The branch-and-bound algorithm based on decision diagrams introduced by Bergman et al. in 2016 is a framework for solving discrete optimization problems with a dynamic programming formulation. It works by compiling a series of bounded-width decision diagrams that can provide lower and upper bounds for any given subproblem. Eventually, every part of the search space will be either explored or pruned by the algorithm, thus proving optimality. This paper presents new ingredients to speed up the search by exploiting the structure of dynamic programming models. The key idea is to prevent the repeated expansion of nodes corresponding to the same dynamic programming states by querying expansion thresholds cached throughout the search. These thresholds are based on dominance relations between partial solutions previously found and on the pruning inequalities of the filtering techniques introduced by Gillard et al. in 2021. Computational experiments show that the pruning brought by this caching mechanism allows significantly reducing the number of nodes expanded by the algorithm. This results in more benchmark instances of difficult optimization problems being solved in less time while using narrower decision diagrams.
Two-dimensional digital image correlation (2D-DIC) is a widely used optical technique to measure displacement and strain during asphalt concrete (AC) testing. An accurate 2-D DIC measurement can only be achieved when the camera's principal axis is perpendicular to the planar specimen surface. However, this requirement may not be met during testing due to device constraints. This paper proposes a simple and reliable method to correct errors induced by non-perpendicularity. The method is based on image feature matching and rectification. No additional equipment is needed. A theoretical error analysis was conducted to quantify the effect of a non-perpendicular camera alignment on measurement accuracy. The proposed method was validated numerically using synthetic images and experimentally in an AC fracture test. It achieved relatively high accuracy, even under considerable camera rotation angle and large deformation. As a pre-processing technique, the proposed method showed promising performance in assisting the recently developed CrackPropNet for automated crack propagation measurement under a non-perpendicular camera alignment.
This work proposes a decision-making framework for partially observable systems in continuous time with discrete state and action spaces. As optimal decision-making becomes intractable for large state spaces we employ approximation methods for the filtering and the control problem that scale well with an increasing number of states. Specifically, we approximate the high-dimensional filtering distribution by projecting it onto a parametric family of distributions, and integrate it into a control heuristic based on the fully observable system to obtain a scalable policy. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on several partially observed systems, including queueing systems and chemical reaction networks.
In this paper, the energy-efficient unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarm assisted mobile edge computing (MEC) with dynamic clustering and scheduling is studied. In the considered system model, UAVs are divided into multiple swarms, with each swarm consisting of a leader UAV and several follower UAVs to provide computing services to end-users. Unlike existing work, we allow UAVs to dynamically cluster into different swarms, i.e., each follower UAV can change its leader based on the time-varying spatial positions, updated application placement, etc. in a dynamic manner. Meanwhile, UAVs are required to dynamically schedule their energy replenishment, application placement, trajectory planning and task delegation. With the aim of maximizing the long-term energy efficiency of the UAV swarm assisted MEC system, a joint optimization problem of dynamic clustering and scheduling is formulated. Taking into account the underlying cooperation and competition among intelligent UAVs, we further reformulate this optimization problem as a combination of a series of strongly coupled multi-agent stochastic games, and then propose a novel reinforcement learning-based UAV swarm dynamic coordination (RLDC) algorithm for obtaining the equilibrium. Simulations are conducted to evaluate the performance of the RLDC algorithm and demonstrate its superiority over counterparts.
We introduce Bonito, an open-source model for conditional task generation: the task of converting unannotated text into task-specific training datasets for instruction tuning. Our goal is to enable zero-shot task adaptation of large language models on users' specialized, private data. We train Bonito on a new large-scale dataset with 1.65M examples created by remixing existing instruction tuning datasets into meta-templates. The meta-templates for a dataset produce training examples where the input is the unannotated text and the task attribute and the output consists of the instruction and the response. We use Bonito to generate synthetic tasks for seven datasets from specialized domains across three task types -- yes-no question answering, extractive question answering, and natural language inference -- and adapt language models. We show that Bonito significantly improves the average performance of pretrained and instruction tuned models over the de facto self supervised baseline. For example, adapting Mistral-Instruct-v2 and instruction tuned variants of Mistral and Llama2 with Bonito improves the strong zero-shot performance by 22.1 F1 points whereas the next word prediction objective undoes some of the benefits of instruction tuning and reduces the average performance by 0.8 F1 points. We conduct additional experiments with Bonito to understand the effects of the domain, the size of the training set, and the choice of alternative synthetic task generators. Overall, we show that learning with synthetic instruction tuning datasets is an effective way to adapt language models to new domains. The model, dataset, and code are available at //github.com/BatsResearch/bonito.
