arXiv subjects

Sirui Li

Publications and source records attributed to Sirui Li.

70 records · Page 4Linked to original sources

arXiv2023

Learning to Configure Separators in Branch-and-Cut

Cutting planes are crucial in solving mixed integer linear programs (MILP) as they facilitate bound improvements on the optimal solution. Modern MILP solvers rely on a variety of separators to generate a diverse set of cutting planes by invoking the separators frequently during the solving process. This work identifies that MILP solvers can be drastically accelerated by appropriately selecting separators to activate. As the combinatorial separator selection space imposes challenges for machine learning, we learn to separate by proposing a novel data-driven strategy to restrict the selection space and a learning-guided algorithm on the restricted space. Our method predicts instance-aware separator configurations which can dynamically adapt during the solve, effectively accelerating the open source MILP solver SCIP by improving the relative solve time up to 72% and 37% on synthetic and real-world MILP benchmarks. Our work complements recent work on learning to select cutting planes and highlights the importance of separator management.

math.OC↗

arXiv2023

Integrated Analysis of Coarse-Grained Guidance for Traffic Flow Stability

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) enable more efficient and sustainable transportation systems. Ample studies have shown that controlling a small fraction of AVs can smooth traffic flow and mitigate traffic congestion. However, deploying AVs in real-world systems poses challenges due to safety and cost concerns. A viable alternative approach that can be implemented in the near future is $\textit{coarse-grained guidance}$, where human drivers are guided by real-time instructions, updated every $Δ$ seconds, to stabilize the traffic. While previous theoretical studies consider stability analysis for continuous AV control, this article presents the first integrated theoretical analysis that directly relates the guidance provided to the human drivers to the traffic flow stability outcome. Casting the problem into the Lyapunov stability framework, this study derives sufficient conditions for coarse-grained guidance with hold length $Δ$ to stabilize the system, and provides extensions of the analysis to incorporate additional human driving behaviors such as magnitude error and reaction delay. Numerical simulations reveal that the theoretical analysis closely matches simulated results. The analysis further offers insights into the relationship between system parameter and stability criteria, and can be leveraged to design improved controllers with greater maximum hold length.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2023

Large Language Models for Failure Mode Classification: An Investigation

In this paper we present the first investigation into the effectiveness of Large Language Models (LLMs) for Failure Mode Classification (FMC). FMC, the task of automatically labelling an observation with a corresponding failure mode code, is a critical task in the maintenance domain as it reduces the need for reliability engineers to spend their time manually analysing work orders. We detail our approach to prompt engineering to enable an LLM to predict the failure mode of a given observation using a restricted code list. We demonstrate that the performance of a GPT-3.5 model (F1=0.80) fine-tuned on annotated data is a significant improvement over a currently available text classification model (F1=0.60) trained on the same annotated data set. The fine-tuned model also outperforms the out-of-the box GPT-3.5 (F1=0.46). This investigation reinforces the need for high quality fine-tuning data sets for domain-specific tasks using LLMs.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2023

Cooperation for Scalable Supervision of Autonomy in Mixed Traffic

Advances in autonomy offer the potential for dramatic positive outcomes in a number of domains, yet enabling their safe deployment remains an open problem. This work's motivating question is: In safety-critical settings, can we avoid the need to have one human supervise one machine at all times? The work formalizes this scalable supervision problem by considering remotely located human supervisors and investigating how autonomous agents can cooperate to achieve safety. This article focuses on the safety-critical context of autonomous vehicles (AVs) merging into traffic consisting of a mixture of AVs and human drivers. The analysis establishes high reliability upper bounds on human supervision requirements. It further shows that AV cooperation can improve supervision reliability by orders of magnitude and counterintuitively requires fewer supervisors (per AV) as more AVs are adopted. These analytical results leverage queuing-theoretic analysis, order statistics, and a conservative, reachability-based approach. A key takeaway is the potential value of cooperation in enabling the deployment of autonomy at scale. While this work focuses on AVs, the scalable supervision framework may be of independent interest to a broader array of autonomous control challenges.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

Modelling Multi-relations for Convolutional-based Knowledge Graph Embedding

Representation learning of knowledge graphs aims to embed entities and relations into low-dimensional vectors. Most existing works only consider the direct relations or paths between an entity pair. It is considered that such approaches disconnect the semantic connection of multi-relations between an entity pair, and we propose a convolutional and multi-relational representation learning model, ConvMR. The proposed ConvMR model addresses the multi-relation issue in two aspects: (1) Encoding the multi-relations between an entity pair into a unified vector that maintains the semantic connection. (2) Since not all relations are necessary while joining multi-relations, we propose an attention-based relation encoder to automatically assign weights to different relations based on semantic hierarchy. Experimental results on two popular datasets, FB15k-237 and WN18RR, achieved consistent improvements on the mean rank. We also found that ConvMR is efficient to deal with less frequent entities.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2022

