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Multiobjective optimization is a ubiquitous problem that arises naturally in many scientific and industrial areas. Network routing optimization with multiobjective performance demands falls into this problem class, and finding good quality solutions at large scales is generally challenging. In this work, we develop a scheme with which near-term quantum computers can be applied to solve multiobjective combinatorial optimization problems. We study the application of this scheme to the network routing problem in detail, by first mapping it to the multiobjective shortest-path problem. Focusing on an implementation based on the quantum approximate optimization algorithm (QAOA)—the go-to approach for tackling optimization problems on near-term quantum computers—we examine the Pareto plot that results from the scheme and qualitatively analyze its ability to produce Pareto-optimal solutions. We further provide theoretical and numerical scaling analyses of the resource requirements and performance of QAOA and identify key challenges associated with this approach. Finally, through Amazon Braket, we execute small-scale implementations of our scheme on the IonQ Harmony 11-qubit quantum computer.

This article proposes a lateral vehicle trajectory planning and control algorithm using a model predictive control (MPC) scheme for an automated perpendicular parking system. Previous work showed that approximated clothoid-based local path planning using a virtual towing distance provides low computational time and the stability of lateral vehicle motion in a parking system. However, this approach cannot function in certain parking situations and may cause undesirable steering maneuvers due to state-dependent planning. We present a new approximated clothoid path based on lateral vehicle kinematics to cope with these problems. Using the proposed kinematic model, we formulate an MPC problem for path planning. Then, the proposed lateral vehicle trajectory planning becomes an MPC problem under constraints. Besides, we show that lateral vehicle motion for vertical parking can be implemented using simple kinematic lateral motion control. Experimental results show that the vehicle with the proposed method moves smoothly and completes the given parking mission under constraints, even under tight parking space conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Least-mean-squares (LMS) solvers such as Linear / Ridge-Regression and SVD not only solve fundamental machine learning problems, but are also the building blocks in a variety of other methods, such as matrix factorizations. We suggest an algorithm that gets a finite set of $n$ n $d$ d -dimensional real vectors and returns a subset of $d+1$ d + 1 vectors with positive weights whose weighted sum is exactly the same. The constructive proof in Caratheodory's Theorem computes such a subset in $O(n^2d^2)$ O (n 2 d 2) time and thus not used in practice. Our algorithm computes this subset in $O(nd+d^4\log {n})$ O (n d + d 4 log n) time, using $O(\log n)$ O (log n) calls to Caratheodory's construction on small but “smart” subsets. This is based on a novel paradigm of fusion between different data summarization techniques, known as sketches and coresets. For large values of $d$ d , we suggest a faster construction that takes $O(nd)$ O (n d) time and returns a weighted subset of $O(d)$ O (d) sparsified input points. Here, a sparsified point means that some of its entries were set to zero. As an application, we show how to boost the performance of existing LMS solvers, such as those in scikit-learn library, up to x100. Generalization for streaming and distributed data is trivial. Extensive experimental results and open source code are provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How can we efficiently find very large numbers of clusters C in very large datasets N of potentially high dimensionality D? Here we address the question by using a novel variational approach to optimize Gaussian mixture models (GMMs) with diagonal covariance matrices. The variational method approximates expectation maximization (EM) by applying truncated posteriors as variational distributions and partial E-steps in combination with coresets. Run time complexity to optimize the clustering objective then reduces from O(NCD) per conventional EM iteration to O(N′G2D) for a variational EM iteration on coresets (with coreset size N ′ ≤ N and truncation parameter G ≪ C). Based on the strongly reduced run time complexity per iteration, which scales sublinearly with NC, we then provide a concrete, practically applicable, parallelized and highly efficient clustering algorithm. In numerical experiments on standard large-scale benchmarks we (A) show that also overall clustering times scale sublinearly with NC, and (B) observe substantial wall-clock speedups compared to already highly efficient recently reported results. The algorithm’s sublinear scaling allows for applications at scales where alternative methods cease to be applicable. We demonstrate such very large-scale applicability using the YFCC100M benchmark, for which we realize with a GMM of up to 50.000 clusters an optimization of a data density model with up to 150 M parameters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adversarial attacks have been extensively studied in recent years since they can identify the vulnerability of deep learning models before deployed. In this paper, we consider the black-box adversarial setting, where the adversary needs to craft adversarial examples without access to the gradients of a target model. Previous methods attempted to approximate the true gradient either by using the transfer gradient of a surrogate white-box model or based on the feedback of model queries. However, the existing methods inevitably suffer from low attack success rates or poor query efficiency since it is difficult to estimate the gradient in a high-dimensional input space with limited information. To address these problems and improve black-box attacks, we propose two prior-guided random gradient-free (PRGF) algorithms based on biased sampling and gradient averaging, respectively. Our methods can take the advantage of a transfer-based prior given by the gradient of a surrogate model and the query information simultaneously. Through theoretical analyses, the transfer-based prior is appropriately integrated with model queries by an optimal coefficient in each method. Extensive experiments demonstrate that, in comparison with the alternative state-of-the-arts, both of our methods require much fewer queries to attack black-box models with higher success rates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we consider an iterative adaptive dynamic programming (ADP) algorithm within the Hamiltonian-driven framework to solve the Hamilton–Jacobi–Bellman (HJB) equation for the infinite-horizon optimal control problem in continuous time for nonlinear systems. First, a novel function, “min-Hamiltonian,” is defined to capture the fundamental properties of the classical Hamiltonian. It is shown that both the HJB equation and the policy iteration (PI) algorithm can be formulated in terms of the min-Hamiltonian within the Hamiltonian-driven framework. Moreover, we develop an iterative ADP algorithm that takes into consideration the approximation errors during the policy evaluation step. We then derive a sufficient condition on the iterative value gradient to guarantee closed-loop stability of the equilibrium point as well as convergence to the optimal value. A model-free extension based on an off-policy reinforcement learning (RL) technique is also provided. Finally, numerical results illustrate the efficacy of the proposed framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a rough-to-fine evolutionary multiobjective optimization algorithm based on the decomposition for solving problems in which the solutions are initially far from the Pareto-optimal set. Subsequently, a tree is constructed by a modified $k$ -means algorithm on $N$ uniform weight vectors, and each node of the tree contains a weight vector. Each node is associated with a subproblem with the help of its weight vector. Consequently, a subproblem tree can be established. It is easy to find that the descendant subproblems are refinements of their ancestor subproblems. The proposed algorithm approaches the Pareto