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Full-Text Articles in Theory and Algorithms

An Adaptive Large Neighborhood Search For The Multi-Vehicle Profitable Tour Problem With Flexible Compartments And Mandatory Customers, Vincent F. Yu, Nabila Yuraisyah Salsabila, Aldy Gunawan, Anggun Nurfitriani Handoko May 2024

An Adaptive Large Neighborhood Search For The Multi-Vehicle Profitable Tour Problem With Flexible Compartments And Mandatory Customers, Vincent F. Yu, Nabila Yuraisyah Salsabila, Aldy Gunawan, Anggun Nurfitriani Handoko

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The home-refill delivery system is a business model that addresses the concerns of plastic waste and its impact on the environment. It allows customers to pick up their household goods at their doorsteps and refill them into their own containers. However, the difficulty in accessing customers’ locations and product consolidations are undeniable challenges. To overcome these issues, we introduce a new variant of the Profitable Tour Problem, named the multi-vehicle profitable tour problem with flexible compartments and mandatory customers (MVPTPFC-MC). The objective is to maximize the difference between the total collected profit and the traveling cost. We model the proposed …


Recommendations With Minimum Exposure Guarantees: A Post-Processing Framework, Ramon Lopes, Rodrigo Alves, Antoine Ledent, Rodrygo L. T. Santos, Marius Kloft Feb 2024

Recommendations With Minimum Exposure Guarantees: A Post-Processing Framework, Ramon Lopes, Rodrigo Alves, Antoine Ledent, Rodrygo L. T. Santos, Marius Kloft

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Relevance-based ranking is a popular ingredient in recommenders, but it frequently struggles to meet fairness criteria because social and cultural norms may favor some item groups over others. For instance, some items might receive lower ratings due to some sort of bias (e.g. gender bias). A fair ranking should balance the exposure of items from advantaged and disadvantaged groups. To this end, we propose a novel post-processing framework to produce fair, exposure-aware recommendations. Our approach is based on an integer linear programming model maximizing the expected utility while satisfying a minimum exposure constraint. The model has fewer variables than previous …


Uncertainty-Adjusted Inductive Matrix Completion With Graph Neural Networks, Petr Kasalicky, Antoine Ledent, Rodrigo Alves Sep 2023

Uncertainty-Adjusted Inductive Matrix Completion With Graph Neural Networks, Petr Kasalicky, Antoine Ledent, Rodrigo Alves

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We propose a robust recommender systems model which performs matrix completion and a ratings-wise uncertainty estimation jointly. Whilst the prediction module is purely based on an implicit low-rank assumption imposed via nuclear norm regularization, our loss function is augmented by an uncertainty estimation module which learns an anomaly score for each individual rating via a Graph Neural Network: data points deemed more anomalous by the GNN are downregulated in the loss function used to train the low-rank module. The whole model is trained in an end-to-end fashion, allowing the anomaly detection module to tap on the supervised information available in …


Morphologically-Aware Vocabulary Reduction Of Word Embeddings, Chong Cher Chia, Maksim Tkachenko, Hady Wirawan Lauw Apr 2023

Morphologically-Aware Vocabulary Reduction Of Word Embeddings, Chong Cher Chia, Maksim Tkachenko, Hady Wirawan Lauw

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We propose SubText, a compression mechanism via vocabulary reduction. The crux is to judiciously select a subset of word embeddings which support the reconstruction of the remaining word embeddings based on their form alone. The proposed algorithm considers the preservation of the original embeddings, as well as a word’s relationship to other words that are morphologically or semantically similar. Comprehensive evaluation of the compressed vocabulary reveals SubText’s efficacy on diverse tasks over traditional vocabulary reduction techniques, as validated on English, as well as a collection of inflected languages.


An Efficient Annealing-Assisted Differential Evolution For Multi-Parameter Adaptive Latent Factor Analysis, Qing Li, Guansong Pang, Mingsheng Shang Dec 2022

An Efficient Annealing-Assisted Differential Evolution For Multi-Parameter Adaptive Latent Factor Analysis, Qing Li, Guansong Pang, Mingsheng Shang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A high-dimensional and incomplete (HDI) matrix is a typical representation of big data. However, advanced HDI data analysis models tend to have many extra parameters. Manual tuning of these parameters, generally adopting the empirical knowledge, unavoidably leads to additional overhead. Although variable adaptive mechanisms have been proposed, they cannot balance the exploration and exploitation with early convergence. Moreover, learning such multi-parameters brings high computational time, thereby suffering gross accuracy especially when solving a bilinear problem like conducting the commonly used latent factor analysis (LFA) on an HDI matrix. Herein, an efficient annealing-assisted differential evolution for multi-parameter adaptive latent factor analysis …


