In recent times, significant advancements have been made in delving into the optimization landscape of policy gradient methods for achieving optimal control in linear time-invariant (LTI) systems. Compared with state-feedback control, output-feedback control is more prevalent since the underlying state of the system may not be fully observed in many practical settings. This paper analyzes the optimization landscape inherent to policy gradient methods when applied to static output feedback (SOF) control in discrete-time LTI systems subject to quadratic cost. We begin by establishing crucial properties of the SOF cost, encompassing coercivity, L-smoothness, and M-Lipschitz continuous Hessian. Despite the absence of convexity, we leverage these properties to derive novel findings regarding convergence (and nearly dimension-free rate) to stationary points for three policy gradient methods, including the vanilla policy gradient method, the natural policy gradient method, and the Gauss-Newton method. Moreover, we provide proof that the vanilla policy gradient method exhibits linear convergence towards local minima when initialized near such minima. The paper concludes by presenting numerical examples that validate our theoretical findings. These results not only characterize the performance of gradient descent for optimizing the SOF problem but also provide insights into the effectiveness of general policy gradient methods within the realm of reinforcement learning.
This study presents a novel approach to assessing food security risks at the national level, employing a probabilistic scenario-based framework that integrates both Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSP) and Representative Concentration Pathways (RCP). This innovative method allows each scenario, encompassing socio-economic and climate factors, to be treated as a model capable of generating diverse trajectories. This approach offers a more dynamic understanding of food security risks under varying future conditions. The paper details the methodologies employed, showcasing their applicability through a focused analysis of food security challenges in Egypt and Ethiopia, and underscores the importance of considering a spectrum of socio-economic and climatic factors in national food security assessments.
This article intends to systematically identify and comparatively analyze state-of-the-art supply chain (SC) forecasting strategies and technologies. A novel framework has been proposed incorporating Big Data Analytics in SC Management (problem identification, data sources, exploratory data analysis, machine-learning model training, hyperparameter tuning, performance evaluation, and optimization), forecasting effects on human-workforce, inventory, and overall SC. Initially, the need to collect data according to SC strategy and how to collect them has been discussed. The article discusses the need for different types of forecasting according to the period or SC objective. The SC KPIs and the error-measurement systems have been recommended to optimize the top-performing model. The adverse effects of phantom inventory on forecasting and the dependence of managerial decisions on the SC KPIs for determining model performance parameters and improving operations management, transparency, and planning efficiency have been illustrated. The cyclic connection within the framework introduces preprocessing optimization based on the post-process KPIs, optimizing the overall control process (inventory management, workforce determination, cost, production and capacity planning). The contribution of this research lies in the standard SC process framework proposal, recommended forecasting data analysis, forecasting effects on SC performance, machine learning algorithms optimization followed, and in shedding light on future research.
In real-world scenarios, trusted execution environments (TEEs) frequently host applications that lack the trust of the infrastructure provider, as well as data owners who have specifically outsourced their data for remote processing. We present Twine, a trusted runtime for running WebAssembly-compiled applications within TEEs, establishing a two-way sandbox. Twine leverages memory safety guarantees of WebAssembly (Wasm) and abstracts the complexity of TEEs, empowering the execution of legacy and language-agnostic applications. It extends the standard WebAssembly system interface (WASI), providing controlled OS services, focusing on I/O. Additionally, through built-in TEE mechanisms, Twine delivers attestation capabilities to ensure the integrity of the runtime and the OS services supplied to the application. We evaluate its performance using general-purpose benchmarks and real-world applications, showing it compares on par with state-of-the-art solutions. A case study involving fintech company Credora reveals that Twine can be deployed in production with reasonable performance trade-offs, ranging from a 0.7x slowdown to a 1.17x speedup compared to native run time. Finally, we identify performance improvement through library optimisation, showcasing one such adjustment that leads up to 4.1x speedup. Twine is open-source and has been upstreamed into the original Wasm runtime, WAMR.
Handwriting recognition is a key technology for accessing the content of old manuscripts, helping to preserve cultural heritage. Deep learning shows an impressive performance in solving this task. However, to achieve its full potential, it requires a large amount of labeled data, which is difficult to obtain for ancient languages and scripts. Often, a trade-off has to be made between ground truth quantity and quality, as is the case for the recently introduced Bullinger database. It contains an impressive amount of over a hundred thousand labeled text line images of mostly premodern German and Latin texts that were obtained by automatically aligning existing page-level transcriptions with text line images. However, the alignment process introduces systematic errors, such as wrongly hyphenated words. In this paper, we investigate the impact of such errors on training and evaluation and suggest means to detect and correct typical alignment errors.
To meet the demands for more adaptable and expedient approaches to augment both research and manufacturing, we report an autonomous system using real-time in-situ characterization and an autonomous, decision-making processer based on an active learning algorithm. This system was applied to a plastic film forming system to highlight its efficiency and accuracy in determining the process conditions for specified target film dimensions, importantly, without any human intervention. Application of this system towards nine distinct film dimensions demonstrated the system ability to quickly determine the appropriate and stable process conditions (average 11 characterization-adjustment iterations, 19 minutes) and the ability to avoid traps, such as repetitive over-correction. Furthermore, comparison of the achieved film dimensions to the target values showed a high accuracy (R2 = 0.87, 0.90) for film width and thickness, respectively. In addition, the use of an active learning algorithm afforded our system to proceed optimization with zero initial training data, which was unavailable due to the complex relationships between the control factors (material supply rate, applied force, material viscosity) within the plastic forming process. As our system is intrinsically general and can be applied to any most material processes, these results have significant implications in accelerating both research and industrial processes.