front (PF) by solving a few subproblems in the first few levels to obtain a rough PF and gradually refining the PF by involving the subproblems level-by-level. This strategy is highly favorable for solving problems in which the solutions are initially far from the Pareto set. Moreover, the proposed algorithm has lower time complexity. Theoretical analysis shows the complexity of dealing with a new candidate solution is $\mathcal {O}(M \log N)$ , where $M$ is the number of objectives. Empirical studies demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper revisits the temporal difference (TD) learning algorithm for the policy evaluation tasks in reinforcement learning. Typically, the performance of TD(0) and TD($\lambda$ λ ) is very sensitive to the choice of stepsizes. Oftentimes, TD(0) suffers from slow convergence. Motivated by the tight link between the TD(0) learning algorithm and the stochastic gradient methods, we develop a provably convergent adaptive projected variant of the TD(0) learning algorithm with linear function approximation that we term AdaTD(0). In contrast to the TD(0), AdaTD(0) is robust or less sensitive to the choice of stepsizes. Analytically, we establish that to reach an $\epsilon$ ε accuracy, the number of iterations needed is $\tilde{O}(\epsilon ^{-2}\ln ^4\frac{1}{\epsilon }/\ln ^4\frac{1}{\rho })$ O ˜ (ε - 2 ln 4 1 ε / ln 4 1 ρ) in the general case, where $\rho$ ρ represents the speed of the underlying Markov chain converges to the stationary distribution. This implies that the iteration complexity of AdaTD(0) is no worse than that of TD(0) in the worst case. When the stochastic semi-gradients are sparse, we provide theoretical acceleration of AdaTD(0). Going beyond TD(0), we develop an adaptive variant of TD($\lambda$ λ ), which is referred to as AdaTD($\lambda$ λ ). Empirically, we evaluate the performance of AdaTD(0) and AdaTD($\lambda$ λ ) on several standard reinforcement learning tasks, which demonstrate the effectiveness of our new approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multi-relational learning on knowledge graphs infers high-order relations among the entities across the graphs. This learning task can be solved by label propagation on the tensor product of the knowledge graphs to learn the high-order relations as a tensor. In this paper, we generalize a widely used label propagation model to the normalized tensor product graph, and propose an optimization formulation and the scalable Low-rank Tensor-based Label Propagation algorithm (LowrankTLP) to infer multi-relations for two learning tasks, hyperlink prediction and multiple graph alignment. The optimization formulation minimizes the upper bound of the noisy-tensor estimating error for multiple graph alignment, by learning with a subset of the eigen-pairs in the spectrum of the normalized tensor product graph. We also provide a data-dependent transductive Rademacher bound for binary hyperlink prediction. We accelerate LowrankTLP with parallel tensor computation which enables label propagation on a tensor product of 100 graphs each of size 1000 in less than half hour in the simulation. LowrankTLP was also applied to predicting the author-paper-venue hyperlinks in publication records, alignment of segmented regions across up to 26 CT-scan images and alignment of protein-protein interaction networks across multiple species. The experiments demonstrate that LowrankTLP indeed well approximates the original label propagation with better scalability and accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bipartite graphs widely exist in real-world scenarios and model binary relations like host-website, author-paper, and user-product. In bipartite graphs, a butterfly (i.e., $2\times 2$ 2 × 2 bi-clique) is the smallest non-trivial cohesive structure and plays an important role in applications such as anomaly detection. Considerable efforts focus on counting butterflies in static bipartite graphs. However, they suffer from high time and space complexity when the bipartite graph of interest is given as a stream of edges. Although there are methods for approximately counting butterflies from bipartite graph streams, they suffer from either low accuracy or high time complexity. Therefore, it is still a challenge to accurately estimate butterfly counts from bipartite graph streams in a short time. To address this issue, we develop novel algorithms by exploiting the bipartite nature, which subtly integrates sampling and sketching techniques. We provide accurate estimators for butterfly counts and derive simple yet exact formulas for bounding their errors. We also conduct extensive experiments on a variety of real-world large bipartite graphs. Experimental results demonstrate that our algorithms are up to 20.0 times more accurate and up to 286.3 times faster than state-of-the-art methods under the same memory usage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most extensively studied combinatorial optimization problems is the Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP). Considerable research efforts in the past have resulted in exact solvers. However, the runtime of such hand-crafted solutions increases exponentially with problem size. Ising model based solvers have also gained prominence due to their abilities to find fast and approximate solutions for combinatorial optimization problems. However, such Ising based heuristics also suffer from scalability as the solution quality becomes increasingly sub-optimal with increase in problem size. In this work, we propose Neuro-Ising – a machine learning framework which uses Ising models to find clusters of near-optimal partial solutions of large scale TSPs and combines those solutions by employing a supervised data driven mechanism, which we model as a Graph Neural Network (GNN). The GNN is trained from solution instances obtained through exact solvers and hence, the proposed approach generalizes to unseen problems while avoiding the run-time complexity otherwise required, if the solution is built from scratch. Using standard computing resources, our proposed framework rapidly converges to near-optimal solutions for 15 TSPs (upto $\sim 5k$ cities) from the TSPLib benchmark suite. We report $\sim 10.66\times $ speedup over Tabu Search for 8 problems. Furthermore, compared to two state-of-the-art clustering-based TSP solvers, Neuro-Ising achieves $\sim 38 \times $ faster convergence along with $\sim 8.9\%$ better quality of solution, on average. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Owing to its good compression ability, discrete cosine transform (DCT) is widely used in signal processing, including high-efficiency video coding (HEVC). For efficient implementation, approximate DCTs and integer DCTs were proposed, but the challenge in the tradeoff between coding performance and implementation cost always exists. To solve this problem, this article proposes a new algorithm to derive Int-DCT with good coding performance and low hardware cost. To address the multiobjective optimization problem, we extract information from the initially shortlisted transform matrices to derive the weighting factors for the different matrices properties. Those properties having a higher impact to the performance are assigned with higher weights and vice versa. Subsequently, an efficient search algorithm is proposed to shortlist those candidates which can lead to better coding performance evaluated by the proposed measure. Last but not the least, a splitting method is proposed to search the efficient extended double-base number system (EDBNS) representation of the coefficients for hardware implementation and select the solution which encounters the lowest cost. The experimental results in ASIC demonstrate that the implementation area and power cost of designs by the new algorithm are reduced by at least 11.1% and 17.5% for 32-point transform, respectively, over other competing algorithms. Meanwhile, the transforms generated by the proposed algorithm causes negligible impact to coding performance compared to the original transforms in HEVC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We propose a novel semi-supervised learning (SSL) assumption—the high separation probability (HSP) assumption—that is complementary to the common low density separation (LDS) assumption, and a highly accurate and efficient SSL algorithm, the transductive minimax