Proactive and Reactive Coordination of Non-dedicated Agent Teams Operating in Uncertain Environments

Domains such as disaster rescue, security patrolling etc. often feature dynamic environments where allocations of tasks to agents become ineffective due to unforeseen conditions that may require agents to leave the team. Agents leave the team either due to arrival of high priority tasks (e.g., emergency, accident or violation) or due to some damage to the agent. Existing research in task allocation has only considered fixed number of agents and in some instances arrival of new agents on the team. However, there is little or no literature that considers situations where agents leave the team after task allocation. To that end, we first provide a general model to represent non-dedicated teams. Second, we provide a proactive approach based on sample average approximation to generate a strategy that works well across different feasible scenarios of agents leaving the team. Furthermore, we also provide a 2-stage approach that provides a 2-stage policy that changes allocation based on observed state of the team. Third, we provide a reactive approach that rearranges the allocated tasks to better adapt to leaving agents. Finally, we provide a detailed evaluation of our approaches on existing benchmark problems.

Enhancing the Unified Features to Locate Buggy Files by Exploiting the Sequential Nature of Source Code

Bug reports provide an effective way for end-users to disclose potential bugs hidden in a software system, while automatically locating the potential buggy source files according to a bug report remains a great challenge in software maintenance. Many previous approaches represent bug reports and source code from lexical and structural information correlated their relevance by measuring their similarity, and recently a CNN-based model is proposed to learn the unified features for bug localization, which overcomes the difficulty in modeling natural and programming languages with different structural semantics. However, previous studies fail to capture the sequential nature of source code, which carries additional semantics beyond the lexical and structural terms and such information is vital in modeling program functionalities and behaviors. In this paper, we propose a novel model LS-CNN, which enhances the unified features by exploiting the sequential nature of source code. LS-CNN combines CNN and LSTM to extract semantic features for automatically identifying potential buggy source code according to a bug report. Experimental results on widely-used software projects indicate that LS-CNN significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in locating buggy files.

Lessons from the Amazon Picking Challenge: Four Aspects of Building Robotic Systems

We describe the winning entry to the Amazon Picking Challenge 2015. From the experience of building this system and competing, we derive several conclusions: (1) We suggest to characterize robotic system building along four key aspects, each of them spanning a spectrum of solutions - modularity vs. integration, generality vs. assumptions, computation vs. embodiment, and planning vs. feedback. (2) To understand which region of each spectrum most adequately addresses which robotic problem, we must explore the full spectrum of possible approaches. (3) For manipulation problems in unstructured environments, certain regions of each spectrum match the problem most adequately, and should be exploited further. This is supported by the fact that our solution deviated from the majority of the other challenge entries along each of the spectra. This is an abridged version of a conference publication.

Image-embodied Knowledge Representation Learning

Entity images could provide significant visual information for knowledge representation learning. Most conventional methods learn knowledge representations merely from structured triples, ignoring rich visual information extracted from entity images. In this paper, we propose a novel Image-embodied Knowledge Representation Learning model (IKRL), where knowledge representations are learned with both triple facts and images. More specifically, we first construct representations for all images of an entity with a neural image encoder. These image representations are then integrated into an aggregated image-based representation via an attention-based method. We evaluate our IKRL models on knowledge graph completion and triple classification. Experimental results demonstrate that our models outperform all baselines on both tasks, which indicates the significance of visual information for knowledge representations and the capability of our models in learning knowledge representations with images.

Characterising the Manipulability of Boolean Games

The existence of (Nash) equilibria with undesirable properties is a well-known problem in game theory, which has motivated much research directed at the possibility of mechanisms for modifying games in order to eliminate undesirable equilibria, or induce desirable ones. Taxation schemes are a well-known mechanism for modifying games in this way. In the multi-agent systems community, taxation mechanisms for incentive engineering have been studied in the context of Boolean games with costs. These are games in which each player assigns truth-values to a set of propositional variables she uniquely controls in pursuit of satisfying an individual propositional goal formula; different choices for the player are also associated with different costs. In such a game, each player prefers primarily to see the satisfaction of their goal, and secondarily, to minimise the cost of their choice, thereby giving rise to lexicographic preferences over goal-satisfaction and costs. Within this setting, where taxes operate on costs only, however, it may well happen that the elimination or introduction of equilibria can only be achieved at the cost of simultaneously introducing less desirable equilibria or eliminating more attractive ones. Although this framework has been studied extensively, the problem of precisely characterising the equilibria that may be induced or eliminated has remained open. In this paper we close this problem, giving a complete characterisation of those mechanisms that can induce a set of outcomes of the game to be exactly the set of Nash Equilibrium outcomes.

