Jayanth Bhargav

Sowjanya Karanam, Jayanth Bhargav

Machine learning is now a central part of how modern systems are built and used, powering everything from personalized recommendations to large-scale business analytics. As its role grows, organizations are facing new challenges in managing, deploying, and scaling these models efficiently. One approach that has gained wide adoption is the use of microservice architectures, which break complex machine learning systems into smaller, independent parts that can be built, updated, and scaled on their own. In this paper, we review how major companies such as Netflix, Uber, and Google use microservices to handle key machine learning tasks like training, deployment, and monitoring. We discuss the main challenges involved in designing such systems and explore how microservices fit into large-scale applications, particularly in recommendation systems. We also present some simulation studies showing that microservice-based designs can reduce latency and improve scalability, leading to faster, more efficient, and more responsive machine learning applications in real-world and large-scale systems.

Jayanth Bhargav, Zirui Xu, Vasileios Tzoumas et al.

We study a target coverage problem in which a team of sensing agents, operating under limited communication, must collaboratively monitor targets that may be adaptively repositioned by an attacker. We model this interaction as a zero-sum game between the sensing team (known as the defender) and the attacker. However, computing an exact Nash equilibrium (NE) for this game is computationally prohibitive as the action space of the defender grows exponentially with the number of sensors and their possible orientations. Exploiting the submodularity property of the game's utility function, we propose a distributed framework that enables agents to self-configure their communication neighborhoods under bandwidth constraints and collaboratively maximize the target coverage. We establish theoretical guarantees showing that the resulting sensing strategies converge to an approximate NE of the game. To our knowledge, this is the first distributed, communication-aware approach that scales effectively for games with combinatorial action spaces while explicitly incorporating communication constraints. To this end, we leverage the distributed bandit-submodular optimization framework and the notion of Value of Coordination that were introduced in [1]. Through simulations, we show that our approach attains near-optimal game value and higher target coverage compared to baselines.

Jayanth Bhargav, Mahsa Ghasemi, Shreyas Sundaram

We consider the problem of selecting an optimal subset of information sources for a hypothesis testing/classification task where the goal is to identify the true state of the world from a finite set of hypotheses, based on finite observation samples from the sources. In order to characterize the learning performance, we propose a misclassification penalty framework, which enables nonuniform treatment of different misclassification errors. In a centralized Bayesian learning setting, we study two variants of the subset selection problem: (i) selecting a minimum cost information set to ensure that the maximum penalty of misclassifying the true hypothesis is below a desired bound and (ii) selecting an optimal information set under a limited budget to minimize the maximum penalty of misclassifying the true hypothesis. Under certain assumptions, we prove that the objective (or constraints) of these combinatorial optimization problems are weak (or approximate) submodular, and establish high-probability performance guarantees for greedy algorithms. Further, we propose an alternate metric for information set selection which is based on the total penalty of misclassification. We prove that this metric is submodular and establish near-optimal guarantees for the greedy algorithms for both the information set selection problems. Finally, we present numerical simulations to validate our theoretical results over several randomly generated instances.

Jayanth Bhargav, Johannes Betz, Hongrui Zheng et al.

The rising popularity of driver-less cars has led to the research and development in the field of autonomous racing, and overtaking in autonomous racing is a challenging task. Vehicles have to detect and operate at the limits of dynamic handling and decisions in the car have to be made at high speeds and high acceleration. One of the most crucial parts in autonomous racing is path planning and decision making for an overtaking maneuver with a dynamic opponent vehicle. In this paper we present the evaluation of a track based offline policy learning approach for autonomous racing. We define specific track portions and conduct offline experiments to evaluate the probability of an overtaking maneuver based on speed and position of the ego vehicle. Based on these experiments we can define overtaking probability distributions for each of the track portions. Further, we propose a switching MPCC controller setup for incorporating the learnt policies to achieve a higher rate of overtaking maneuvers. By exhaustive simulations, we show that our proposed algorithm is able to increase the number of overtakes at different track portions.