scholarly journals An Efficient Evolutionary Algorithm for Subset Selection with General Cost Constraints

2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (04) ◽  
pp. 3267-3274
Author(s):  
Chao Bian ◽  
Chao Feng ◽  
Chao Qian ◽  
Yang Yu

In this paper, we study the problem of selecting a subset from a ground set to maximize a monotone objective function f such that a monotone cost function c is bounded by an upper limit. State-of-the-art algorithms include the generalized greedy algorithm and POMC. The former is an efficient fixed time algorithm, but the performance is limited by the greedy nature. The latter is an anytime algorithm that can find better subsets using more time, but without any polynomial-time approximation guarantee. In this paper, we propose a new anytime algorithm EAMC, which employs a simple evolutionary algorithm to optimize a surrogate objective integrating f and c. We prove that EAMC achieves the best known approximation guarantee in polynomial expected running time. Experimental results on the applications of maximum coverage, influence maximization and sensor placement show the excellent performance of EAMC.

Author(s):  
Chao Qian ◽  
Jing-Cheng Shi ◽  
Yang Yu ◽  
Ke Tang ◽  
Zhi-Hua Zhou

This paper considers the problem of minimizing the ratio of two set functions, i.e., $f/g$. Previous work assumed monotone and submodular of the two functions, while we consider a more general situation where $g$ is not necessarily submodular. We derive that the greedy approach GreedRatio, as a fixed time algorithm, achieves a $\frac{|X^*|}{(1+(|X^*| \textendash 1)(1 \textendash \kappa_f))\gamma(g)}$ approximation ratio, which also improves the previous bound for submodular $g$. If more time can be spent, we present the PORM algorithm, an anytime randomized iterative approach minimizing $f$ and $\textendash g$ simultaneously. We show that PORM using reasonable time has the same general approximation guarantee as GreedRatio, but can achieve better solutions in cases and applications.


2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (6) ◽  
pp. 847-856
Author(s):  
Shengbing Ren ◽  
Xiang Zhang

The problem of synthesizing adequate inductive invariants lies at the heart of automated software verification. The state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms for synthesizing invariants have gradually shown its excellent performance. However, synthesizing disjunctive invariants is a difficult task. In this paper, we propose a method k++ Support Vector Machine (SVM) integrating k-means++ and SVM to synthesize conjunctive and disjunctive invariants. At first, given a program, we start with executing the program to collect program states. Next, k++SVM adopts k-means++ to cluster the positive samples and then applies SVM to distinguish each positive sample cluster from all negative samples to synthesize the candidate invariants. Finally, a set of theories founded on Hoare logic are adopted to check whether the candidate invariants are true invariants. If the candidate invariants fail the check, we should sample more states and repeat our algorithm. The experimental results show that k++SVM is compatible with the algorithms for Intersection Of Half-space (IOH) and more efficient than the tool of Interproc. Furthermore, it is shown that our method can synthesize conjunctive and disjunctive invariants automatically


Author(s):  
Mingliang Xu ◽  
Qingfeng Li ◽  
Jianwei Niu ◽  
Hao Su ◽  
Xiting Liu ◽  
...  

Quick response (QR) codes are usually scanned in different environments, so they must be robust to variations in illumination, scale, coverage, and camera angles. Aesthetic QR codes improve the visual quality, but subtle changes in their appearance may cause scanning failure. In this article, a new method to generate scanning-robust aesthetic QR codes is proposed, which is based on a module-based scanning probability estimation model that can effectively balance the tradeoff between visual quality and scanning robustness. Our method locally adjusts the luminance of each module by estimating the probability of successful sampling. The approach adopts the hierarchical, coarse-to-fine strategy to enhance the visual quality of aesthetic QR codes, which sequentially generate the following three codes: a binary aesthetic QR code, a grayscale aesthetic QR code, and the final color aesthetic QR code. Our approach also can be used to create QR codes with different visual styles by adjusting some initialization parameters. User surveys and decoding experiments were adopted for evaluating our method compared with state-of-the-art algorithms, which indicates that the proposed approach has excellent performance in terms of both visual quality and scanning robustness.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Cauã Roca Antunes ◽  
Alexandre Rademaker ◽  
Mara Abel

Ontologies are computational artifacts that model consensual aspects of reality. In distributed contexts, applications often need to utilize information from several distinct ontologies. In order to integrate multiple ontologies, entities modeled in each ontology must be matched through an ontology alignment. However, imperfect alignments may introduce inconsistencies. One kind of inconsistency, which is often introduced, is the violation of the conservativity principle, that states that the alignment should not introduce new subsumption relations between entities from the same source ontology. We propose a two-step quadratic-time algorithm for automatically correcting such violations, and evaluate it against datasets from the Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative 2019, comparing the results to a state-of-the-art approach. The proposed algorithm was significantly faster and less aggressive; that is, it performed fewer modifications over the original alignment when compared to the state-of-the-art algorithm.