The Impact of Task Underspecification in Evaluating Deep Reinforcement Learning

Evaluations of Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) methods are an integral part of scientific progress of the field. Beyond designing DRL methods for general intelligence, designing task-specific methods is becoming increasingly prominent for real-world applications. In these settings, the standard evaluation practice involves using a few instances of Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) to represent the task. However, many tasks induce a large family of MDPs owing to variations in the underlying environment, particularly in real-world contexts. For example, in traffic signal control, variations may stem from intersection geometries and traffic flow levels. The select MDP instances may thus inadvertently cause overfitting, lacking the statistical power to draw conclusions about the method's true performance across the family. In this article, we augment DRL evaluations to consider parameterized families of MDPs. We show that in comparison to evaluating DRL methods on select MDP instances, evaluating the MDP family often yields a substantially different relative ranking of methods, casting doubt on what methods should be considered state-of-the-art. We validate this phenomenon in standard control benchmarks and the real-world application of traffic signal control. At the same time, we show that accurately evaluating on an MDP family is nontrivial. Overall, this work identifies new challenges for empirical rigor in reinforcement learning, especially as the outcomes of DRL trickle into downstream decision-making.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

Uniqueness of global weak solutions to the frame hydrodynamics for biaxial nematic phases in $\mathbb{R}^2$

We consider the hydrodynamics for biaxial nematic phases described by a field of orthonormal frame, which can be derived from a molecular-theory-based tensor model. We prove the uniqueness of global weak solutions to the Cauchy problem of the frame hydrodynamics in dimensional two. The proof is mainly based on the suitable weaker energy estimates within the Littlewood--Paley analysis. We take full advantage of the estimates of nonlinear terms with rotational derivatives on $SO(3)$, together with cancellation relations and dissipative structures of the biaxial frame system.

math.AP↗

arXiv2022

Frame hydrodynamics of biaxial nematics from molecular-theory-based tensor models

Starting from a dynamic tensor model about two second-order tensors, we derive the frame hydrodynamics for the biaxial nematic phase using the Hilbert expansion. The coefficients in the frame model are derived from those in the tensor model. The energy dissipation of the tensor model is maintained in the frame model. The model is reduced to the Ericksen--Leslie model if the biaxial bulk energy minimum of the tensor model is reduced to a uniaxial one.

cond-mat.soft↗

arXiv2022

Well-posedness of frame hydrodynamics for biaxial nematic liquid crystals

We consider the hydrodynamics for the biaxial nematic phase characterized by a field of orthonormal frame, which can be derived from a molecular-theory-based tensor model. In dimension two and three, we establish the local well-posedness and the blow-up criterion for smooth solutions to the frame hydrodynamic model. Furthermore, we prove the global existence of weak solutions in $\mathbb{R}^2$ which are nonsmooth at finitely many singular times.

math.AP↗

arXiv2022

Rigorous biaxial limit of a molecular-theory-based two-tensor hydrodynamics

We consider a two-tensor hydrodynamics derived from the molecular model, where high-order tensors are determined by closure approximation through the maximum entropy state or the quasi-entropy. We prove the existence and uniqueness of local in time smooth solutions to the two-tensor system. Then, we rigorously justify the connection between the molecular-theory-based two-tensor hydrodynamics and the biaxial frame hydrodynamics. More specifically, in the framework of Hilbert expansion, we show the convergence of the solution to the two-tensor hydrodynamics to the solution to the frame hydrodynamics.

math.AP↗

arXiv2022

Improving Question Answering over Knowledge Graphs Using Graph Summarization

Question Answering (QA) systems over Knowledge Graphs (KGs) (KGQA) automatically answer natural language questions using triples contained in a KG. The key idea is to represent questions and entities of a KG as low-dimensional embeddings. Previous KGQAs have attempted to represent entities using Knowledge Graph Embedding (KGE) and Deep Learning (DL) methods. However, KGEs are too shallow to capture the expressive features and DL methods process each triple independently. Recently, Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) has shown to be excellent in providing entity embeddings. However, using GCNs to KGQAs is inefficient because GCNs treat all relations equally when aggregating neighbourhoods. Also, a problem could occur when using previous KGQAs: in most cases, questions often have an uncertain number of answers. To address the above issues, we propose a graph summarization technique using Recurrent Convolutional Neural Network (RCNN) and GCN. The combination of GCN and RCNN ensures that the embeddings are propagated together with the relations relevant to the question, and thus better answers. The proposed graph summarization technique can be used to tackle the issue that KGQAs cannot answer questions with an uncertain number of answers. In this paper, we demonstrated the proposed technique on the most common type of questions, which is single-relation questions. Experiments have demonstrated that the proposed graph summarization technique using RCNN and GCN can provide better results when compared to the GCN. The proposed graph summarization technique significantly improves the recall of actual answers when the questions have an uncertain number of answers.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