probability machine (TMPM). Under the HSP assumption, a preferred classifier should ensure that with high probability the samples are far away from the decision boundary. Similarly, the LDS assumption states that the decision boundary should lie in a low-density region. A remarkable property of HSP is that it provides an elegant theoretical framework for analyzing the generalization performance of SSL, while it remains difficult for the LDS assumption to have a quantitative criterion on how it fits the data. Moreover, it has the same paradigm as the minimax probability machine (MPM) and yields an intractable mixed-integer optimization for solving the transductive label assignment problem. Consequently, we propose TMPM with a label-switching strategy and iterative manner to formalize our approximate solution. Theoretically, we analyze the computational complexity, convergence property, and generalization error bound of TMPM. Empirically, we show that TMPM achieves competitive performance on a wide range of datasets, while being almost one order of magnitude faster than existing SSL approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article deals with nonconvex stochastic optimization problems in deep learning. Appropriate learning rates, based on theory, for adaptive-learning-rate optimization algorithms (e.g., Adam and AMSGrad) to approximate the stationary points of such problems are provided. These rates are shown to allow faster convergence than previously reported for these algorithms. Specifically, the algorithms are examined in numerical experiments on text and image classification and are shown in experiments to perform better with constant learning rates than algorithms using diminishing learning rates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces a new deep learning approach to approximately solve the covering salesman problem (CSP). In this approach, given the city locations of a CSP as input, a deep neural network model is designed to directly output the solution. It is trained using the deep reinforcement learning without supervision. Specifically, in the model, we apply the multihead attention (MHA) to capture the structural patterns, and design a dynamic embedding to handle the dynamic patterns of the problem. Once the model is trained, it can generalize to various types of CSP tasks (different sizes and topologies) without the need of retraining. Through controlled experiments, the proposed approach shows desirable time complexity: it runs more than 20 times faster than the traditional heuristic solvers with a tiny gap of optimality. Moreover, it significantly outperforms the current state-of-the-art deep learning approaches for combinatorial optimization in the aspect of both training and inference. In comparison with traditional solvers, this approach is highly desirable for most of the challenging tasks in practice that are usually large scale and require quick decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proposes robust inverse $Q$ -learning algorithms for a learner to mimic an expert’s states and control inputs in the imitation learning problem. These two agents have different adversarial disturbances. To do the imitation, the learner must reconstruct the unknown expert cost function. The learner only observes the expert’s control inputs and uses inverse $Q$ -learning algorithms to reconstruct the unknown expert cost function. The inverse $Q$ -learning algorithms are robust in that they are independent of the system model and allow for the different cost function parameters and disturbances between two agents. We first propose an offline inverse $Q$ -learning algorithm which consists of two iterative learning loops: 1) an inner $Q$ -learning iteration loop and 2) an outer iteration loop based on inverse optimal control. Then, based on this offline algorithm, we further develop an online inverse $Q$ -learning algorithm such that the learner mimics the expert behaviors online with the real-time observation of the expert control inputs. This online computational method has four functional approximators: a critic approximator, two actor approximators, and a state-reward neural network (NN). It simultaneously approximates the parameters of $Q$ -function and the learner state reward online. Convergence and stability proofs are rigorously studied to guarantee the algorithm performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on the performance deterioration of nonlinear filtering algorithms in the error-in-variable (EIV) model, a nonlinear version of maximum total correntropy (MTC) algorithm called kernel recursive maximum total correntropy (KRMTC) is proposed in this brief, which constructs a nonlinear relationship based on MTC criterion between inputs and outputs in high-dimensional feature space. Compared with existing kernel adaptive filtering (KAF) algorithms based on traditional mean square error (MSE) and maximum correntropy criteria (MCC), the proposed algorithm can handle nonlinear modeling problems in the EIV model well. In addition, an approximate linear dependency (ALD) criterion is applied to reduce the computational complexity of KRMTC. To verify the feasibility of the proposed algorithm, firstly, the convergence of the KRMTC algorithm under some assumptions is discussed and its local convergence condition is given. Secondly, the proposed algorithm is applied to the Lorenz time-series prediction and wind prediction simulations. Simulation results display that the KRMTC algorithm has better performance than kernel recursive least squares (KRLS) and kernel recursive maximum correntropy (KRMC) algorithms in EIV case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many inverse problems in machine learning, system identification, and image processing include nuisance parameters, which are important for the recovering of other parameters. Separable nonlinear optimization problems fall into this category. The special separable structure in these problems has inspired several efficient optimization strategies. A well-known method is the variable projection (VP) that projects out a subset of the estimated parameters, resulting in a reduced problem that includes fewer parameters. The expectation maximization (EM) is another separated method that provides a powerful framework for the estimation of nuisance parameters. The relationships between EM and VP were ignored in previous studies, though they deal with a part of parameters in a similar way. In this article, we explore the internal relationships and differences between VP and EM. Unlike the algorithms that separate the parameters directly, the hierarchical identification algorithm decomposes a complex model into several linked submodels and identifies the corresponding parameters. Therefore, this article also studies the difference and connection between the hierarchical algorithm and the parameter-separated algorithms like VP and EM. In the numerical simulation part, Monte Carlo experiments are performed to further compare the performance of different algorithms. The results show that the VP algorithm usually converges faster than the other two algorithms and is more robust to the initial point of the parameters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multi-scale exposure fusion (MEF) is an efficient way to fuse differently exposed low dynamic range (LDR) images of a high dynamic range (HDR) scene into an information enriched LDR image. In this paper, a new MEF algorithm is proposed to merge the differently exposed LDR images by introducing novel content adaptive edge-preserving smoothing (CAS) pyramids for the weight maps of all the LDR images. With the proposed CAS pyramids, details in the brightest and darkest regions of the HDR scene are preserved better than existing MEF algorithms on top of the Gaussian pyramids and edge-preserving smoothing pyramids. Comparisons experimentally demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm to nine state-of-the-art MEF algorithms from both subjective and objective points of view regardless the image sizes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Geometric model fitting is a fundamental task in computer vision, which serves as the pre-requisite of many downstream applications. While the problem has a simple intrinsic structure where the solution can be parameterized within a few degrees of freedom, the ubiquitously existing outliers are the main challenge. In previous studies, random sampling techniques have been established as the practical choice, since optimization-based methods are usually too time-demanding. This prospective study is intended to design efficient algorithms that benefit from a general optimization-based view. In particular, two important types of loss functions are discussed, i.e., truncated and $l_1$ l 1 losses, and efficient solvers have been derived for both upon specific approximations. Based on this philosophy, a class of algorithms are introduced to perform deterministic search for the inliers or geometric model. Recommendations are made based on theoretical and experimental analyses. Compared with the existing solutions, the proposed methods are both simple in computation and robust to outliers. Extensive experiments are conducted on publicly available datasets for geometric estimation, which demonstrate the superiority of our methods compared with the state-of-the-art ones. Additionally, we apply our method to the recent benchmark for wide-baseline stereo evaluation, leading to a significant improvement of performance. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/AoxiangFan/EifficientDeterministicSearch. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Symbol detection (SD) plays an important role in a digital communication system. However, most SD algorithms require channel state information (CSI), which is often difficult to estimate accurately. As a consequence, it is challenging for these SD algorithms to approach the performance of the maximum likelihood detection (MLD) algorithm. To address this issue, we employ both semi-supervised learning and ensemble learning to design a flexible parallelizable approach in this paper. First, we prove theoretically that the proposed algorithms can arbitrarily approach the performance of the MLD algorithm with perfect CSI. Second, to enable parallel implementation and also enhance design flexibility, we further propose a parallelizable approach for multi-output systems. Finally, comprehensive simulation results are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the designed algorithms. In particular, the proposed algorithms approach the performance of the MLD algorithm with perfect CSI, and outperform it when the CSI is imperfect. Interestingly, a detector constructed with received signals from only two receiving antennas (less than the size of the whole receiving antenna array) can also provide good detection performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the phase retrieval problem one seeks to recover an unknown $n$ dimensional signal vector $\mathbf {x}$ from $m$ measurements of the form $y_{i} = |(\mathbf {A} \mathbf {x})_{i}|$ , where $\mathbf {A}$ denotes the sensing matrix. Many algorithms for this problem are based on approximate message passing. For these algorithms, it is known that if the sensing matrix $\mathbf {A}$ is generated by sub-sampling $n$ columns of a uniformly random (i.e., Haar distributed) orthogonal matrix, in the high dimensional asymptotic regime ($m,n \rightarrow \infty, n/m \rightarrow \kappa $), the dynamics of the algorithm are given by a deterministic recursion known as the state evolution. For a special class of linearized message-passing algorithms, we show that the state evolution is universal: it continues to hold even when $\mathbf {A}$ is generated by randomly sub-sampling columns of the Hadamard-Walsh matrix, if the signal is drawn from a Gaussian prior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the artificial intelligence and Internet of Things (AIoT) develop rapidly, the deployment of artificial neural networks in edge computing is becoming significant with great challenge. The binarized convolutional neural network (BCNN) is one of the most widely adopted light-weight ANNs in AIoT, which can achieve the balance of system accuracy and hardware resource consumption, compared to others. To achieve high power and area efficiency in BCNN deployment, many approximate computing (AxC) techniques are integrated to make full use of the resilience of BCNN. As the research focused on the integration of AxC in circuit design, the design of AxC itself is not fully considered when applied to specific applications or domains. Based on circuit-architecture-system co-design, this article proposes an efficient BCNN deployment method, including a quality-circuit co-design method for approximate adder generation, a quality-aware intercompensation approach for addition tree, and a computing quality involved retraining approach for BCNN deployment. Experimental results show that the proposed quality model can achieve 86.43% in average accuracy while evaluating nine types of typical approximate adders. The proposed method is conducted on the applications of keyword spotting of GSCD, MNIST, and CIFAR-10, and we can further rise the approximation degree by 50%–75%, while reducing the accuracy by less than 1%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Approximate computing is an attractive paradigm for reducing the design complexity of error-resilient systems, therefore, improving performance and saving power consumption. In this work, we propose a new two-level approximate logic synthesis method based on cube insertion and removal procedures. The experimental results have shown significant literal count and runtime reduction compared to the state-of-the-art approach. The method scalability is illustrated for a high error threshold over large benchmark circuits. The obtained solutions have presented a literal number reduction up to 38%, 56%, and 93% with respect to an error rate of 1%, 3%, and 5%, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Online streaming feature selection (OSFS) has attracted extensive attention during the past decades. Current approaches commonly assume that the feature space of fixed data instances dynamically increases without any missing data. However, this assumption does not always hold in many real applications. Motivated by this observation, this study aims to implement online feature selection from sparse streaming features, i.e., features flow in one by one with missing data as instance count remains fixed. To do so, this study proposes a latent-factor-analysis-based online sparse-streaming-feature selection algorithm (LOSSA). Its main idea is to apply latent factor analysis to pre-estimate missing data in sparse streaming features before conducting feature selection, thereby addressing the missing data issue effectively and efficiently. Theoretical and empirical studies indicate that LOSSA can significantly improve the quality of OSFS when missing data are encountered in target instances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article studies the mean standard deviation (mean-std) Canadian traveller problem (CTP). Different from the canonical CTP, which aims at minimizing the traveller's expected travel time, while considering edge breakdown probabilities, we introduce the reliability version of CTP, which tries to find a routing policy with the minimal linear combination of the travel time's mean and standard deviation. With the recent development of internet-of-things (IoT) technology, the transportation network's edges' travel-time statistics, i.e., mean and standard deviation, as well as the traversal probabilities, are available to the end users. With those information, we propose a dual dynamic programming (DDP) method, which simultaneously estimates the first-order and the second-order moments of a given decision-list (DL) policy, and thereby makes improvements towards to the optimal one through the generalized policy iteration (GPI) scheme. We construct an open source benchmark environment to evaluate the performance of different mean-std CTP solutions, and show that the DDP method outperforms state of the arts in a range of transportation networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we consider the problem of estimating diffraction attenuation from the approximation of terrain using a multiple bridged knife-edge model. This model can be considered as a generalization of the well-known multiple knife-edge (MKE) one where spaces between knife-edges are bridged by reflecting surfaces. A series-based-standard solution is presented in the literature but suffers from its very high computational