Meta-Complementing The Semantics Of Short Texts In Neural Topic Models, Ce Zhang, Hady Wirawan Lauw Nov 2022

Meta-Complementing The Semantics Of Short Texts In Neural Topic Models, Ce Zhang, Hady Wirawan Lauw

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Topic models infer latent topic distributions based on observed word co-occurrences in a text corpus. While typically a corpus contains documents of variable lengths, most previous topic models treat documents of different lengths uniformly, assuming that each document is sufficiently informative. However, shorter documents may have only a few word co-occurrences, resulting in inferior topic quality. Some other previous works assume that all documents are short, and leverage external auxiliary data, e.g., pretrained word embeddings and document connectivity. Orthogonal to existing works, we remedy this problem within the corpus itself by proposing a Meta-Complement Topic Model, which improves topic quality …


A Quality Metric For K-Means Clustering Based On Centroid Locations, Manoj Thulasidas Nov 2022

A Quality Metric For K-Means Clustering Based On Centroid Locations, Manoj Thulasidas

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

K-Means clustering algorithm does not offer a clear methodology to determine the appropriate number of clusters; it does not have a built-in mechanism for K selection. In this paper, we present a new metric for clustering quality and describe its use for K selection. The proposed metric, based on the locations of the centroids, as well as the desired properties of the clusters, is developed in two stages. In the initial stage, we take into account the full covariance matrix of the clustering variables, thereby making it mathematically similar to a reduced chi2. We then extend it to account for …


Consensus Formation On Heterogeneous Networks, Edoardo Fadda, Junda He, Claudia J. Tessone, Paolo Barucca Jun 2022

Consensus Formation On Heterogeneous Networks, Edoardo Fadda, Junda He, Claudia J. Tessone, Paolo Barucca

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Reaching consensus-a macroscopic state where the system constituents display the same microscopic state-is a necessity in multiple complex socio-technical and techno-economic systems: their correct functioning ultimately depends on it. In many distributed systems-of which blockchain-based applications are a paradigmatic example-the process of consensus formation is crucial not only for the emergence of a leading majority but for the very functioning of the system. We build a minimalistic network model of consensus formation on blockchain systems for quantifying how central nodes-with respect to their average distance to others-can leverage on their position to obtain competitive advantage in the consensus process. We …


On Discovering Motifs And Frequent Patterns In Spatial Trajectories With Discrete Fréchet Distance, Bo Tang, Man Lung Yiu, Kyriakos Mouratidis, Jiahao Zhang, Kai Wang Jan 2022

On Discovering Motifs And Frequent Patterns In Spatial Trajectories With Discrete Fréchet Distance, Bo Tang, Man Lung Yiu, Kyriakos Mouratidis, Jiahao Zhang, Kai Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The discrete Fréchet distance (DFD) captures perceptual and geographical similarity between two trajectories. It has been successfully adopted in a multitude of applications, such as signature and handwriting recognition, computer graphics, as well as geographic applications. Spatial applications, e.g., sports analysis, traffic analysis, etc. require discovering similar subtrajectories within a single trajectory or across multiple trajectories. In this paper, we adopt DFD as the similarity measure, and study two representative trajectory analysis problems, namely, motif discovery and frequent pattern discovery. Due to the time complexity of DFD, these tasks are computationally challenging. We address that challenge with a suite of …


Transformer-Based Joint Learning Approach For Text Normalization In Vietnamese Automatic Speech Recognition Systems, The Viet Bui, Tho Chi Luong, Oanh Thi Tran Jan 2022

Transformer-Based Joint Learning Approach For Text Normalization In Vietnamese Automatic Speech Recognition Systems, The Viet Bui, Tho Chi Luong, Oanh Thi Tran

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this article, we investigate the task of normalizing transcribed texts in Vietnamese Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems in order to improve user readability and the performance of downstream tasks. This task usually consists of two main sub-tasks: predicting and inserting punctuation (i.e., period, comma); and detecting and standardizing named entities (i.e., numbers, person names) from spoken forms to their appropriate written forms. To achieve these goals, we introduce a complete corpus including of 87,700 sentences and investigate conditional joint learning approaches which globally optimize two sub-tasks simultaneously. The experimental results are quite promising. Overall, the proposed architecture outperformed the …