Learning to Delegate for Large-scale Vehicle Routing

Vehicle routing problems (VRPs) form a class of combinatorial problems with wide practical applications. While previous heuristic or learning-based works achieve decent solutions on small problem instances of up to 100 cities, their performance deteriorates in large problems. This article presents a novel learning-augmented local search framework to solve large-scale VRP. The method iteratively improves the solution by identifying appropriate subproblems and $\textit{delegating}$ their improvement to a black box subsolver. At each step, we leverage spatial locality to consider only a linear number of subproblems, rather than exponential. We frame subproblem selection as regression and train a Transformer on a generated training set of problem instances. Our method accelerates state-of-the-art VRP solvers by 10x to 100x while achieving competitive solution qualities for VRPs with sizes ranging from 500 to 3000. Learned subproblem selection offers a 1.5x to 2x speedup over heuristic or random selection. Our results generalize to a variety of VRP distributions, variants, and solvers.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

Efficient Trajectory Compression and Range Query Processing

Nowadays, there are ubiquitousness of GPS sensors in various devices collecting, transmitting and storing tremendous trajectory data. However, such an unprecedented scale of GPS data has posed an urgent demand for not only an effective storage mechanism but also an efficient query mechanism. Line simplification in online mode, searving as a mainstream trajectory compression method, plays an important role to attack this issue. But for the existing algorithms, either their time cost is extremely high, or the accuracy loss after the compression is completely unacceptable. To attack this issue, we propose $ε\_$Region based Online trajectory Compression with Error bounded (ROCE for short), which makes the best balance among the accuracy loss, the time cost and the compression rate. The range query serves as a primitive, yet quite essential operation on analyzing trajectories. Each trajectory is usually seen as a sequence of discrete points, and in most previous work, a trajectory is judged to be overlapped with the query region R iff there is at least one point in this trajectory falling in R. But this traditional criteria is not suitable when the queried trajectories are compressed, because there may be hundreds of points discarded between each two adjacent points and the points in each compressed trajectory are quite sparse. And many trajectories could be missing in the result set. To address this, in this paper, a new criteria based on the probability and an efficient Range Query processing algorithm on Compressed trajectories RQC are proposed. In addition, an efficient index \emph{ASP\_tree} and lots of novel techniques are also presented to accelerate the processing of trajectory compression and range queries obviously. Extensive experiments have been done on multiple real datasets, and the results demonstrate superior performance of our methods.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2019

Rigorous justification of the uniaxial limit from Qian-Sheng's inertial $Q$-tensor theory to the Ericksen-Leslie theory

In this paper, we rigorously justify the connection between Qian-Sheng's inertial $Q$-tensor model and the full Ericksen-Leslie model for the liquid crystal flow. By using the Hilbert expansion method, we prove that, when the elastic coefficients tend to zero(also called the uniaxial limit), the solution to the Qian-Sheng's inertial model will converge to the solution to the full inertial Ericksen-Leslie system.

math.AP↗

arXiv2019

Conditional Linear Regression

Work in machine learning and statistics commonly focuses on building models that capture the vast majority of data, possibly ignoring a segment of the population as outliers. However, there does not often exist a good model on the whole dataset, so we seek to find a small subset where there exists a useful model. We are interested in finding a linear rule capable of achieving more accurate predictions for just a segment of the population. We give an efficient algorithm with theoretical analysis for the conditional linear regression task, which is the joint task of identifying a significant segment of the population, described by a k-DNF, along with its linear regression fit.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2014

Local well-posedness and small Deborah limit of a molecule-based $Q$-tensor system

In this paper, we consider a hydrodynamic $Q$-tensor system for nematic liquid crystal flow, which is derived from Doi-Onsager molecular theory by the Bingham closure. We first prove the existence and uniqueness of local strong solution. Furthermore, by taking Deborah number goes to zero and using the Hilbert expansion method, we present a rigorous derivation from the molecule-based $Q$-tensor theory to the Ericksen-Leslie theory.

math.AP↗