Optimization of Worker Scheduling at Logistics Depots Using Genetic Algorithms and Simulated Annealing

This paper addresses the optimization of scheduling for workers at a logistics depot using a combination of genetic algorithm and simulated annealing algorithm. The efficient scheduling of permanent and temporary workers is crucial for optimizing the efficiency of the logistics depot while minimizing labor usage. The study begins by establishing a 0-1 integer linear programming model, with decision variables determining the scheduling of permanent and temporary workers for each time slot on a given day. The objective function aims to minimize person-days, while constraints ensure fulfillment of hourly labor requirements, limit workers to one time slot per day, cap consecutive working days for permanent workers, and maintain non-negativity and integer constraints. The model is then solved using genetic algorithms and simulated annealing. Results indicate that, for this problem, genetic algorithms outperform simulated annealing in terms of solution quality. The optimal solution reveals a minimum of 29857 person-days.

FedProK: Trustworthy Federated Class-Incremental Learning via Prototypical Feature Knowledge Transfer

Federated Class-Incremental Learning (FCIL) focuses on continually transferring the previous knowledge to learn new classes in dynamic Federated Learning (FL). However, existing methods do not consider the trustworthiness of FCIL, i.e., improving continual utility, privacy, and efficiency simultaneously, which is greatly influenced by catastrophic forgetting and data heterogeneity among clients. To address this issue, we propose FedProK (Federated Prototypical Feature Knowledge Transfer), leveraging prototypical feature as a novel representation of knowledge to perform spatial-temporal knowledge transfer. Specifically, FedProK consists of two components: (1) feature translation procedure on the client side by temporal knowledge transfer from the learned classes and (2) prototypical knowledge fusion on the server side by spatial knowledge transfer among clients. Extensive experiments conducted in both synchronous and asynchronous settings demonstrate that our FedProK outperforms the other state-of-the-art methods in three perspectives of trustworthiness, validating its effectiveness in selectively transferring spatial-temporal knowledge.

Phasic Diversity Optimization for Population-Based Reinforcement Learning

Reviewing the previous work of diversity Rein-forcement Learning,diversity is often obtained via an augmented loss function,which requires a balance between reward and diversity.Generally,diversity optimization algorithms use Multi-armed Bandits algorithms to select the coefficient in the pre-defined space. However, the dynamic distribution of reward signals for MABs or the conflict between quality and diversity limits the performance of these methods. We introduce the Phasic Diversity Optimization (PDO) algorithm, a Population-Based Training framework that separates reward and diversity training into distinct phases instead of optimizing a multi-objective function. In the auxiliary phase, agents with poor performance diversified via determinants will not replace the better agents in the archive. The decoupling of reward and diversity allows us to use an aggressive diversity optimization in the auxiliary phase without performance degradation. Furthermore, we construct a dogfight scenario for aerial agents to demonstrate the practicality of the PDO algorithm. We introduce two implementations of PDO archive and conduct tests in the newly proposed adversarial dogfight and MuJoCo simulations. The results show that our proposed algorithm achieves better performance than baselines.

Open Continual Feature Selection via Granular-Ball Knowledge Transfer

This paper presents a novel framework for continual feature selection (CFS) in data preprocessing, particularly in the context of an open and dynamic environment where unknown classes may emerge. CFS encounters two primary challenges: the discovery of unknown knowledge and the transfer of known knowledge. To this end, the proposed CFS method combines the strengths of continual learning (CL) with granular-ball computing (GBC), which focuses on constructing a granular-ball knowledge base to detect unknown classes and facilitate the transfer of previously learned knowledge for further feature selection. CFS consists of two stages: initial learning and open learning. The former aims to establish an initial knowledge base through multi-granularity representation using granular-balls. The latter utilizes prior granular-ball knowledge to identify unknowns, updates the knowledge base for granular-ball knowledge transfer, reinforces old knowledge, and integrates new knowledge. Subsequently, we devise an optimal feature subset mechanism that incorporates minimal new features into the existing optimal subset, often yielding superior results during each period. Extensive experimental results on public benchmark datasets demonstrate our method's superiority in terms of both effectiveness and efficiency compared to state-of-the-art feature selection methods.

Adaptive Fusion of Single-View and Multi-View Depth for Autonomous Driving

Multi-view depth estimation has achieved impressive performance over various benchmarks. However, almost all current multi-view systems rely on given ideal camera poses, which are unavailable in many real-world scenarios, such as autonomous driving. In this work, we propose a new robustness benchmark to evaluate the depth estimation system under various noisy pose settings. Surprisingly, we find current multi-view depth estimation methods or single-view and multi-view fusion methods will fail when given noisy pose settings. To address this challenge, we propose a single-view and multi-view fused depth estimation system, which adaptively integrates high-confident multi-view and single-view results for both robust and accurate depth estimations. The adaptive fusion module performs fusion by dynamically selecting high-confidence regions between two branches based on a wrapping confidence map. Thus, the system tends to choose the more reliable branch when facing textureless scenes, inaccurate calibration, dynamic objects, and other degradation or challenging conditions. Our method outperforms state-of-the-art multi-view and fusion methods under robustness testing. Furthermore, we achieve state-of-the-art performance on challenging benchmarks (KITTI and DDAD) when given accurate pose estimations. Project website: https://github.com/Junda24/AFNet/.

