This article presents a matheuristic algorithm for the single-source capacitated facility location problem (SSCFLP) and its variants: SSCFLP with K facilities (SSCKFLP), SSCFLP with contiguous service areas (CFLSAP), and SSCFLP with K facilities and contiguous service areas (CKFLSAP). The algorithm starts from an initial solution, and iteratively improves the solution by exactly solving large neighborhood-based sub-problems. The performance of the algorithm is tested on 5 sets of SSCFLP benchmark instances. Among the 272 instances, 191 optimal solutions are found, and 35 best-known solutions are updated. For the largest set of instances with 300-1000 facilities and 300-1500 customers (Avella and Boccia 2009), the proposed algorithm outperforms existing methods in terms of the solution quality and the computational time. Furthermore, based on two geographic areas, two sets of instances are generated to test the algorithm for solving SSCFLP and its variants. The solutions found by the proposed algorithm approximate optimal solutions or the lower bounds with average gaps of 0.07% for SSCFLP, 0.22% for CFLSAP, 0.04% for SSCKFLP, and 0.13% for CKFLSAP.
Due to the COVID 19 pandemic, smartphone-based proximity tracing systems became of utmost interest. Many of these systems use BLE signals to estimate the distance between two persons. The quality of this method depends on many factors and, therefore, does not always deliver accurate results. In this paper, we present a multi-channel approach to improve proximity classification, and a novel, publicly available data set that contains matched IEEE 802.11 (2.4 GHz and 5 GHz) and BLE signal strength data, measured in four different environments. We have developed and evaluated a combined classification model based on BLE and IEEE 802.11 signals. Our approach significantly improves the distance classification and consequently also the contact tracing accuracy. We are able to achieve good results with our approach in everyday public transport scenarios. However, in our implementation based on IEEE 802.11 probe requests, we also encountered privacy problems and limitations due to the consistency and interval at which such probes are sent. We discuss these limitations and sketch how our approach could be improved to make it suitable for real-world deployment.
In this paper we get error bounds for fully discrete approximations of infinite horizon problems via the dynamic programming approach. It is well known that considering a time discretization with a positive step size $h$ an error bound of size $h$ can be proved for the difference between the value function (viscosity solution of the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation corresponding to the infinite horizon) and the value function of the discrete time problem. However, including also a spatial discretization based on elements of size $k$ an error bound of size $O(k/h)$ can be found in the literature for the error between the value functions of the continuous problem and the fully discrete problem. In this paper we revise the error bound of the fully discrete method and prove, under similar assumptions to those of the time discrete case, that the error of the fully discrete case is in fact $O(h+k)$ which gives first order in time and space for the method. This error bound matches the numerical experiments of many papers in the literature in which the behaviour $1/h$ from the bound $O(k/h)$ have not been observed.
The table-based fact verification task has recently gained widespread attention and yet remains to be a very challenging problem. It inherently requires informative reasoning over natural language together with different numerical and logical reasoning on tables (e.g., count, superlative, comparative). Considering that, we exploit mixture-of-experts and present in this paper a new method: Self-adaptive Mixture-of-Experts Network (SaMoE). Specifically, we have developed a mixture-of-experts neural network to recognize and execute different types of reasoning -- the network is composed of multiple experts, each handling a specific part of the semantics for reasoning, whereas a management module is applied to decide the contribution of each expert network to the verification result. A self-adaptive method is developed to teach the management module combining results of different experts more efficiently without external knowledge. The experimental results illustrate that our framework achieves 85.1% accuracy on the benchmark dataset TabFact, comparable with the previous state-of-the-art models. We hope our framework can serve as a new baseline for table-based verification. Our code is available at //github.com/THUMLP/SaMoE.
Following the research agenda initiated by Munoz & Vassilvitskii [1] and Lykouris & Vassilvitskii [2] on learning-augmented online algorithms for classical online optimization problems, in this work, we consider the Online Facility Location problem under this framework. In Online Facility Location (OFL), demands arrive one-by-one in a metric space and must be (irrevocably) assigned to an open facility upon arrival, without any knowledge about future demands. We present an online algorithm for OFL that exploits potentially imperfect predictions on the locations of the optimal facilities. We prove that the competitive ratio decreases smoothly from sublogarithmic in the number of demands to constant, as the error, i.e., the total distance of the predicted locations to the optimal facility locations, decreases towards zero. We complement our analysis with a matching lower bound establishing that the dependence of the algorithm's competitive ratio on the error is optimal, up to constant factors. Finally, we evaluate our algorithm on real world data and compare our learning augmented approach with the current best online algorithm for the problem.
In this paper we propose a methodology to accelerate the resolution of the so-called "Sorted L-One Penalized Estimation" (SLOPE) problem. Our method leverages the concept of "safe screening", well-studied in the literature for \textit{group-separable} sparsity-inducing norms, and aims at identifying the zeros in the solution of SLOPE. More specifically, we derive a set of \(\tfrac{n(n+1)}{2}\) inequalities for each element of the \(n\)-dimensional primal vector and prove that the latter can be safely screened if some subsets of these inequalities are verified. We propose moreover an efficient algorithm to jointly apply the proposed procedure to all the primal variables. Our procedure has a complexity \(\mathcal{O}(n\log n + LT)\) where \(T\leq n\) is a problem-dependent constant and \(L\) is the number of zeros identified by the tests. Numerical experiments confirm that, for a prescribed computational budget, the proposed methodology leads to significant improvements of the solving precision.