2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 21
Author(s):  
Roland Perko ◽  
Manfred Klopschitz ◽  
Alexander Almer ◽  
Peter M. Roth

Many scientific studies deal with person counting and density estimation from single images. Recently, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been applied for these tasks. Even though often better results are reported, it is often not clear where the improvements are resulting from, and if the proposed approaches would generalize. Thus, the main goal of this paper was to identify the critical aspects of these tasks and to show how these limit state-of-the-art approaches. Based on these findings, we show how to mitigate these limitations. To this end, we implemented a CNN-based baseline approach, which we extended to deal with identified problems. These include the discovery of bias in the reference data sets, ambiguity in ground truth generation, and mismatching of evaluation metrics w.r.t. the training loss function. The experimental results show that our modifications allow for significantly outperforming the baseline in terms of the accuracy of person counts and density estimation. In this way, we get a deeper understanding of CNN-based person density estimation beyond the network architecture. Furthermore, our insights would allow to advance the field of person density estimation in general by highlighting current limitations in the evaluation protocols.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fei Qi ◽  
Zhaohui Xia ◽  
Gaoyang Tang ◽  
Hang Yang ◽  
Yu Song ◽  
...  

As an emerging field, Automated Machine Learning (AutoML) aims to reduce or eliminate manual operations that require expertise in machine learning. In this paper, a graph-based architecture is employed to represent flexible combinations of ML models, which provides a large searching space compared to tree-based and stacking-based architectures. Based on this, an evolutionary algorithm is proposed to search for the best architecture, where the mutation and heredity operators are the key for architecture evolution. With Bayesian hyper-parameter optimization, the proposed approach can automate the workflow of machine learning. On the PMLB dataset, the proposed approach shows the state-of-the-art performance compared with TPOT, Autostacker, and auto-sklearn. Some of the optimized models are with complex structures which are difficult to obtain in manual design.


2003 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-167 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Toffolo ◽  
Ernesto Benini

A key feature of an efficient and reliable multi-objective evolutionary algorithm is the ability to maintain genetic diversity within a population of solutions. In this paper, we present a new diversity-preserving mechanism, the Genetic Diversity Evaluation Method (GeDEM), which considers a distance-based measure of genetic diversity as a real objective in fitness assignment. This provides a dual selection pressure towards the exploitation of current non-dominated solutions and the exploration of the search space. We also introduce a new multi-objective evolutionary algorithm, the Genetic Diversity Evolutionary Algorithm (GDEA), strictly designed around GeDEM and then we compare it with other state-of-the-art algorithms on a well-established suite of test problems. Experimental results clearly indicate that the performance of GDEA is top-level.


Author(s):  
Wentao Ding ◽  
Guanji Gao ◽  
Linfeng Shi ◽  
Yuzhong Qu

Recognizing time expressions is a fundamental and important task in many applications of natural language understanding, such as reading comprehension and question answering. Several newest state-of-the-art approaches have achieved good performance on recognizing time expressions. These approaches are black-boxed or based on heuristic rules, which leads to the difficulty in understanding the temporal information. On the contrary, classic rule-based or semantic parsing approaches can capture rich structural information, but their performances on recognition are not so good. In this paper, we propose a pattern-based approach, called PTime, which automatically generates and selects patterns for recognizing time expressions. In this approach, time expressions in training text are abstracted into type sequences by using fine-grained token types, thus the problem is transformed to select an appropriate subset of the sequential patterns. We use the Extended Budgeted Maximum Coverage (EBMC) model to optimize the pattern selection. The main idea is to maximize the correct token sequences matched by the selected patterns while the number of the mistakes should be limited by an adjustable budget. The interpretability of patterns and the adjustability of permitted number of mistakes make PTime a very promising approach for many applications. Experimental results show that PTime achieves a very competitive performance as compared with existing state-of-the-art approaches.


Author(s):  
Rung-Tzuo Liaw ◽  
Chuan-Kang Ting

Evolutionary multitasking is a significant emerging search paradigm that utilizes evolutionary algorithms to concurrently optimize multiple tasks. The multi-factorial evolutionary algorithm renders an effectual realization of evolutionary multitasking on two or three tasks. However, there remains room for improvement on the performance and capability of evolutionary multitasking. Beyond three tasks, this paper proposes a novel framework, called the symbiosis in biocoenosis optimization (SBO), to address evolutionary many-tasking optimization. The SBO leverages the notion of symbiosis in biocoenosis for transferring information and knowledge among different tasks through three major components: 1) transferring information through inter-task individual replacement, 2) measuring symbiosis through intertask paired evaluations, and 3) coordinating the frequency and quantity of transfer based on symbiosis in biocoenosis. The inter-task individual replacement with paired evaluations caters for estimation of symbiosis, while the symbiosis in biocoenosis provides a good estimator of transfer. This study examines the effectiveness and efficiency of the SBO on a suite of many-tasking benchmark problems, designed to deal with 30 tasks simultaneously. The experimental results show that SBO leads to better solutions and faster convergence than the state-of-the-art evolutionary multitasking algorithms. Moreover, the results indicate that SBO is highly capable of identifying the similarity between problems and transferring information appropriately.


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