complexity. We, thus, propose to generalize the recursive Vogler algorithm developed for the MKE model to tackle this problem. To reduce complexity, the proposed algorithm exploits the recursive form to avoid repeated calculations of the existing solution. Moreover, we provide a complexity analysis of both the standard algorithm and the proposed algorithm based on the number of computed integrals. Both theoretical and numerical results show that our proposed algorithm is faster than the original one while having identical accuracy, hence proving the effectiveness of our solution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is growing interest in applying distributed machine learning to edge computing, forming federated edge learning. Federated edge learning faces non-i.i.d. and heterogeneous data, and the communication between edge workers, possibly through distant locations and with unstable wireless networks, is more costly than their local computational overhead. In this work, we propose ${{\sf DONE}}$ DONE , a distributed approximate Newton-type algorithm with fast convergence rate for communication-efficient federated edge learning. First, with strongly convex and smooth loss functions, ${{\sf DONE}}$ DONE approximates the Newton direction in a distributed manner using the classical Richardson iteration on each edge worker. Second, we prove that ${{\sf DONE}}$ DONE has linear-quadratic convergence and analyze its communication complexities. Finally, the experimental results with non-i.i.d. and heterogeneous data show that ${{\sf DONE}}$ DONE attains a comparable performance to Newton's method. Notably, ${{\sf DONE}}$ DONE requires fewer communication iterations compared to distributed gradient descent and outperforms DANE, FEDL, and GIANT, state-of-the-art approaches, in the case of non-quadratic loss functions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a large cloud data center HPC system, a critical problem is how to allocate the submitted tasks to heterogeneous servers that will achieve the goal of maximizing the system’s gain defined as the value of completed tasks minus system operation costs. We consider this problem in the online setting that tasks arrive in batches and propose a novel deep reinforcement learning (DRL) enhanced greedy optimization algorithm of two-stage scheduling interacting task sequencing and task allocation. For task sequencing, we deploy a DRL module to predict the best allocation sequence for each arriving batch of tasks based on the knowledge (allocation strategies) learnt from previous batches. For task allocation, we propose a greedy strategy that allocates tasks to servers one by one online following the allocation sequence to maximize the total gain increase. We show that our greedy strategy has a performance guarantee of competitive ratio $\frac{1}{1+\kappa }$ 1 1 + κ to the optimal offline solution, which improves the existing result for the same problem, where $\kappa$ κ is upper bounded by the maximum cost-to-gain ratio of each task. While our DRL module enhances the greedy algorithm by providing the likely-optimal allocation sequence for each batch of arriving tasks, our greedy strategy bounds DRL’s prediction error within a proven worst-case performance guarantee for any allocation sequence. It enables a better solution quality than that obtainable from both DRL and greedy optimization alone. Extensive experiment evaluation results in both simulation and real application environments demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed algorithm. Compared with the state-of-the-art baselines, our algorithm increases the system gain by about 10% to 30%. Our algorithm provides an interesting example of combining machine learning (ML) and greedy optimization techniques to improve ML-based solutions with a worst-case performance guarantee for solving hard optimization problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers a federated temporal difference (TD) learning algorithm and provides both asymptotic and finite-time analyses. To protect each worker agent's cost information from being acquired by possible attackers, we propose a privacy-preserving variant of the algorithm by adding perturbation to the exchanged information. We show the rigorous differential privacy guarantee by using moments accountant and derive an upper bound of the utility loss for the privacy-preserving algorithm. Evaluations are also provided to corroborate the efficiency of the algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This brief addresses the problem of implementing very large constant multiplications by a single variable under the shift-adds architecture using a minimum number of adders/subtractors. Due to the intrinsic complexity of the problem, we introduce an approximate algorithm, called TÕLL, which partitions the very large constants into smaller ones. To reduce the number of operations, TÕLL incorporates graph-based and common subexpression elimination methods proposed for the shift-adds design of constant multiplications. It can also consider the delay of a multiplierless design defined in terms of the maximum number of operations in series, i.e., the number of adder-steps, while reducing the number of operations. High-level experimental results show that the adder-steps of a shift-adds design can be reduced significantly with a little overhead in the number of operations. Gate-level experimental results indicate that while the shift-adds design can lead to a 36.6% reduction in gate-level area with respect to a design using a multiplier, the delay-aware optimization can yield a 48.3% reduction in minimum achievable delay of the shift-adds design when compared to the area-aware optimization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Convolutional transform learning (CTL), learning filters by minimizing the data fidelity loss function in an unsupervised way, is becoming very pervasive, resulting from keeping the best of both worlds: the benefit of unsupervised learning and the success of the convolutional neural network. There have been growing interests in developing efficient CTL algorithms. However, developing a convergent and accelerated CTL algorithm with accurate representations simultaneously with proper sparsity is an open problem. This article presents a new CTL framework with a $log$ regularizer that can not only obtain accurate representations but also yield strong sparsity. To efficiently address our nonconvex composite optimization, we propose to employ the proximal difference of the convex algorithm (PDCA) which relies on decomposing the nonconvex regularizer into the difference of two convex parts and then optimizes the convex subproblems. Furthermore, we introduce the extrapolation technology to accelerate the algorithm, leading to a fast and efficient CTL algorithm. In particular, we provide a rigorous convergence analysis for the proposed algorithm under the accelerated PDCA. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can converge more stably to desirable solutions with lower approximation error and simultaneously with stronger sparsity and, thus, learn filters efficiently. Meanwhile, the convergence speed is faster than the existing CTL algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bilevel optimization involves two levels of optimization, where one optimization problem is nested within the other. The structure of the problem often requires solving a large number of inner optimization problems that make these kinds of optimization problems expensive to solve. The reaction set mapping and the lower level optimal value function mapping are often used to reduce bilevel optimization problems to a single level; however, the mappings are not known a priori, and the need is to be estimated. Though there exist a few studies that rely on the estimation of these mappings, they are often applied to problems where one of these mappings has a known form, that is, piecewise linear, convex, etc. In this article, we utilize both these mappings together to solve general bilevel optimization problems without any assumptions on the structure of these mappings. Kriging approximations are created during the generations of an evolutionary algorithm, where the population members serve as the samples for creating the approximations. One of the important features of the proposed algorithm is the creation of an auxiliary