Conventional magneto-static finite element analysis of electrical machine models is time-consuming and computationally expensive. Since each machine topology has a distinct set of parameters, design optimization is commonly performed independently. This paper presents a novel method for predicting Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) of differently parameterized electrical machine topologies at the same time by mapping a high dimensional integrated design parameters in a lower dimensional latent space using a variational autoencoder. After training, via a latent space, the decoder and multi-layer neural network will function as meta-models for sampling new designs and predicting associated KPIs, respectively. This enables parameter-based concurrent multi-topology optimization.
Anomaly detection among a large number of processes arises in many applications ranging from dynamic spectrum access to cybersecurity. In such problems one can often obtain noisy observations aggregated from a chosen subset of processes that conforms to a tree structure. The distribution of these observations, based on which the presence of anomalies is detected, may be only partially known. This gives rise to the need for a search strategy designed to account for both the sample complexity and the detection accuracy, as well as cope with statistical models that are known only up to some missing parameters. In this work we propose a sequential search strategy using two variations of the Generalized Local Likelihood Ratio statistic. Our proposed Hierarchical Dynamic Search (HDS) strategy is shown to be order-optimal with respect to the size of the search space and asymptotically optimal with respect to the detection accuracy. An explicit upper bound on the error probability of HDS is established for the finite sample regime. Extensive experiments are conducted, demonstrating the performance gains of HDS over existing methods.
Specifications of complex, large scale, computer software and hardware systems can be radically simplified by using simple maps from input sequences to output values. These "state machine maps" provide an alternative representation of classical Moore type state machines. Composition of state machine maps corresponds to state machine products and can be used to specify essentially any type of interconnection as well as parallel and distributed computation. State machine maps can also specify abstract properties of systems and are significantly more concise and scalable than traditional representations of automata. Examples included here include specifications of producer/consumer software, network distributed consensus, real-time digital circuits, and operating system scheduling. The motivation for this work comes from experience designing and developing operating systems and real-time software where weak methods for understanding and exploring designs is a well known handicap. The methods introduced here are based on ordinary discrete mathematics, primitive recursive functions and deterministic state machines and are intended, initially, to aid the intuition and understanding of the system developers. Staying strictly within the boundaries of classical deterministic state machines anchors the methods to the algebraic structures of automata and semigroups, obviates any need for axiomatic deduction systems, "formal methods", or extensions to the model, and makes the specifications more faithful to engineering practice. While state machine maps are obvious representations of state machines, the techniques introduced here for defining and composing them are novel.
We study online convex optimization with switching costs, a practically important but also extremely challenging problem due to the lack of complete offline information. By tapping into the power of machine learning (ML) based optimizers, ML-augmented online algorithms (also referred to as expert calibration in this paper) have been emerging as state of the art, with provable worst-case performance guarantees. Nonetheless, by using the standard practice of training an ML model as a standalone optimizer and plugging it into an ML-augmented algorithm, the average cost performance can be even worse than purely using ML predictions. In order to address the "how to learn" challenge, we propose EC-L2O (expert-calibrated learning to optimize), which trains an ML-based optimizer by explicitly taking into account the downstream expert calibrator. To accomplish this, we propose a new differentiable expert calibrator that generalizes regularized online balanced descent and offers a provably better competitive ratio than pure ML predictions when the prediction error is large. For training, our loss function is a weighted sum of two different losses -- one minimizing the average ML prediction error for better robustness, and the other one minimizing the post-calibration average cost. We also provide theoretical analysis for EC-L2O, highlighting that expert calibration can be even beneficial for the average cost performance and that the high-percentile tail ratio of the cost achieved by EC-L2O to that of the offline optimal oracle (i.e., tail cost ratio) can be bounded. Finally, we test EC-L2O by running simulations for sustainable datacenter demand response. Our results demonstrate that EC-L2O can empirically achieve a lower average cost as well as a lower competitive ratio than the existing baseline algorithms.
In this paper, we propose a novel design, called MixNN, for protecting deep learning model structure and parameters. The layers in a deep learning model of MixNN are fully decentralized. It hides communication address, layer parameters and operations, and forward as well as backward message flows among non-adjacent layers using the ideas from mix networks. MixNN has following advantages: 1) an adversary cannot fully control all layers of a model including the structure and parameters, 2) even some layers may collude but they cannot tamper with other honest layers, 3) model privacy is preserved in the training phase. We provide detailed descriptions for deployment. In one classification experiment, we compared a neural network deployed in a virtual machine with the same one using the MixNN design on the AWS EC2. The result shows that our MixNN retains less than 0.001 difference in terms of classification accuracy, while the whole running time of MixNN is about 7.5 times slower than the one running on a single virtual machine.