On A Multistage Discrete Stochastic Optimization Problem With Stochastic Constraints And Nested Sampling, Thuy Anh Ta, Tien Mai, Fabian Bastin, Pierre L'Ecuyer Nov 2021

On A Multistage Discrete Stochastic Optimization Problem With Stochastic Constraints And Nested Sampling, Thuy Anh Ta, Tien Mai, Fabian Bastin, Pierre L'Ecuyer

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We consider a multistage stochastic discrete program in which constraints on any stage might involve expectations that cannot be computed easily and are approximated by simulation. We study a sample average approximation (SAA) approach that uses nested sampling, in which at each stage, a number of scenarios are examined and a number of simulation replications are performed for each scenario to estimate the next-stage constraints. This approach provides an approximate solution to the multistage problem. To establish the consistency of the SAA approach, we first consider a two-stage problem and show that in the second-stage problem, given a scenario, the …


Adaptive Posterior Knowledge Selection For Improving Knowledge-Grounded Dialogue Generation, Weichao Wang, Wei Gao, Shi Feng, Ling Chen, Daling Wang Nov 2021

Adaptive Posterior Knowledge Selection For Improving Knowledge-Grounded Dialogue Generation, Weichao Wang, Wei Gao, Shi Feng, Ling Chen, Daling Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In open-domain dialogue systems, knowledge information such as unstructured persona profiles, text descriptions and structured knowledge graph can help incorporate abundant background facts for delivering more engaging and informative responses. Existing studies attempted to model a general posterior distribution over candidate knowledge by considering the entire response utterance as a whole at the beginning of decoding process for knowledge selection. However, a single smooth distribution could fail to model the variability of knowledge selection patterns over different decoding steps, and make the knowledge expression less consistent. To remedy this issue, we propose an adaptive posterior knowledge selection framework, which sequentially …


Mmconv: An Environment For Multimodal Conversational Search Across Multiple Domains, Lizi Liao, Le Hong Long, Zheng Zhang, Minlie Huang, Tat-Seng Chua Jul 2021

Mmconv: An Environment For Multimodal Conversational Search Across Multiple Domains, Lizi Liao, Le Hong Long, Zheng Zhang, Minlie Huang, Tat-Seng Chua

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Although conversational search has become a hot topic in both dialogue research and IR community, the real breakthrough has been limited by the scale and quality of datasets available. To address this fundamental obstacle, we introduce the Multimodal Multi-domain Conversational dataset (MMConv), a fully annotated collection of human-to-human role-playing dialogues spanning over multiple domains and tasks. The contribution is two-fold. First, beyond the task-oriented multimodal dialogues among user and agent pairs, dialogues are fully annotated with dialogue belief states and dialogue acts. More importantly, we create a relatively comprehensive environment for conducting multimodal conversational search with real user settings, structured …


Urban Perception: Sensing Cities Via A Deep Interactive Multi-Task Learning Framework, Weili Guan, Zhaozheng Chen, Fuli Feng, Weifeng Liu, Liqiang Nie Apr 2021

Urban Perception: Sensing Cities Via A Deep Interactive Multi-Task Learning Framework, Weili Guan, Zhaozheng Chen, Fuli Feng, Weifeng Liu, Liqiang Nie

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Social scientists have shown evidence that visual perceptions of urban attributes, such as safe, wealthy, and beautiful perspectives of the given cities, are highly correlated to the residents' behaviors and quality of life. Despite their significance, measuring visual perceptions of urban attributes is challenging due to the following facts: (1) Visual perceptions are subjectively contradistinctive rather than absolute. (2) Perception comparisons between image pairs are usually conducted region by region, and highly related to the specific urban attributes. And (3) the urban attributes have both the shared and specific information. To address these problems, in this article, we present a …


Base-Package Recommendation Framework Based On Consumer Behaviours In Iptv Platform, Kuruparan Shanmugalingam, Ruwinda Ranganayanke, Chanka Gunawardhaha, Rajitha Navarathna Nov 2020

Base-Package Recommendation Framework Based On Consumer Behaviours In Iptv Platform, Kuruparan Shanmugalingam, Ruwinda Ranganayanke, Chanka Gunawardhaha, Rajitha Navarathna

