In solving multi-modal, multi-objective optimization problems (MMOPs), the objective is not only to find a good representation of the Pareto-optimal front (PF) in the objective space but also to find all equivalent Pareto-optimal subsets (PSS) in the variable space. Such problems are practically relevant when a decision maker (DM) is interested in identifying alternative designs with similar performance. There has been significant research interest in recent years to develop efficient algorithms to deal with MMOPs. However, the existing algorithms still require prohibitive number of function evaluations (often in several thousands) to deal with problems involving as low as two objectives and two variables. The algorithms are typically embedded with sophisticated, customized mechanisms that require additional parameters to manage the diversity and convergence in the variable and the objective spaces. In this letter, we introduce a steady-state evolutionary algorithm for solving MMOPs, with a simple design and no additional userdefined parameters that need tuning compared to a standard EA. We report its performance on 21 MMOPs from various test suites that are widely used for benchmarking using a low computational budget of 1000 function evaluations. The performance of the proposed algorithm is compared with six state-of-the-art algorithms (MO Ring PSO SCD, DN-NSGAII, TriMOEA-TA&R, CPDEA, MMOEA/DC and MMEA-WI). The proposed algorithm exhibits significantly better performance than the above algorithms based on the established metrics including IGDX, PSP and IGD. We hope this study would encourage design of simple, efficient and generalized algorithms to improve its uptake for practical applications.
Recent advances in natural language processing (NLP) have led to strong text classification models for many tasks. However, still often thousands of examples are needed to train models with good quality. This makes it challenging to quickly develop and deploy new models for real world problems and business needs. Few-shot learning and active learning are two lines of research, aimed at tackling this problem. In this work, we combine both lines into FASL, a platform that allows training text classification models using an iterative and fast process. We investigate which active learning methods work best in our few-shot setup. Additionally, we develop a model to predict when to stop annotating. This is relevant as in a few-shot setup we do not have access to a large validation set.
We introduce a new constrained optimization method for policy gradient reinforcement learning, which uses two trust regions to regulate each policy update. In addition to using the proximity of one single old policy as the first trust region as done by prior works, we propose to form a second trust region through the construction of another virtual policy that represents a wide range of past policies. We then enforce the new policy to stay closer to the virtual policy, which is beneficial in case the old policy performs badly. More importantly, we propose a mechanism to automatically build the virtual policy from a memory buffer of past policies, providing a new capability for dynamically selecting appropriate trust regions during the optimization process. Our proposed method, dubbed as Memory-Constrained Policy Optimization (MCPO), is examined on a diverse suite of environments including robotic locomotion control, navigation with sparse rewards and Atari games, consistently demonstrating competitive performance against recent on-policy constrained policy gradient methods.
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.
Imitation learning is a promising approach to help robots acquire dexterous manipulation capabilities without the need for a carefully-designed reward or a significant computational effort. However, existing imitation learning approaches require sophisticated data collection infrastructure and struggle to generalize beyond the training distribution. One way to address this limitation is to gather additional data that better represents the full operating conditions. In this work, we investigate characteristics of such additional demonstrations and their impact on performance. Specifically, we study the effects of corrective and randomly-sampled additional demonstrations on learning a policy that guides a five-fingered robot hand through a pick-and-place task. Our results suggest that corrective demonstrations considerably outperform randomly-sampled demonstrations, when the proportion of additional demonstrations sampled from the full task distribution is larger than the number of original demonstrations sampled from a restrictive training distribution. Conversely, when the number of original demonstrations are higher than that of additional demonstrations, we find no significant differences between corrective and randomly-sampled additional demonstrations. These results provide insights into the inherent trade-off between the effort required to collect corrective demonstrations and their relative benefits over randomly-sampled demonstrations. Additionally, we show that inexpensive vision-based sensors, such as LeapMotion, can be used to dramatically reduce the cost of providing demonstrations for dexterous manipulation tasks. Our code is available at //github.com/GT-STAR-Lab/corrective-demos-dexterous-manipulation.
We demonstrate that merely analog transmissions and match filtering can realize the function of an edge server in federated learning (FL). Therefore, a network with massively distributed user equipments (UEs) can achieve large-scale FL without an edge server. We also develop a training algorithm that allows UEs to continuously perform local computing without being interrupted by the global parameter uploading, which exploits the full potential of UEs' processing power. We derive convergence rates for the proposed schemes to quantify their training efficiency. The analyses reveal that when the interference obeys a Gaussian distribution, the proposed algorithm retrieves the convergence rate of a server-based FL. But if the interference distribution is heavy-tailed, then the heavier the tail, the slower the algorithm converges. Nonetheless, the system run time can be largely reduced by enabling computation in parallel with communication, whereas the gain is particularly pronounced when communication latency is high. These findings are corroborated via excessive simulations.