optimization problem using the Kriging-based metamodel of the lower level optimal value function that solves an approximate relaxation of the bilevel optimization problem. The auxiliary problem when used for local search is able to accelerate the evolutionary algorithm toward the bilevel optimal solution. We perform experiments on two sets of test problems and a problem from the domain of control theory. Our experiments suggest that the approach is quite promising and can lead to substantial savings when solving bilevel optimization problems. The approach is able to outperform state-of-the-art methods that are available for solving bilevel problems, in particular, the savings in function evaluations for the lower level problem are substantial with the proposed approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reinforcement learning (RL) has demonstrated its ability to solve high dimensional tasks by leveraging non-linear function approximators. However, these successes are mostly achieved by ’black-box’ policies in simulated domains. When deploying RL to the real world, several concerns regarding the use of a ’black-box’ policy might be raised. In order to make the learned policies more transparent, we propose in this paper a policy iteration scheme that retains a complex function approximator for its internal value predictions but constrains the policy to have a concise, hierarchical, and human-readable structure, based on a mixture of interpretable experts. Each expert selects a primitive action according to a distance to a prototypical state. A key design decision to keep such experts interpretable is to select the prototypical states from trajectory data. The main technical contribution of the paper is to address the challenges introduced by this non-differentiable prototypical state selection procedure. Experimentally, we show that our proposed algorithm can learn compelling policies on continuous action deep RL benchmarks, matching the performance of neural network based policies, but returning policies that are more amenable to human inspection than neural network or linear-in-feature policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The class of random features is one of the most popular techniques to speed up kernel methods in large-scale problems. Related works have been recognized by the NeurIPS Test-of-Time award in 2017 and the ICML Best Paper Finalist in 2019. The body of work on random features has grown rapidly, and hence it is desirable to have a comprehensive overview on this topic explaining the connections among various algorithms and theoretical results. In this survey, we systematically review the work on random features from the past ten years. First, the motivations, characteristics and contributions of representative random features based algorithms are summarized according to their sampling schemes, learning procedures, variance reduction properties and how they exploit training data. Second, we review theoretical results that center around the following key question: how many random features are needed to ensure a high approximation quality or no loss in the empirical/expected risks of the learned estimator. Third, we provide a comprehensive evaluation of popular random features based algorithms on several large-scale benchmark datasets and discuss their approximation quality and prediction performance for classification. Last, we discuss the relationship between random features and modern over-parameterized deep neural networks (DNNs), including the use of high dimensional random features in the analysis of DNNs as well as the gaps between current theoretical and empirical results. This survey may serve as a gentle introduction to this topic, and as a users’ guide for practitioners interested in applying the representative algorithms and understanding theoretical results under various technical assumptions. We hope that this survey will facilitate discussion on the open problems in this topic, and more importantly, shed light on future research directions. Due to the page limit, we suggest the readers refer to the full version of this survey https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.11154. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By employing time-varying proximal functions, adaptive subgradient methods (ADAGRAD) have improved the regret bound and been widely used in online learning and optimization. However, ADAGRAD with full matrix proximal functions (ADA-FULL) cannot handle large-scale problems due to the impractical $O(d^3)$ O (d 3) time and $O(d^2)$ O (d 2) space complexities, though it has better performance when gradients are correlated. In this paper, we propose two efficient variants of ADA-FULL via a matrix sketching technique called frequent directions (FD). The first variant named as ADA-FD directly utilizes FD to maintain and manipulate low-rank matrices, which reduces the space and time complexities to $O(\tau d)$ O (τ d) and $O(\tau ^2d)$ O (τ 2 d) respectively, where $d$ d is the dimensionality and $\tau \ll d$ τ ≪ d is the sketching size. The second variant named as ADA-FFD further adopts a doubling trick to accelerate FD used in ADA-FD, which reduces the average time complexity to $O(\tau d)$ O (τ d) while only doubles the space complexity of ADA-FD. Theoretical analysis reveals that the regret of ADA-FD and ADA-FFD is close to that of ADA-FULL as long as the outer product matrix of gradients is approximately low-rank. Experimental results demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proposes an offline control algorithm, called recurrent model predictive control, to solve large-scale nonlinear finite-horizon optimal control problems. It can be regarded as an explicit solver of traditional model predictive control (MPC) algorithms, which can adaptively select appropriate model prediction horizon according to current computing resources, so as to improve the policy performance. Our algorithm employs a recurrent function to approximate the optimal policy, which maps the system states and reference values directly to the control inputs. The output of the learned policy network after $N$ recurrent cycles corresponds to the nearly optimal solution of $N$ -step MPC. A policy optimization objective is designed by decomposing the MPC cost function according to the Bellman’s principle of optimality. The optimal recurrent policy can be obtained by directly minimizing the designed objective function, which is applicable for general nonlinear and noninput-affine systems. Both simulation-based and real-robot path-tracking tasks are utilized to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Subgraph queries are routinely used to search for entities in richly attributed graphs e.g., social networks and knowledge graphs. With little knowledge of underlying data, users often need to rewrite queries multiple times to reach desirable answers. Why-questions are studied to clarify missing or unexpected query results. This paper makes a first step to answer Why-questions for entity search in attributed graphs. We consider three common types of Why-questions: Why-not, Why, and Why-rank, which suggest query manipulations that are responsible for user-specified missing, unexpected, and undesirably ranked entities, respectively. (1) We approach a general query rewriting paradigm that suggests to identify desired entities that are specified by Why-questions. We introduce measures that characterize good query rewrites by incorporating both query editing cost and answer closeness. (2) While computing optimal query rewrites is intractable, we develop feasible algorithms, from approximation to fast heuristics, and provide query rewrites with (near) optimality guarantees whenever possible, for Why, Why-not and Why-rank questions. We further show that our results remain intact for Why questions that (1) request a single query rewrite to clarify multiple types of entities, and (2) variants such as Why-empty and Why-so-many, by providing the matching algorithms. Using real-world graphs, we experimentally verify that our algorithms are effective and feasible for large graphs. Our case study also verifies their application in e.g., knowledge exploration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Data deduplication saves storage space by identifying and removing repeats in the data stream. Compared with traditional