Intelligent transportation systems play a crucial role in modern traffic management and optimization, greatly improving traffic efficiency and safety. With the rapid development of generative artificial intelligence (Generative AI) technologies in the fields of image generation and natural language processing, generative AI has also played a crucial role in addressing key issues in intelligent transportation systems, such as data sparsity, difficulty in observing abnormal scenarios, and in modeling data uncertainty. In this review, we systematically investigate the relevant literature on generative AI techniques in addressing key issues in different types of tasks in intelligent transportation systems. First, we introduce the principles of different generative AI techniques, and their potential applications. Then, we classify tasks in intelligent transportation systems into four types: traffic perception, traffic prediction, traffic simulation, and traffic decision-making. We systematically illustrate how generative AI techniques addresses key issues in these four different types of tasks. Finally, we summarize the challenges faced in applying generative AI to intelligent transportation systems, and discuss future research directions based on different application scenarios.
This article intends to systematically identify and comparatively analyze state-of-the-art supply chain (SC) forecasting strategies and technologies. A novel framework has been proposed incorporating Big Data Analytics in SC Management (problem identification, data sources, exploratory data analysis, machine-learning model training, hyperparameter tuning, performance evaluation, and optimization), forecasting effects on human-workforce, inventory, and overall SC. Initially, the need to collect data according to SC strategy and how to collect them has been discussed. The article discusses the need for different types of forecasting according to the period or SC objective. The SC KPIs and the error-measurement systems have been recommended to optimize the top-performing model. The adverse effects of phantom inventory on forecasting and the dependence of managerial decisions on the SC KPIs for determining model performance parameters and improving operations management, transparency, and planning efficiency have been illustrated. The cyclic connection within the framework introduces preprocessing optimization based on the post-process KPIs, optimizing the overall control process (inventory management, workforce determination, cost, production and capacity planning). The contribution of this research lies in the standard SC process framework proposal, recommended forecasting data analysis, forecasting effects on SC performance, machine learning algorithms optimization followed, and in shedding light on future research.
In recent years, the security issues of artificial intelligence have become increasingly prominent due to the rapid development of deep learning research and applications. Backdoor attack is an attack targeting the vulnerability of deep learning models, where hidden backdoors are activated by triggers embedded by the attacker, thereby outputting malicious predictions that may not align with the intended output for a given input. In this work, we propose a novel black-box backdoor attack based on machine unlearning. The attacker first augments the training set with carefully designed samples, including poison and mitigation data, to train a `benign' model. Then, the attacker posts unlearning requests for the mitigation samples to remove the impact of relevant data on the model, gradually activating the hidden backdoor. Since backdoors are implanted during the iterative unlearning process, it significantly increases the computational overhead of existing defense methods for backdoor detection or mitigation. To address this new security threat, we proposes two methods for detecting or mitigating such malicious unlearning requests. We conduct the experiment in both exact unlearning and approximate unlearning (i.e., SISA) settings. Experimental results indicate that: 1) our attack approach can successfully implant backdoor into the model, and sharding increases the difficult of attack; 2) our detection algorithms are effective in identifying the mitigation samples, while sharding reduces the effectiveness of our detection algorithms.
Despite the advancement of machine learning techniques in recent years, state-of-the-art systems lack robustness to "real world" events, where the input distributions and tasks encountered by the deployed systems will not be limited to the original training context, and systems will instead need to adapt to novel distributions and tasks while deployed. This critical gap may be addressed through the development of "Lifelong Learning" systems that are capable of 1) Continuous Learning, 2) Transfer and Adaptation, and 3) Scalability. Unfortunately, efforts to improve these capabilities are typically treated as distinct areas of research that are assessed independently, without regard to the impact of each separate capability on other aspects of the system. We instead propose a holistic approach, using a suite of metrics and an evaluation framework to assess Lifelong Learning in a principled way that is agnostic to specific domains or system techniques. Through five case studies, we show that this suite of metrics can inform the development of varied and complex Lifelong Learning systems. We highlight how the proposed suite of metrics quantifies performance trade-offs present during Lifelong Learning system development - both the widely discussed Stability-Plasticity dilemma and the newly proposed relationship between Sample Efficient and Robust Learning. Further, we make recommendations for the formulation and use of metrics to guide the continuing development of Lifelong Learning systems and assess their progress in the future.
In pace with developments in the research field of artificial intelligence, knowledge graphs (KGs) have attracted a surge of interest from both academia and industry. As a representation of semantic relations between entities, KGs have proven to be particularly relevant for natural language processing (NLP), experiencing a rapid spread and wide adoption within recent years. Given the increasing amount of research work in this area, several KG-related approaches have been surveyed in the NLP research community. However, a comprehensive study that categorizes established topics and reviews the maturity of individual research streams remains absent to this day. Contributing to closing this gap, we systematically analyzed 507 papers from the literature on KGs in NLP. Our survey encompasses a multifaceted review of tasks, research types, and contributions. As a result, we present a structured overview of the research landscape, provide a taxonomy of tasks, summarize our findings, and highlight directions for future work.