Most existing works of polar codes focus on the analysis of block error probability. However, in many scenarios, bit error probability is also important for evaluating the performance of channel codes. In this paper, we establish a new framework to analyze the bit error probability of polar codes. Specifically, by revisiting the error event of bit-channel, we first introduce the conditional bit error probability as a metric to evaluate the reliability of bit-channel for both systematic and non-systematic polar codes. Guided by the concept of polar subcode, we then derive an upper bound on the conditional bit error probability of each bit-channel, and accordingly, an upper bound on the bit error probability of polar codes. Based on these, two types of construction metrics aiming at minimizing the bit error probability of polar codes are proposed, which are of linear computational complexity and explicit forms. Simulation results show that the polar codes constructed by the proposed methods can outperform those constructed by the conventional methods.
Decomposition-based evolutionary algorithms have become fairly popular for many-objective optimization in recent years. However, the existing decomposition methods still are quite sensitive to the various shapes of frontiers of many-objective optimization problems (MaOPs). On the one hand, the cone decomposition methods such as the penalty-based boundary intersection (PBI) are incapable of acquiring uniform frontiers for MaOPs with very convex frontiers. On the other hand, the parallel reference lines of the parallel decomposition methods including the normal boundary intersection (NBI) might result in poor diversity because of under-sampling near the boundaries for MaOPs with concave frontiers. In this paper, a collaborative decomposition method is first proposed to integrate the advantages of parallel decomposition and cone decomposition to overcome their respective disadvantages. This method inherits the NBI-style Tchebycheff function as a convergence measure to heighten the convergence and uniformity of distribution of the PBI method. Moreover, this method also adaptively tunes the extent of rotating an NBI reference line towards a PBI reference line for every subproblem to enhance the diversity of distribution of the NBI method. Furthermore, a collaborative decomposition-based evolutionary algorithm (CoDEA) is presented for many-objective optimization. A collaborative decomposition-based environmental selection mechanism is primarily designed in CoDEA to rank all the individuals associated with the same PBI reference line in the boundary layer and pick out the best ranks. CoDEA is compared with several popular algorithms on 85 benchmark test instances. The experimental results show that CoDEA achieves high competitiveness benefiting from the collaborative decomposition maintaining a good balance among the convergence, uniformity, and diversity of distribution.
Multi-object tracking (MOT) is a crucial component of situational awareness in military defense applications. With the growing use of unmanned aerial systems (UASs), MOT methods for aerial surveillance is in high demand. Application of MOT in UAS presents specific challenges such as moving sensor, changing zoom levels, dynamic background, illumination changes, obscurations and small objects. In this work, we present a robust object tracking architecture aimed to accommodate for the noise in real-time situations. We propose a kinematic prediction model, called Deep Extended Kalman Filter (DeepEKF), in which a sequence-to-sequence architecture is used to predict entity trajectories in latent space. DeepEKF utilizes a learned image embedding along with an attention mechanism trained to weight the importance of areas in an image to predict future states. For the visual scoring, we experiment with different similarity measures to calculate distance based on entity appearances, including a convolutional neural network (CNN) encoder, pre-trained using Siamese networks. In initial evaluation experiments, we show that our method, combining scoring structure of the kinematic and visual models within a MHT framework, has improved performance especially in edge cases where entity motion is unpredictable, or the data presents frames with significant gaps.
Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have recently achieved great success in many visual recognition tasks. However, existing deep neural network models are computationally expensive and memory intensive, hindering their deployment in devices with low memory resources or in applications with strict latency requirements. Therefore, a natural thought is to perform model compression and acceleration in deep networks without significantly decreasing the model performance. During the past few years, tremendous progress has been made in this area. In this paper, we survey the recent advanced techniques for compacting and accelerating CNNs model developed. These techniques are roughly categorized into four schemes: parameter pruning and sharing, low-rank factorization, transferred/compact convolutional filters, and knowledge distillation. Methods of parameter pruning and sharing will be described at the beginning, after that the other techniques will be introduced. For each scheme, we provide insightful analysis regarding the performance, related applications, advantages, and drawbacks etc. Then we will go through a few very recent additional successful methods, for example, dynamic capacity networks and stochastic depths networks. After that, we survey the evaluation matrix, the main datasets used for evaluating the model performance and recent benchmarking efforts. Finally, we conclude this paper, discuss remaining challenges and possible directions on this topic.