We present a generalized distance metric that can be used to implement routing strategies and identify routing table entries to reach the root node for a given key, in a DHT (Distributed Hash Table) network based on either Chord, Kademlia, Tapestry, or Pastry. The generalization shows that all the above four DHT algorithms are in fact, the same algorithm but with different parameters in distance representation. We also proposes that nodes can have routing tables of varying sizes based on their memory capabilities but with the fact that each node must have at least two entries, one for the node closest from it, and the other for the node from whom it is closest in each ring components for all the algorithms. Messages will always reach the correct root nodes by following the above rule. We also further observe that in any network, if the distance metric to define the root node in the DHT is same at all the nodes, then the root node for a key will also be the same, irrespective of the size of the routing table at different nodes.
Simulation-based inference (SBI) is constantly in search of more expressive algorithms for accurately inferring the parameters of complex models from noisy data. We present consistency models for neural posterior estimation (CMPE), a new free-form conditional sampler for scalable, fast, and amortized SBI with generative neural networks. CMPE combines the advantages of normalizing flows and flow matching methods into a single generative architecture: It essentially distills a continuous probability flow and enables rapid few-shot inference with an unconstrained architecture that can be tailored to the structure of the estimation problem. Our empirical evaluation demonstrates that CMPE not only outperforms current state-of-the-art algorithms on three hard low-dimensional problems but also achieves competitive performance in a high-dimensional Bayesian denoising experiment and in estimating a computationally demanding multi-scale model of tumor spheroid growth.
Aiming at expanding few-shot relations' coverage in knowledge graphs (KGs), few-shot knowledge graph completion (FKGC) has recently gained more research interests. Some existing models employ a few-shot relation's multi-hop neighbor information to enhance its semantic representation. However, noise neighbor information might be amplified when the neighborhood is excessively sparse and no neighbor is available to represent the few-shot relation. Moreover, modeling and inferring complex relations of one-to-many (1-N), many-to-one (N-1), and many-to-many (N-N) by previous knowledge graph completion approaches requires high model complexity and a large amount of training instances. Thus, inferring complex relations in the few-shot scenario is difficult for FKGC models due to limited training instances. In this paper, we propose a few-shot relational learning with global-local framework to address the above issues. At the global stage, a novel gated and attentive neighbor aggregator is built for accurately integrating the semantics of a few-shot relation's neighborhood, which helps filtering the noise neighbors even if a KG contains extremely sparse neighborhoods. For the local stage, a meta-learning based TransH (MTransH) method is designed to model complex relations and train our model in a few-shot learning fashion. Extensive experiments show that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art FKGC approaches on the frequently-used benchmark datasets NELL-One and Wiki-One. Compared with the strong baseline model MetaR, our model achieves 5-shot FKGC performance improvements of 8.0% on NELL-One and 2.8% on Wiki-One by the metric Hits@10.
Conventional methods for object detection typically require a substantial amount of training data and preparing such high-quality training data is very labor-intensive. In this paper, we propose a novel few-shot object detection network that aims at detecting objects of unseen categories with only a few annotated examples. Central to our method are our Attention-RPN, Multi-Relation Detector and Contrastive Training strategy, which exploit the similarity between the few shot support set and query set to detect novel objects while suppressing false detection in the background. To train our network, we contribute a new dataset that contains 1000 categories of various objects with high-quality annotations. To the best of our knowledge, this is one of the first datasets specifically designed for few-shot object detection. Once our few-shot network is trained, it can detect objects of unseen categories without further training or fine-tuning. Our method is general and has a wide range of potential applications. We produce a new state-of-the-art performance on different datasets in the few-shot setting. The dataset link is //github.com/fanq15/Few-Shot-Object-Detection-Dataset.
We introduce a multi-task setup of identifying and classifying entities, relations, and coreference clusters in scientific articles. We create SciERC, a dataset that includes annotations for all three tasks and develop a unified framework called Scientific Information Extractor (SciIE) for with shared span representations. The multi-task setup reduces cascading errors between tasks and leverages cross-sentence relations through coreference links. Experiments show that our multi-task model outperforms previous models in scientific information extraction without using any domain-specific features. We further show that the framework supports construction of a scientific knowledge graph, which we use to analyze information in scientific literature.
In this paper, we propose the joint learning attention and recurrent neural network (RNN) models for multi-label classification. While approaches based on the use of either model exist (e.g., for the task of image captioning), training such existing network architectures typically require pre-defined label sequences. For multi-label classification, it would be desirable to have a robust inference process, so that the prediction error would not propagate and thus affect the performance. Our proposed model uniquely integrates attention and Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) models, which not only addresses the above problem but also allows one to identify visual objects of interests with varying sizes without the prior knowledge of particular label ordering. More importantly, label co-occurrence information can be jointly exploited by our LSTM model. Finally, by advancing the technique of beam search, prediction of multiple labels can be efficiently achieved by our proposed network model.