Computing a dense subgraph is a fundamental problem in graph mining, with a diverse set of applications ranging from electronic commerce to community detection in social networks. In many of these applications, the underlying context is better modelled as a weighted hypergraph that keeps evolving with time. This motivates the problem of maintaining the densest subhypergraph of a weighted hypergraph in a {\em dynamic setting}, where the input keeps changing via a sequence of updates (hyperedge insertions/deletions). Previously, the only known algorithm for this problem was due to Hu et al. [HWC17]. This algorithm worked only on unweighted hypergraphs, and had an approximation ratio of $(1+\epsilon)r^2$ and an update time of $O(\text{poly} (r, \log n))$, where $r$ denotes the maximum rank of the input across all the updates. We obtain a new algorithm for this problem, which works even when the input hypergraph is weighted. Our algorithm has a significantly improved (near-optimal) approximation ratio of $(1+\epsilon)$ that is independent of $r$, and a similar update time of $O(\text{poly} (r, \log n))$. It is the first $(1+\epsilon)$-approximation algorithm even for the special case of weighted simple graphs. To complement our theoretical analysis, we perform experiments with our dynamic algorithm on large-scale, real-world data-sets. Our algorithm significantly outperforms the state of the art [HWC17] both in terms of accuracy and efficiency.
Tensor PCA is a stylized statistical inference problem introduced by Montanari and Richard to study the computational difficulty of estimating an unknown parameter from higher-order moment tensors. Unlike its matrix counterpart, Tensor PCA exhibits a statistical-computational gap, i.e., a sample size regime where the problem is information-theoretically solvable but conjectured to be computationally hard. This paper derives computational lower bounds on the run-time of memory bounded algorithms for Tensor PCA using communication complexity. These lower bounds specify a trade-off among the number of passes through the data sample, the sample size, and the memory required by any algorithm that successfully solves Tensor PCA. While the lower bounds do not rule out polynomial-time algorithms, they do imply that many commonly-used algorithms, such as gradient descent and power method, must have a higher iteration count when the sample size is not large enough. Similar lower bounds are obtained for Non-Gaussian Component Analysis, a family of statistical estimation problems in which low-order moment tensors carry no information about the unknown parameter. Finally, stronger lower bounds are obtained for an asymmetric variant of Tensor PCA and related statistical estimation problems. These results explain why many estimators for these problems use a memory state that is significantly larger than the effective dimensionality of the parameter of interest.
We present a pipelined multiplier with reduced activities and minimized interconnect based on online digit-serial arithmetic. The working precision has been truncated such that $p<n$ bits are used to compute $n$ bits product, resulting in significant savings in area and power. The digit slices follow variable precision according to input, increasing upto $p$ and then decreases according to the error profile. Pipelining has been done to achieve high throughput and low latency which is desirable for compute intensive inner products. Synthesis results of the proposed designs have been presented and compared with the non-pipelined online multiplier, pipelined online multiplier with full working precision and conventional serial-parallel and array multipliers. For $8, 16, 24$ and $32$ bit precision, the proposed low power pipelined design show upto $38\%$ and $44\%$ reduction in power and area respectively compared to the pipelined online multiplier without working precision truncation.
Clustering is one of the most fundamental and wide-spread techniques in exploratory data analysis. Yet, the basic approach to clustering has not really changed: a practitioner hand-picks a task-specific clustering loss to optimize and fit the given data to reveal the underlying cluster structure. Some types of losses---such as k-means, or its non-linear version: kernelized k-means (centroid based), and DBSCAN (density based)---are popular choices due to their good empirical performance on a range of applications. Although every so often the clustering output using these standard losses fails to reveal the underlying structure, and the practitioner has to custom-design their own variation. In this work we take an intrinsically different approach to clustering: rather than fitting a dataset to a specific clustering loss, we train a recurrent model that learns how to cluster. The model uses as training pairs examples of datasets (as input) and its corresponding cluster identities (as output). By providing multiple types of training datasets as inputs, our model has the ability to generalize well on unseen datasets (new clustering tasks). Our experiments reveal that by training on simple synthetically generated datasets or on existing real datasets, we can achieve better clustering performance on unseen real-world datasets when compared with standard benchmark clustering techniques. Our meta clustering model works well even for small datasets where the usual deep learning models tend to perform worse.
Many tasks in natural language processing can be viewed as multi-label classification problems. However, most of the existing models are trained with the standard cross-entropy loss function and use a fixed prediction policy (e.g., a threshold of 0.5) for all the labels, which completely ignores the complexity and dependencies among different labels. In this paper, we propose a meta-learning method to capture these complex label dependencies. More specifically, our method utilizes a meta-learner to jointly learn the training policies and prediction policies for different labels. The training policies are then used to train the classifier with the cross-entropy loss function, and the prediction policies are further implemented for prediction. Experimental results on fine-grained entity typing and text classification demonstrate that our proposed method can obtain more accurate multi-label classification results.