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Internet Protocol TeleVision (IPTV) provides many services such as live television streaming, time-shifted media, and Video On Demand (VOD). However, many customers do not engage properly with their subscribed packages due to a lack of knowledge and poor guidance. Many customers fail to identify the proper IPTV service package based on their needs and to utilise their current package to the maximum. In this paper, we propose a base-package recommendation model with a novel customer scoring-meter based on customers behaviour. Initially, our paper describes an algorithm to measure customers engagement score, which illustrates a novel approach to track customer engagement …


Reducing Estimation Bias Via Triplet-Average Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient, Dongming Wu, Xingping Dong, Jianbing Shen, Steven C. H. Hoi Nov 2020

Reducing Estimation Bias Via Triplet-Average Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient, Dongming Wu, Xingping Dong, Jianbing Shen, Steven C. H. Hoi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The overestimation caused by function approximation is a well-known property in Q-learning algorithms, especially in single-critic models, which leads to poor performance in practical tasks. However, the opposite property, underestimation, which often occurs in Q-learning methods with double critics, has been largely left untouched. In this article, we investigate the underestimation phenomenon in the recent twin delay deep deterministic actor-critic algorithm and theoretically demonstrate its existence. We also observe that this underestimation bias does indeed hurt performance in various experiments. Considering the opposite properties of single-critic and double-critic methods, we propose a novel triplet-average deep deterministic policy gradient algorithm that …


Efficient Sampling Algorithms For Approximate Temporal Motif Counting, Jingjing Wang, Yanhao Wang, Wenjun Jiang, Yuchen Li, Kian-Lee Tan Oct 2020

Efficient Sampling Algorithms For Approximate Temporal Motif Counting, Jingjing Wang, Yanhao Wang, Wenjun Jiang, Yuchen Li, Kian-Lee Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A great variety of complex systems ranging from user interactions in communication networks to transactions in financial markets can be modeled as temporal graphs, which consist of a set of vertices and a series of timestamped and directed edges. Temporal motifs in temporal graphs are generalized from subgraph patterns in static graphs which take into account edge orderings and durations in addition to structures. Counting the number of occurrences of temporal motifs is a fundamental problem for temporal network analysis. However, existing methods either cannot support temporal motifs or suffer from performance issues. In this paper, we focus on approximate …


A Hybrid Framework Using A Qubo Solver For Permutation-Based Combinatorial Optimization, Siong Thye Goh, Sabrish Gopalakrishnan, Jianyuan Bo, Hoong Chuin Lau Sep 2020

A Hybrid Framework Using A Qubo Solver For Permutation-Based Combinatorial Optimization, Siong Thye Goh, Sabrish Gopalakrishnan, Jianyuan Bo, Hoong Chuin Lau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we propose a hybrid framework to solve large-scale permutation-based combinatorial problems effectively using a high-performance quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO) solver. To do so, transformations are required to change a constrained optimization model to an unconstrained model that involves parameter tuning. We propose techniques to overcome the challenges in using a QUBO solver that typically comes with limited numbers of bits. First, to smooth the energy landscape, we reduce the magnitudes of the input without compromising optimality. We propose a machine learning approach to tune the parameters for good performance effectively. To handle possible infeasibility, we introduce …


Volumetric Optimization Of Freight Cargo Loading: Case Study Of A Smu Forwarder, Tristan Lim, Michael Ser Chong Ping, Mark Goh, Shi Ying Jacelyn Tan Jul 2019

Volumetric Optimization Of Freight Cargo Loading: Case Study Of A Smu Forwarder, Tristan Lim, Michael Ser Chong Ping, Mark Goh, Shi Ying Jacelyn Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Purpose: Freight forwarders faces a challenging environment of high market volatility and margin compression risks. Hence, strategic consideration is given to undertaking capacity management and transport asset ownership to achieve longer term cost leadership. Doing so will also help to address management issues, such as better control of potential transport disruptions, improve scheduling flexibility and efficiency, and provide service level enhancement.Design/methodology/approach: The case company currently hastruck resource which is unprofitable, and the firm’s schedulers are having difficulty optimizing the loading capacity. We apply Genetic Algorithm (GA) to undertake volumetric optimization of truckcapacity and to build an easy-to-use platform to help …


Online Spatio-Temporal Matching In Stochastic And Dynamic Domains, Meghna Lowalekar, Pradeep Varakantham, Patrick Jaillet Aug 2018