As a crucial component of most modern deep recommender systems, feature embedding maps high-dimensional sparse user/item features into low-dimensional dense embeddings. However, these embeddings are usually assigned a unified dimension, which suffers from the following issues: (1) high memory usage and computation cost. (2) sub-optimal performance due to inferior dimension assignments. In order to alleviate the above issues, some works focus on automated embedding dimension search by formulating it as hyper-parameter optimization or embedding pruning problems. However, they either require well-designed search space for hyperparameters or need time-consuming optimization procedures. In this paper, we propose a Single-Shot Embedding Dimension Search method, called SSEDS, which can efficiently assign dimensions for each feature field via a single-shot embedding pruning operation while maintaining the recommendation accuracy of the model. Specifically, it introduces a criterion for identifying the importance of each embedding dimension for each feature field. As a result, SSEDS could automatically obtain mixed-dimensional embeddings by explicitly reducing redundant embedding dimensions based on the corresponding dimension importance ranking and the predefined parameter budget. Furthermore, the proposed SSEDS is model-agnostic, meaning that it could be integrated into different base recommendation models. The extensive offline experiments are conducted on two widely used public datasets for CTR prediction tasks, and the results demonstrate that SSEDS can still achieve strong recommendation performance even if it has reduced 90\% parameters. Moreover, SSEDS has also been deployed on the WeChat Subscription platform for practical recommendation services. The 7-day online A/B test results show that SSEDS can significantly improve the performance of the online recommendation model.
This paper proposes an active learning algorithm for solving regression and classification problems based on inverse-distance weighting functions for selecting the feature vectors to query. The algorithm has the following features: (i) supports both pool-based and population-based sampling; (ii) is independent of the type of predictor used; (iii) can handle known and unknown constraints on the queryable feature vectors; and (iv) can run either sequentially, or in batch mode, depending on how often the predictor is retrained. The method's potential is shown in numerical tests on illustrative synthetic problems and real-world regression and classification datasets from the UCI repository. A Python implementation of the algorithm that we call IDEAL (Inverse-Distance based Exploration for Active Learning), is available at \url{//cse.lab.imtlucca.it/~bemporad/ideal}.
The Model Order Reduction (MOR) technique can provide compact numerical models for fast simulation. Different from the intrusive MOR methods, the non-intrusive MOR does not require access to the Full Order Models (FOMs), especially system matrices. Since the non-intrusive MOR methods strongly rely on the snapshots of the FOMs, constructing good snapshot sets becomes crucial. In this work, we propose a new active learning approach with two novelties. A novel idea with our approach is the use of single-time step snapshots from the system states taken from an estimation of the reduced-state space. These states are selected using a greedy strategy supported by an error estimator based Gaussian Process Regression (GPR). Additionally, we introduce a use case-independent validation strategy based on Probably Approximately Correct (PAC) learning. In this work, we use Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) to identify the Reduced Order Model (ROM), however the method could be similarly applied to other ROM identification methods. The performance of the whole workflow is tested by a 2-D thermal conduction and a 3-D vacuum furnace model. With little required user interaction and a training strategy independent to a specific use case, the proposed method offers a huge potential for industrial usage to create so-called executable Digital Twins (DTs).
Recent times are witnessing rapid development in machine learning algorithm systems, especially in reinforcement learning, natural language processing, computer and robot vision, image processing, speech, and emotional processing and understanding. In tune with the increasing importance and relevance of machine learning models, algorithms, and their applications, and with the emergence of more innovative uses cases of deep learning and artificial intelligence, the current volume presents a few innovative research works and their applications in real world, such as stock trading, medical and healthcare systems, and software automation. The chapters in the book illustrate how machine learning and deep learning algorithms and models are designed, optimized, and deployed. The volume will be useful for advanced graduate and doctoral students, researchers, faculty members of universities, practicing data scientists and data engineers, professionals, and consultants working on the broad areas of machine learning, deep learning, and artificial intelligence.
In this paper, we propose a novel Feature Decomposition and Reconstruction Learning (FDRL) method for effective facial expression recognition. We view the expression information as the combination of the shared information (expression similarities) across different expressions and the unique information (expression-specific variations) for each expression. More specifically, FDRL mainly consists of two crucial networks: a Feature Decomposition Network (FDN) and a Feature Reconstruction Network (FRN). In particular, FDN first decomposes the basic features extracted from a backbone network into a set of facial action-aware latent features to model expression similarities. Then, FRN captures the intra-feature and inter-feature relationships for latent features to characterize expression-specific variations, and reconstructs the expression feature. To this end, two modules including an intra-feature relation modeling module and an inter-feature relation modeling module are developed in FRN. Experimental results on both the in-the-lab databases (including CK+, MMI, and Oulu-CASIA) and the in-the-wild databases (including RAF-DB and SFEW) show that the proposed FDRL method consistently achieves higher recognition accuracy than several state-of-the-art methods. This clearly highlights the benefit of feature decomposition and reconstruction for classifying expressions.
Click-through rate (CTR) prediction plays a critical role in recommender systems and online advertising. The data used in these applications are multi-field categorical data, where each feature belongs to one field. Field information is proved to be important and there are several works considering fields in their models. In this paper, we proposed a novel approach to model the field information effectively and efficiently. The proposed approach is a direct improvement of FwFM, and is named as Field-matrixed Factorization Machines (FmFM, or $FM^2$). We also proposed a new explanation of FM and FwFM within the FmFM framework, and compared it with the FFM. Besides pruning the cross terms, our model supports field-specific variable dimensions of embedding vectors, which acts as soft pruning. We also proposed an efficient way to minimize the dimension while keeping the model performance. The FmFM model can also be optimized further by caching the intermediate vectors, and it only takes thousands of floating-point operations (FLOPs) to make a prediction. Our experiment results show that it can out-perform the FFM, which is more complex. The FmFM model's performance is also comparable to DNN models which require much more FLOPs in runtime.