Dominance and Optimisation Based on Scale-Invariant Maximum Margin Preference Learning

In the task of preference learning, there can be natural invariance properties that one might often expect a method to satisfy. These include (i) invariance to scaling of a pair of alternatives, e.g., replacing a pair (a,b) by (2a,2b); and (ii) invariance to rescaling of features across all alternatives. Maximum margin learning approaches satisfy such invariance properties for pairs of test vectors, but not for the preference input pairs, i.e., scaling the inputs in a different way could result in a different preference relation. In this paper we define and analyse more cautious preference relations that are invariant to the scaling of features, or inputs, or both simultaneously; this leads to computational methods for testing dominance with respect to the induced relations, and for generating optimal solutions among a set of alternatives. In our experiments, we compare the relations and their associated optimality sets based on their decisiveness, computation time and cardinality of the optimal set. We also discuss connections with imprecise probability.

Effective Representing of Information Network by Variational Autoencoder

Network representation is the basis of many applications and of extensive interest in various fields, such as information retrieval, social network analysis, and recommendation systems. Most previous methods for network representation only consider the incomplete aspects of a problem, including link structure, node information, and partial integration. The present study proposes a deep network representation model that seamlessly integrates the text information and structure of a network. Our model captures highly non-linear relationships between nodes and complex features of a network by exploiting the variational autoencoder (VAE), which is a deep unsupervised generation algorithm. We also merge the representation learned with a paragraph vector model and that learned with the VAE to obtain the network representation that preserves both structure and text information. We conduct comprehensive empirical experiments on benchmark datasets and find our model performs better than state-of-the-art techniques by a large margin.

Generating Models of a Matched Formula With a Polynomial Delay (Extended Abstract)

A matched formula is a CNF formula whose incidence graph admits a matching which matches a distinct variable to every clause. Such a formula is always satisfiable. Matched formulas are used, for example, in the area of parameterized complexity. We prove that the problem of counting the number of the models (satisfying assignments) of a matched formula is #P-complete. On the other hand, we define a class of formulas generalizing the matched formulas and prove that for a formula in this class one can choose in polynomial time a variable suitable for splitting the tree for the search of the models of the formula. As a consequence, the models of a formula from this class, in particular of any matched formula, can be generated sequentially with a delay polynomial in the size of the input. On the other hand, we prove that this task cannot be performed efficiently for linearly satisfiable formulas, which is a generalization of matched formulas containing the class considered above.

Local Search for Minimum Weight Dominating Set with Two-Level Configuration Checking and Frequency Based Scoring Function (Extended Abstract)

The Minimum Weight Dominating Set (MWDS) problem is an important generalization of the Minimum Dominating Set (MDS) problem with extensive applications. This paper proposes a new local search algorithm for the MWDS problem, which is based on two new ideas. The first idea is a heuristic called two-level configuration checking (CC2), which is a new variant of a recent powerful configuration checking strategy (CC) for effectively avoiding the recent search paths. The second idea is a novel scoring function based on the frequency of being uncovered of vertices. Our algorithm is called CC2FS, according to the names of the two ideas. The experimental results show that, CC2FS performs much better than some state-of-the-art algorithms in terms of solution quality on a broad range of MWDS benchmarks.

DISA: A Scientific Writing Advisor with Deep Information Structure Analysis

This paper demonstrates DISA, a higher-level writing assistant system, which analyzes the information structure of abstracts, and retrieves the knowledge according to the research goals from the related work. By incorporating the latest neural-network technologies including linguistically-informed neural-network and autoencoder, we construct an intelligent system which extends the scope of computer-aided writing.