Online Spatio-Temporal Matching In Stochastic And Dynamic Domains, Meghna Lowalekar, Pradeep Varakantham, Patrick Jaillet

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Online spatio-temporal matching of servers/services to customers is a problem that arises at a large scale in many domains associated with shared transportation (e.g., taxis, ride sharing, super shuttles, etc.) and delivery services (e.g., food, equipment, clothing, home fuel, etc.). A key characteristic of these problems is that the matching of servers/services to customers in one stage has a direct impact on the matching in the next stage. For instance, it is efficient for taxis to pick up customers closer to the drop off point of the customer from the first stage of matching. Traditionally, greedy/myopic approaches have been adopted …


Online Active Learning With Expert Advice, Shuji Hao, Peiying Hu, Peilin Zhao, Steven C. H. Hoi, Chunyan Miao Jul 2018

Online Active Learning With Expert Advice, Shuji Hao, Peiying Hu, Peilin Zhao, Steven C. H. Hoi, Chunyan Miao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In literature, learning with expert advice methods usually assume that a learner always obtain the true label of every incoming training instance at the end of each trial. However, in many real-world applications, acquiring the true labels of all instances can be both costly and time consuming, especially for large-scale problems. For example, in the social media, data stream usually comes in a high speed and volume, and it is nearly impossible and highly costly to label all of the instances. In this article, we address this problem with active learning with expert advice, where the ground truth of an …


A Sliding-Window Framework For Representative Subset Selection, Yanhao Wang, Yuchen Li, Kian-Lee Tan Apr 2018

A Sliding-Window Framework For Representative Subset Selection, Yanhao Wang, Yuchen Li, Kian-Lee Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Representative subset selection (RSS) is an important tool for users to draw insights from massive datasets. A common approach is to model RSS as the submodular maximization problem because the utility of extracted representatives often satisfies the "diminishing returns" property. To capture the data recency issue and support different types of constraints in real-world problems, we formulate RSS as maximizing a submodular function subject to a d-knapsack constraint (SMDK) over sliding windows. Then, we propose a novel KnapWindow framework for SMDK. Theoretically, KnapWindow is 1-ε/1+d - approximate for SMDK and achieves sublinear complexity. Finally, we evaluate the efficiency and effectiveness …


Sparse Passive-Aggressive Learning For Bounded Online Kernel Methods, Jing Lu, Doyen Sahoo, Peilin Zhao, Steven C. H. Hoi Feb 2018

Sparse Passive-Aggressive Learning For Bounded Online Kernel Methods, Jing Lu, Doyen Sahoo, Peilin Zhao, Steven C. H. Hoi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

One critical deficiency of traditional online kernel learning methods is their unbounded and growing number of support vectors in the online learning process, making them inefficient and non-scalable for large-scale applications. Recent studies on scalable online kernel learning have attempted to overcome this shortcoming, e.g., by imposing a constant budget on the number of support vectors. Although they attempt to bound the number of support vectors at each online learning iteration, most of them fail to bound the number of support vectors for the final output hypothesis, which is often obtained by averaging the series of hypotheses over all the …


Second-Order Online Active Learning And Its Applications, Shuji Hao, Jing Lu, Peilin Zhao, Chi Zhang, Steven C. H. Hoi, Chunyan Miao Nov 2017

Second-Order Online Active Learning And Its Applications, Shuji Hao, Jing Lu, Peilin Zhao, Chi Zhang, Steven C. H. Hoi, Chunyan Miao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The goal of online active learning is to learn predictive models from a sequence of unlabeled data given limited label querybudget. Unlike conventional online learning tasks, online active learning is considerably more challenging because of two reasons.Firstly, it is difficult to design an effective query strategy to decide when is appropriate to query the label of an incoming instance givenlimited query budget. Secondly, it is also challenging to decide how to update the predictive models effectively whenever the true labelof an instance is queried. Most existing approaches for online active learning are often based on a family of first-order online …


Modeling Trajectories With Recurrent Neural Networks, Hao Wu, Ziyang Chen, Weiwei Sun, Baihua Zheng, Wei Wang Aug 2017

