Our solution in this direction is an innovative omni-directional translator, XTable, that facilitates writing data in one format and reading it in any format, thus achieving the desired format interoperability. In this work, we demonstrate the effectiveness of XTable through application scenarios inspired by real-world use cases.
Knowledge distillation is the process of transferring knowledge from a more powerful large model (teacher) to a simpler counterpart (student). Numerous current approaches involve the student imitating the knowledge of the teacher directly. However, redundancy still exists in the learned representations through these prevalent methods, which tend to learn each spatial location's features indiscriminately. To derive a more compact representation (concept feature) from the teacher, inspired by human cognition, we suggest an innovative method, termed Generative Denoise Distillation (GDD), where stochastic noises are added to the concept feature of the student to embed them into the generated instance feature from a shallow network. Then, the generated instance feature is aligned with the knowledge of the instance from the teacher. We extensively experiment with object detection, instance segmentation, and semantic segmentation to demonstrate the versatility and effectiveness of our method. Notably, GDD achieves new state-of-the-art performance in the tasks mentioned above. We have achieved substantial improvements in semantic segmentation by enhancing PspNet and DeepLabV3, both of which are based on ResNet-18, resulting in mIoU scores of 74.67 and 77.69, respectively, surpassing their previous scores of 69.85 and 73.20 on the Cityscapes dataset of 20 categories. The source code is available at //github.com/ZhgLiu/GDD.
We present a comprehensive, user-centric approach to understand preferences in AI-based productivity agents and develop personalized solutions tailored to users' needs. Utilizing a two-phase method, we first conducted a survey with 363 participants, exploring various aspects of productivity, communication style, agent approach, personality traits, personalization, and privacy. Drawing on the survey insights, we developed a GPT-4 powered personalized productivity agent that utilizes telemetry data gathered via Viva Insights from information workers to provide tailored assistance. We compared its performance with alternative productivity-assistive tools, such as dashboard and narrative, in a study involving 40 participants. Our findings highlight the importance of user-centric design, adaptability, and the balance between personalization and privacy in AI-assisted productivity tools. By building on the insights distilled from our study, we believe that our work can enable and guide future research to further enhance productivity solutions, ultimately leading to optimized efficiency and user experiences for information workers.
Serverless computing relieves developers from the burden of resource management, thus providing ease-of-use to the users and the opportunity to optimize resource utilization for the providers. However, today's serverless systems lack performance guarantees for function invocations, thus limiting support for performance-critical applications: we observed severe performance variability (up to 6x). Providers lack visibility into user functions and hence find it challenging to right-size them: we observed heavy resource underutilization (up to 80%). To understand the causes behind the performance variability and underutilization, we conducted a measurement study of commonly deployed serverless functions and learned that the function performance and resource utilization depend crucially on function semantics and inputs. Our key insight is to delay making resource allocation decisions until after the function inputs are available. We introduce Shabari, a resource management framework for serverless systems that makes decisions as late as possible to right-size each invocation to meet functions' performance objectives (SLOs) and improve resource utilization. Shabari uses an online learning agent to right-size each function invocation based on the features of the function input and makes cold-start-aware scheduling decisions. For a range of serverless functions and inputs, Shabari reduces SLO violations by 11-73% while not wasting any vCPUs and reducing wasted memory by 64-94% in the median case, compared to state-of-the-art systems, including Aquatope, Parrotfish, and Cypress.
Transformer architectures have facilitated the development of large-scale and general-purpose sequence models for prediction tasks in natural language processing and computer vision, e.g., GPT-3 and Swin Transformer. Although originally designed for prediction problems, it is natural to inquire about their suitability for sequential decision-making and reinforcement learning problems, which are typically beset by long-standing issues involving sample efficiency, credit assignment, and partial observability. In recent years, sequence models, especially the Transformer, have attracted increasing interest in the RL communities, spawning numerous approaches with notable effectiveness and generalizability. This survey presents a comprehensive overview of recent works aimed at solving sequential decision-making tasks with sequence models such as the Transformer, by discussing the connection between sequential decision-making and sequence modeling, and categorizing them based on the way they utilize the Transformer. Moreover, this paper puts forth various potential avenues for future research intending to improve the effectiveness of large sequence models for sequential decision-making, encompassing theoretical foundations, network architectures, algorithms, and efficient training systems. As this article has been accepted by the Frontiers of Computer Science, here is an early version, and the most up-to-date version can be found at //journal.hep.com.cn/fcs/EN/10.1007/s11704-023-2689-5
Generative commonsense reasoning which aims to empower machines to generate sentences with the capacity of reasoning over a set of concepts is a critical bottleneck for text generation. Even the state-of-the-art pre-trained language generation models struggle at this task and often produce implausible and anomalous sentences. One reason is that they rarely consider incorporating the knowledge graph which can provide rich relational information among the commonsense concepts. To promote the ability of commonsense reasoning for text generation, we propose a novel knowledge graph augmented pre-trained language generation model KG-BART, which encompasses the complex relations of concepts through the knowledge graph and produces more logical and natural sentences as output. Moreover, KG-BART can leverage the graph attention to aggregate the rich concept semantics that enhances the model generalization on unseen concept sets. Experiments on benchmark CommonGen dataset verify the effectiveness of our proposed approach by comparing with several strong pre-trained language generation models, particularly KG-BART outperforms BART by 5.80, 4.60, in terms of BLEU-3, 4. Moreover, we also show that the generated context by our model can work as background scenarios to benefit downstream commonsense QA tasks.
With the capability of modeling bidirectional contexts, denoising autoencoding based pretraining like BERT achieves better performance than pretraining approaches based on autoregressive language modeling. However, relying on corrupting the input with masks, BERT neglects dependency between the masked positions and suffers from a pretrain-finetune discrepancy. In light of these pros and cons, we propose XLNet, a generalized autoregressive pretraining method that (1) enables learning bidirectional contexts by maximizing the expected likelihood over all permutations of the factorization order and (2) overcomes the limitations of BERT thanks to its autoregressive formulation. Furthermore, XLNet integrates ideas from Transformer-XL, the state-of-the-art autoregressive model, into pretraining. Empirically, XLNet outperforms BERT on 20 tasks, often by a large margin, and achieves state-of-the-art results on 18 tasks including question answering, natural language inference, sentiment analysis, and document ranking.
To provide more accurate, diverse, and explainable recommendation, it is compulsory to go beyond modeling user-item interactions and take side information into account. Traditional methods like factorization machine (FM) cast it as a supervised learning problem, which assumes each interaction as an independent instance with side information encoded. Due to the overlook of the relations among instances or items (e.g., the director of a movie is also an actor of another movie), these methods are insufficient to distill the collaborative signal from the collective behaviors of users. In this work, we investigate the utility of knowledge graph (KG), which breaks down the independent interaction assumption by linking items with their attributes. We argue that in such a hybrid structure of KG and user-item graph, high-order relations --- which connect two items with one or multiple linked attributes --- are an essential factor for successful recommendation. We propose a new method named Knowledge Graph Attention Network (KGAT) which explicitly models the high-order connectivities in KG in an end-to-end fashion. It recursively propagates the embeddings from a node's neighbors (which can be users, items, or attributes) to refine the node's embedding, and employs an attention mechanism to discriminate the importance of the neighbors. Our KGAT is conceptually advantageous to existing KG-based recommendation methods, which either exploit high-order relations by extracting paths or implicitly modeling them with regularization. Empirical results on three public benchmarks show that KGAT significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods like Neural FM and RippleNet. Further studies verify the efficacy of embedding propagation for high-order relation modeling and the interpretability benefits brought by the attention mechanism.
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