compression methods, data deduplication schemes are more computationally efficient and are thus widely used in large scale storage systems. In this paper, we provide an information-theoretic analysis of the performance of deduplication algorithms on data streams in which repeats are not exact. We introduce a source model in which probabilistic substitutions are considered. More precisely, each symbol in a repeated string is substituted with a given edit probability. Deduplication algorithms in both the fixed-length scheme and the variable-length scheme are studied. The fixed-length deduplication algorithm is shown to be unsuitable for the proposed source model as it does not take into account the edit probability. Two modifications are proposed and shown to have performances within a constant factor of optimal for a specific class of source models with the knowledge of model parameters. We also study the conventional variable-length deduplication algorithm and show that as source entropy becomes smaller, the size of the compressed string vanishes relative to the length of the uncompressed string, leading to high compression ratios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In applications of remote sensing, estimation, and control, timely communication is critical but not always ensured by high-rate communication. This work proposes decentralized age-efficient transmission policies for random access channels with $M$ transmitters. We propose the notion of age-gain of a packet to quantify how much the packet will reduce the instantaneous age of information at the receiver side upon successful delivery. We then utilize this notion to propose a transmission policy in which transmitters act in a decentralized manner based on the age-gain of their available packets. In particular, each transmitter sends its latest packet only if its corresponding age-gain is beyond a certain threshold which could be computed adaptively using the collision feedback or found as a fixed value analytically in advance. Both methods improve age of information significantly compared to the state of the art. In the limit of large $M$ , we prove that when the arrival rate is small (below $\frac {1}{eM}$), slotted ALOHA-type algorithms are order optimal. As the arrival rate increases beyond $\frac {1}{eM}$ , while age increases under slotted ALOHA, it decreases significantly under the proposed age-based policies. For arrival rates $\theta $ , $\theta =\frac {1}{o(M)}$ , the proposed algorithms provide a multiplicative gain of at least two compared to the minimum age under slotted ALOHA (minimum over all arrival rates). We conclude that it is beneficial to increase the sampling rate (and hence the arrival rate) and transmit packets selectively based on their age-gain. This is surprising and contrary to common practice where the arrival rate is optimized to attain the minimum AoI. We further extend our results to other random access technologies such as Carrier-sense multiple access (CSMA). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Faced with massive data, subsampling is a commonly used technique to improve computational efficiency, and using nonuniform subsampling probabilities is an effective approach to improve estimation efficiency. For computational efficiency, subsampling is often implemented with replacement or through Poisson subsampling. However, no rigorous investigation has been performed to study the difference between the two subsampling procedures such as their estimation efficiency and computational convenience. This paper performs a comparative study on these two different sampling procedures. In the context of maximizing a general target function, we first derive asymptotic distributions for estimators obtained from the two sampling procedures. The results show that the Poisson subsampling may have a higher estimation efficiency. Based on the asymptotic distributions for both subsampling with replacement and Poisson subsampling, we derive optimal subsampling probabilities that minimize the variance functions of the subsampling estimators. These subsampling probabilities further reveal the similarities and differences between subsampling with replacement and Poisson subsampling. The theoretical characterizations and comparisons on the two subsampling procedures provide guidance to select a more appropriate subsampling approach in practice. Furthermore, practically implementable algorithms are proposed based on the optimal structural results, which are evaluated through both theoretical and empirical analyses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the finite-time distributed approximate optimization problem of higher order multiagent systems, where the local cost functions are considered to be quadratic functions. This problem is solved via penalty-function-based method. First, by the penalty-function method, a global approximate cost function is constructed. Second, nonlinear distributed optimization algorithms are proposed for higher order multiagent systems by the tool of adding a power integrator technique. In the optimization algorithms design, the gradients of the approximate cost function are utilized. Under the proposed optimization algorithms, the agents approach the approximate optimal solution in finite time. Although there exist errors (they may be called approximation errors) between the approximate minimizers and the global accurate minimizer, the approximation errors can be regulated by penalty parameter and the relationship between the bound of the approximation errors and the penalty parameter is given explicitly. Furthermore, the proposed distributed approximate optimization algorithms are applied to the optimal rendezvous problem of wheeled multimobile robots, making the mobile robots achieve approximate optimization rendezvous in finite time. The effectiveness of the proposed distributed optimization algorithms and their applications to optimal rendezvous problem are validated by simulations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we design algorithms to protect swarm-robotics applications against sensor denial-of-service attacks on robots. We focus on applications requiring the robots to jointly select actions, e.g., which trajectory to follow, among a set of available actions. Such applications are central in large-scale robotic applications, such as multirobot motion planning for target tracking. But the current attack-robust algorithms are centralized. In this article, we propose a general-purpose distributed algorithm toward robust optimization at scale, with local communications only. We name it distributed robust maximization (DRM). DRM proposes a divide-and-conquer approach that distributively partitions the problem among cliques of robots. Then, the cliques optimize in parallel, independently of each other. We prove DRM achieves a close-to-optimal performance. We demonstrate DRM’s performance in Gazebo and MATLAB simulations, in scenarios of active target tracking with swarms of robots. In the simulations, DRM achieves computational speed-ups, being 1 to 2 orders faster than the centralized algorithms. Yet, it nearly matches the tracking performance of the centralized counterparts. Since, DRM overestimates the number of attacks in each clique, in this article, we also introduce an improved distributed robust maximization (IDRM) algorithm. IDRM infers the number of attacks in each clique less conservatively than DRM by leveraging three-hop neighboring communications. We verify IDRM improves DRM’s performance in simulations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given $m~d$ -dimensional responsors and $n~d$ -dimensional predictors, sparse regression finds at most $k$ predictors for each responsor for linear approximation, $1\leq k \leq d-1$. The key problem in sparse regression is subset selection, which usually suffers from high computational cost. In recent years, many improved approximate methods of subset selection have been published. However, less attention has been paid to the nonapproximate method of subset selection, which is very necessary for many questions in data analysis. Here, we consider sparse regression from the view of correlation and propose the formula of conditional uncorrelation. Then, an efficient nonapproximate method of subset selection is proposed in which we do not need to calculate any coefficients in the regression equation for candidate predictors. By the proposed method, the computational complexity is reduced from $O([{1}/{6}]{k^{3}}\!