Modeling Trajectories With Recurrent Neural Networks, Hao Wu, Ziyang Chen, Weiwei Sun, Baihua Zheng, Wei Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Modeling trajectory data is a building block for many smart-mobility initiatives. Existing approaches apply shallow models such as Markov chain and inverse reinforcement learning to model trajectories, which cannot capture the long-term dependencies. On the other hand, deep models such as Recurrent Neura lNetwork (RNN) have demonstrated their strength of modeling variable length sequences. However, directly adopting RNN to model trajectories is not appropriate because of the unique topological constraints faced by trajectories. Motivated by these findings, we design two RNN-based models which can make full advantage of the strength of RNN to capture variable length sequence and meanwhile to …


Compress: A Comprehensive Framework Of Trajectory Compression In Road Networks, Yunheng Han, Weiwei Sun, Baihua Zheng Jun 2017

Compress: A Comprehensive Framework Of Trajectory Compression In Road Networks, Yunheng Han, Weiwei Sun, Baihua Zheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

More and more advanced technologies have become available to collect and integrate an unprecedented amount of data from multiple sources, including GPS trajectories about the traces of moving objects. Given the fact that GPS trajectories are vast in size while the information carried by the trajectories could be redundant, we focus on trajectory compression in this article. As a systematic solution, we propose a comprehensive framework, namely, COMPRESS (Comprehensive Paralleled Road-Network-Based Trajectory Compression), to compress GPS trajectory data in an urban road network. In the preprocessing step, COMPRESS decomposes trajectories into spatial paths and temporal sequences, with a thorough justification …


Seapot-Rl: Selective Exploration Algorithm For Policy Transfer In Rl, Akshay Narayan, Zhuoru Li, Tze-Yun Leong Feb 2017

Seapot-Rl: Selective Exploration Algorithm For Policy Transfer In Rl, Akshay Narayan, Zhuoru Li, Tze-Yun Leong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We propose a new method for transferring a policy from a source task to a target task in model-based reinforcement learning. Our work is motivated by scenarios where a robotic agent operates in similar but challenging environments, such as hospital wards, differentiated by structural arrangements or obstacles, such as furniture. We address problems that require fast responses adapted from incomplete, prior knowledge of the agent in new scenarios. We present an efficient selective exploration strategy that maximally reuses the source task policy. Reuse efficiency is effected through identifying sub-spaces that are different in the target environment, thus limiting the exploration …


Finding Causality And Responsibility For Probabilistic Reverse Skyline Query Non-Answers, Yunjun Gao, Qing Liu, Gang Cheng, Linlin Zhou, Baihua Zheng Nov 2016

Finding Causality And Responsibility For Probabilistic Reverse Skyline Query Non-Answers, Yunjun Gao, Qing Liu, Gang Cheng, Linlin Zhou, Baihua Zheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Causality and responsibility is an essential tool in the database community for providing intuitive explanations for answers/non-answers to queries. Causality denotes the causes for the answers/non-answers to queries, and responsibility represents the degree of a cause which reflects its influence on the answers/non-answers to queries. In this paper, we study the causality and responsibility problem (CRP) for the non-answers to probabilistic reverse skyline queries (PRSQ). We first formalize CRP on PRSQ, and then, we propose an efficient algorithm termed as CP to compute the causality and responsibility for the non-answers to PRSQ. CP first finds candidate causes, and then, it …


A Core Task Abstraction Approach To Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning [Extended Abstract], Zhuoru Li, Akshay Narayan, Tze-Yun Leong May 2016

A Core Task Abstraction Approach To Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning [Extended Abstract], Zhuoru Li, Akshay Narayan, Tze-Yun Leong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We propose a new, core task abstraction (CTA) approach to learning the relevant transition functions in model-based hierarchical reinforcement learning. CTA exploits contextual independences of the state variables conditional on the task-specific actions; its promising performance is demonstrated through a set of benchmark problems.


Message Passing For Collective Graphical Models, Tao Sun, Daniel Sheldon, Akshat Kumar Jul 2015

Message Passing For Collective Graphical Models, Tao Sun, Daniel Sheldon, Akshat Kumar

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Collective graphical models (CGMs) are a formalism for inference and learning about a population of independent and identically distributed individuals when only noisy aggregate data are available. We highlight a close connection between approximate MAP inference in CGMs and marginal inference in standard graphical models. The connection leads us to derive a novel Belief Propagation (BP) style algorithm for collective graphical models. Mathematically, the algorithm is a strict generalization of BP—it can be viewed as an extension to minimize the Bethe free energy plus additional energy terms that are non-linear functions of the marginals. For CGMs, the algorithm is much …