Practical Parallel Algorithms for Non-Monotone Submodular Maximization

Submodular maximization has found extensive applications in various domains within the field of artificial intelligence, including but not limited to machine learning, computer vision, and natural language processing. With the increasing size of datasets in these domains, there is a pressing need to develop efficient and parallelizable algorithms for submodular maximization. One measure of the parallelizability of a submodular maximization algorithm is its adaptive complexity, which indicates the number of sequential rounds where a polynomial number of queries to the objective function can be executed in parallel. In this paper, we study the problem of non-monotone submodular maximization subject to a knapsack constraint, and propose the first combinatorial algorithm achieving an $(8+\epsilon)$-approximation under $\mathcal{O}(\log n)$ adaptive complexity, which is \textit{optimal} up to a factor of $\mathcal{O}(\log\log n)$. Moreover, we also propose the first algorithm with both provable approximation ratio and sublinear adaptive complexity for the problem of non-monotone submodular maximization subject to a $k$-system constraint. As a by-product, we show that our two algorithms can also be applied to the special case of submodular maximization subject to a cardinality constraint, and achieve performance bounds comparable with those of state-of-the-art algorithms. Finally, the effectiveness of our approach is demonstrated by extensive experiments on real-world applications.

A Smart Recycling Bin Using Waste Image Classification At The Edge

Rapid economic growth gives rise to the urgent demand for a more efficient waste recycling system. This work thereby developed an innovative recycling bin that automatically separates urban waste to increase the recycling rate. We collected 1800 recycling waste images and combined them with an existing public dataset to train classification models for two embedded systems, Jetson Nano and K210, targeting different markets. The model reached an accuracy of 95.98% on Jetson Nano and 96.64% on K210. A bin program was designed to collect feedback from users. On Jetson Nano, the overall power consumption of the application was reduced by 30% from the previous work to 4.7 W, while the second system, K210, only needed 0.89 W of power to operate. In summary, our work demonstrated a fully functional prototype of an energy-saving, high-accuracy smart recycling bin, which can be commercialized in the future to improve urban waste recycling.

Interpretable performance analysis towards offline reinforcement learning: A dataset perspective

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) has increasingly become the focus of the artificial intelligent research due to its wide real-world applications where the collection of data may be difficult, time-consuming, or costly. In this paper, we first propose a two-fold taxonomy for existing offline RL algorithms from the perspective of exploration and exploitation tendency. Secondly, we derive the explicit expression of the upper bound of extrapolation error and explore the correlation between the performance of different types of algorithms and the distribution of actions under states. Specifically, we relax the strict assumption on the sufficiently large amount of state-action tuples. Accordingly, we provably explain why batch constrained Q-learning (BCQ) performs better than other existing techniques. Thirdly, after identifying the weakness of BCQ on dataset of low mean episode returns, we propose a modified variant based on top return selection mechanism, which is proved to be able to gain state-of-the-art performance on various datasets. Lastly, we create a benchmark platform on the Atari domain, entitled RL easy go (RLEG), at an estimated cost of more than 0.3 million dollars. We make it open-source for fair and comprehensive competitions between offline RL algorithms with complete datasets and checkpoints being provided.