+(m+1)k^{2}\!+\!mkd)$ to $O([{1}/{6}]{k^{3}}\!+[{1}/{2}](m+1)k^{2})$ for each candidate subset in sparse regression. Because the dimension $d$ is generally the number of observations or experiments and large enough, the proposed method can greatly improve the efficiency of nonapproximate subset selection. We also apply the proposed method in real scenarios of dental age assessment and sparse coding to validate the efficiency of the proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is concerned with a distributed filtering problem for Markov jump systems subject to the measurement loss with unknown probabilities. A centralized robust Kalman filter is designed by using variational Bayesian methods and a modified interacting multiple model method based on information theory (IT-IMM). Then, a distributed robust Kalman filter based on the centralized filter and a hybrid consensus method called hybrid consensus on measurement and information (HCMCI) is designed. Moreover, boundedness of the estimation errors and the estimation error covariances are studied for the distributed robust Kalman filter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With an increasing penetration of distributed energy resources (DERs), it has become a public interest regarding how to efficiently manage large-scale DERs into wholesale markets. The existing literature has focused on various coordination methods including iteration-based (e.g., Lagrangian relaxation) and projection-based (e.g., vertex enumeration) ones, which may not work for the cases with complicated constraints due to curse of dimensionality. In this article, we propose an efficient projection-based method that adapts to characterizing the feasible region of active distribution networks with temporal-coupled constraints. The problem of finding the temporal-coupled feasible region is formulated as a max–min optimization program, aiming to determine the largest set allowing zero-valued slack variables. Based on Duality Principle, the max–min model is transformed into a solvable mixed-integer linear programming that can be efficiently optimized by off-the-shelf solvers. In contrast to the existing methods searching for a vertex from interior points, we develop an outer progressive approximation algorithm that generates feasibility cuts for each iteration. Case studies based on a modified IEEE 33-bus feeder and Caracas 141-bus system demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed method in characterizing the feasible region with large-scale temporal-coupled constraints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the non-convex composition optimization consisting of inner and outer finite-sum functions with a large number of component functions. This problem arises in important applications such as nonlinear embedding and reinforcement learning. Although existing approaches such as stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and stochastic variance reduced gradient (SVRG) descent can be applied to solve this problem, their query complexities tend to be high, especially when the number of inner component functions is large. Therefore, to significantly improve the query complexity of current approaches, we have devised the stochastic composition via variance reduction (SCVR). What's more, we analyze the query complexity under different numbers of inner function and outer function. Based on different kinds of estimation of inner component function, we also present the SCVRII algorithm, though the order of query complexities are the same with SCVR. Additionally, we propose an extension to handle the mini-batch cases, which improve the query complexity under the optimal mini-batch size. The experimental results validate our proposed algorithms and theoretical analyses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Binary optimization problems (BOPs) arise naturally in many fields, such as information retrieval, computer vision, and machine learning. Most existing binary optimization methods either use continuous relaxation which can cause large quantization errors, or incorporate a highly specific algorithm that can only be used for particular loss functions. To overcome these difficulties, we propose a novel generalized optimization method, named Alternating Binary Matrix Optimization (ABMO), for solving BOPs. ABMO can handle BOPs with/without orthogonality or linear constraints for a large class of loss functions. ABMO involves rewriting the binary, orthogonality and linear constraints for BOPs as an intersection of two closed sets, then iteratively dividing the original problems into several small optimization problems that can be solved as closed forms. To provide a strict theoretical convergence analysis, we add a sufficiently small perturbation and translate the original problem to an approximated problem whose feasible set is continuous. We not only provide rigorous mathematical proof for the convergence to a stationary and feasible point, but also derive the convergence rate of the proposed algorithm. The promising results obtained from four binary optimization tasks validate the superiority and the generality of ABMO compared with the state-of-the-art methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social-media platforms have created new ways for citizens to stay informed and participate in public debates. However, to enable a healthy environment for information sharing, social deliberation, and opinion formation, citizens need to be exposed to sufficiently diverse viewpoints that challenge their assumptions, instead of being trapped inside filter bubbles. In this paper, we take a step in this direction and propose a novel approach to maximize the diversity of exposure in a social network. We formulate the problem in the context of information propagation, as a task of recommending a small number of news articles to selected users. In the proposed setting, we take into account content and user leanings, and the probability of further sharing an article. Our model allows to capture the balance between maximizing the spread of information and ensuring the exposure of users to diverse viewpoints. The resulting problem can be cast as maximizing a monotone and submodular function, subject to a matroid constraint on the allocation of articles to users. It is a challenging generalization of the influence-maximization problem. Yet, we are able to devise scalable approximation algorithms by introducing a novel extension to the notion of random reverse-reachable sets. We experimentally demonstrate the efficiency and scalability of our algorithm on several real-world datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Driven by real-life applications in geo-social networks, we study the problem of computing radius-bounded $k$ k -cores (RB- $k$ k -cores) that aims to find communities satisfying both social and spatial constraints. In particular, the model $k$ k -core (i.e., the subgraph where each vertex has at least $k$ k neighbors) is used to ensure the social cohesiveness, and a radius-bounded circle is used to restrict the locations of users in an RB- $k$ k -core. We explore several algorithmic paradigms to compute RB- $k$ k -cores, including a triple-vertex-based paradigm, a binary-vertex-based paradigm, and a paradigm utilizing the concept of rotating circles. The rotating-circle-based paradigm is further enhanced by several pruning techniques to achieve better efficiency. In addition, to find representative RB- $k$ k -cores, we study the diversified radius-bounded $k$ k -core search problem, which finds $t$ t RB- $k$ k -cores to cover the most number of vertices. We first propose a baseline algorithm that identifies the distinctive RB- $k$ k -cores after finding all the RB- $k$ k -cores. Beyond this, we design algorithms that can efficiently maintain the top- $t$ t candidate RB- $k$ k -cores and also achieve a guaranteed approximation ratio. Experimental studies on both real and synthetic datasets demonstrate that our proposed techniques can efficiently compute (diversified) RB- $k$ k -cores. Moreover, our techniques can be used to compute the minimum-circle-bounded $k$ k -core and significantly outperform the existing techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]