No Arabic abstract
Simultaneously utilizing several complementary solvers is a simple yet effective strategy for solving computationally hard problems. However, manually building such solver portfolios typically requires considerable domain knowledge and plenty of human effort. As an alternative, automatic construction of parallel portfolios (ACPP) aims at automatically building effective parallel portfolios based on a given problem instance set and a given rich design space. One promising way to solve the ACPP problem is to explicitly group the instances into different subsets and promote a component solver to handle each of them.This paper investigates solving ACPP from this perspective, and especially studies how to obtain a good instance grouping.The experimental results showed that the parallel portfolios constructed by the proposed method could achieve consistently superior performances to the ones constructed by the state-of-the-art ACPP methods,and could even rival sophisticated hand-designed parallel solvers.
The need for domain ontologies in mission critical applications such as risk management and hazard identification is becoming more and more pressing. Most research on ontology learning conducted in the academia remains unrealistic for real-world applications. One of the main problems is the dependence on non-incremental, rare knowledge and textual resources, and manually-crafted patterns and rules. This paper reports work in progress aiming to address such undesirable dependencies during ontology construction. Initial experiments using a working prototype of the system revealed promising potentials in automatically constructing high-quality domain ontologies using real-world texts.
Generalization, i.e., the ability of solving problem instances that are not available during the system design and development phase, is a critical goal for intelligent systems. A typical way to achieve good generalization is to learn a model from vast data. In the context of heuristic search, such a paradigm could be implemented as configuring the parameters of a parallel algorithm portfolio (PAP) based on a set of training problem instances, which is often referred to as PAP construction. However, compared to traditional machine learning, PAP construction often suffers from the lack of training instances, and the obtained PAPs may fail to generalize well. This paper proposes a novel competitive co-evolution scheme, named Co-Evolution of Parameterized Search (CEPS), as a remedy to this challenge. By co-evolving a configuration population and an instance population, CEPS is capable of obtaining generalizable PAPs with few training instances. The advantage of CEPS in improving generalization is analytically shown in this paper. Two concrete algorithms, namely CEPS-TSP and CEPS-VRPSPDTW, are presented for the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) and the Vehicle Routing Problem with Simultaneous Pickup-Delivery and Time Windows (VRPSPDTW), respectively. Experimental results show that CEPS has led to better generalization, and even managed to find new best-known solutions for some instances.
Recent research in areas such as SAT solving and Integer Linear Programming has shown that the performances of a single arbitrarily efficient solver can be significantly outperformed by a portfolio of possibly slower on-average solvers. We report an empirical evaluation and comparison of portfolio approaches applied to Constraint Satisfaction Problems (CSPs). We compared models developed on top of off-the-shelf machine learning algorithms with respect to approaches used in the SAT field and adapted for CSPs, considering different portfolio sizes and using as evaluation metrics the number of solved problems and the time taken to solve them. Results indicate that the best SAT approaches have top performances also in the CSP field and are slightly more competitive than simple models built on top of classification algorithms.
The purpose of this paper is to give explicit constructions of unitary $t$-designs in the unitary group $U(d)$ for all $t$ and $d$. It seems that the explicit constructions were so far known only for very special cases. Here explicit construction means that the entries of the unitary matrices are given by the values of elementary functions at the root of some given polynomials. We will discuss what are the best such unitary $4$-designs in $U(4)$ obtained by these methods. Indeed we give an inductive construction of designs on compact groups by using Gelfand pairs $(G,K)$. Note that $(U(n),U(m) times U(n-m))$ is a Gelfand pair. By using the zonal spherical functions for $(G,K)$, we can construct designs on $G$ from designs on $K$. We remark that our proofs use the representation theory of compact groups crucially. We also remark that this method can be applied to the orthogonal groups $O(d)$, and thus provides another explicit construction of spherical $t$-designs on the $d$ dimensional sphere $S^{d-1}$ by the induction on $d$.
Math expressions are important parts of scientific and educational documents, but some of them may be challenging for junior scholars or students to understand. Nevertheless, constructing textual descriptions for math expressions is nontrivial. In this paper, we explore the feasibility to automatically construct descriptions for math expressions. But there are two challenges that need to be addressed: 1) finding relevant documents since a math equation understanding usually requires several topics, but these topics are often explained in different documents. 2) the sparsity of the collected relevant documents making it difficult to extract reasonable descriptions. Different documents mainly focus on different topics which makes model hard to extract salient information and organize them to form a description of math expressions. To address these issues, we propose a hybrid model (MathDes) which contains two important modules: Selector and Summarizer. In the Selector, a Topic Relation Graph (TRG) is proposed to obtain the relevant documents which contain the comprehensive information of math expressions. TRG is a graph built according to the citations between expressions. In the Summarizer, a summarization model under the Integer Linear Programming (ILP) framework is proposed. This module constructs the final description with the help of a timeline that is extracted from TRG. The experimental results demonstrate that our methods are promising for this task and outperform the baselines in all aspects.