HDRFlow: Real-Time HDR Video Reconstruction with Large Motions

Reconstructing High Dynamic Range (HDR) video from image sequences captured with alternating exposures is challenging, especially in the presence of large camera or object motion. Existing methods typically align low dynamic range sequences using optical flow or attention mechanism for deghosting. However, they often struggle to handle large complex motions and are computationally expensive. To address these challenges, we propose a robust and efficient flow estimator tailored for real-time HDR video reconstruction, named HDRFlow. HDRFlow has three novel designs: an HDR-domain alignment loss (HALoss), an efficient flow network with a multi-size large kernel (MLK), and a new HDR flow training scheme. The HALoss supervises our flow network to learn an HDR-oriented flow for accurate alignment in saturated and dark regions. The MLK can effectively model large motions at a negligible cost. In addition, we incorporate synthetic data, Sintel, into our training dataset, utilizing both its provided forward flow and backward flow generated by us to supervise our flow network, enhancing our performance in large motion regions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our HDRFlow outperforms previous methods on standard benchmarks. To the best of our knowledge, HDRFlow is the first real-time HDR video reconstruction method for video sequences captured with alternating exposures, capable of processing 720p resolution inputs at 25ms.

Selective-Stereo: Adaptive Frequency Information Selection for Stereo Matching

Stereo matching methods based on iterative optimization, like RAFT-Stereo and IGEV-Stereo, have evolved into a cornerstone in the field of stereo matching. However, these methods struggle to simultaneously capture high-frequency information in edges and low-frequency information in smooth regions due to the fixed receptive field. As a result, they tend to lose details, blur edges, and produce false matches in textureless areas. In this paper, we propose Selective Recurrent Unit (SRU), a novel iterative update operator for stereo matching. The SRU module can adaptively fuse hidden disparity information at multiple frequencies for edge and smooth regions. To perform adaptive fusion, we introduce a new Contextual Spatial Attention (CSA) module to generate attention maps as fusion weights. The SRU empowers the network to aggregate hidden disparity information across multiple frequencies, mitigating the risk of vital hidden disparity information loss during iterative processes. To verify SRU's universality, we apply it to representative iterative stereo matching methods, collectively referred to as Selective-Stereo. Our Selective-Stereo ranks $1^{st}$ on KITTI 2012, KITTI 2015, ETH3D, and Middlebury leaderboards among all published methods. Code is available at https://github.com/Windsrain/Selective-Stereo.

Thyroid ultrasound diagnosis improvement via multi-view self-supervised learning and two-stage pre-training

Thyroid nodule classification and segmentation in ultrasound images are crucial for computer-aided diagnosis; however, they face limitations owing to insufficient labeled data. In this study, we proposed a multi-view contrastive self-supervised method to improve thyroid nodule classification and segmentation performance with limited manual labels. Our method aligns the transverse and longitudinal views of the same nodule, thereby enabling the model to focus more on the nodule area. We designed an adaptive loss function that eliminates the limitations of the paired data. Additionally, we adopted a two-stage pre-training to exploit the pre-training on ImageNet and thyroid ultrasound images. Extensive experiments were conducted on a large-scale dataset collected from multiple centers. The results showed that the proposed method significantly improves nodule classification and segmentation performance with limited manual labels and outperforms state-of-the-art self-supervised methods. The two-stage pre-training also significantly exceeded ImageNet pre-training.

Hierarchical Continual Reinforcement Learning via Large Language Model

The ability to learn continuously in dynamic environments is a crucial requirement for reinforcement learning (RL) agents applying in the real world. Despite the progress in continual reinforcement learning (CRL), existing methods often suffer from insufficient knowledge transfer, particularly when the tasks are diverse. To address this challenge, we propose a new framework, Hierarchical Continual reinforcement learning via large language model (Hi-Core), designed to facilitate the transfer of high-level knowledge. Hi-Core orchestrates a twolayer structure: high-level policy formulation by a large language model (LLM), which represents agenerates a sequence of goals, and low-level policy learning that closely aligns with goal-oriented RL practices, producing the agent's actions in response to the goals set forth. The framework employs feedback to iteratively adjust and verify highlevel policies, storing them along with low-level policies within a skill library. When encountering a new task, Hi-Core retrieves relevant experience from this library to help to learning. Through experiments on Minigrid, Hi-Core has demonstrated its effectiveness in handling diverse CRL tasks, which outperforms popular baselines.

Semantic Segmentation in Multiple Adverse Weather Conditions with Domain Knowledge Retention

Semantic segmentation's performance is often compromised when applied to unlabeled adverse weather conditions. Unsupervised domain adaptation is a potential approach to enhancing the model's adaptability and robustness to adverse weather. However, existing methods encounter difficulties when sequentially adapting the model to multiple unlabeled adverse weather conditions. They struggle to acquire new knowledge while also retaining previously learned knowledge.To address these problems, we propose a semantic segmentation method for multiple adverse weather conditions that incorporates adaptive knowledge acquisition, pseudolabel blending, and weather composition replay. Our adaptive knowledge acquisition enables the model to avoid learning from extreme images that could potentially cause the model to forget. In our approach of blending pseudo-labels, we not only utilize the current model but also integrate the previously learned model into the ongoing learning process. This collaboration between the current teacher and the previous model enhances the robustness of the pseudo-labels for the current target. Our weather composition replay mechanism allows the model to continuously refine its previously learned weather information while simultaneously learning from the new target domain. Our method consistently outperforms the stateof-the-art methods, and obtains the best performance with averaged mIoU (%) of 65.7 and the lowest forgetting (%) of 3.6 against 60.1 and 11.3, on the ACDC datasets for a four-target continual multi-target domain adaptation.