Yuren Zhou

Xiaoyu He, Zibin Zheng, Yuren Zhou

This work provides an efficient sampling method for the covariance matrix adaptation evolution strategy (CMA-ES) in large-scale settings. In contract to the Gaussian sampling in CMA-ES, the proposed method generates mutation vectors from a mixture model, which facilitates exploiting the rich variable correlations of the problem landscape within a limited time budget. We analyze the probability distribution of this mixture model and show that it approximates the Gaussian distribution of CMA-ES with a controllable accuracy. We use this sampling method, coupled with a novel method for mutation strength adaptation, to formulate the mixture model based evolution strategy (MMES) -- a CMA-ES variant for large-scale optimization. The numerical simulations show that, while significantly reducing the time complexity of CMA-ES, MMES preserves the rotational invariance, is scalable to high dimensional problems, and is competitive against the state-of-the-arts in performing global optimization.

Zann Koh, Yuren Zhou, Billy Pik Lik Lau et al.

The proliferation of smartphones has accelerated mobility studies by largely increasing the type and volume of mobility data available. One such source of mobility data is from GPS technology, which is becoming increasingly common and helps the research community understand mobility patterns of people. However, there lacks a standardized framework for studying the different mobility patterns created by the non-Work, non-Home locations of Working and Nonworking users on Workdays and Offdays using machine learning methods. We propose a new mobility metric, Daily Characteristic Distance, and use it to generate features for each user together with Origin-Destination matrix features. We then use those features with an unsupervised machine learning method, $k$-means clustering, and obtain three clusters of users for each type of day (Workday and Offday). Finally, we propose two new metrics for the analysis of the clustering results, namely User Commonality and Average Frequency. By using the proposed metrics, interesting user behaviors can be discerned and it helps us to better understand the mobility patterns of the users.

Jining Wang, Chuan Chen, Zibin Zheng et al.

To solve the inherent incompleteness of knowledge graphs (KGs), numbers of knowledge graph completion (KGC) models have been proposed to predict missing links from known triples. Among those, several works have achieved more advanced results via exploiting the structure information on KGs with Graph Convolutional Networks (GCN). However, we observe that entity embeddings aggregated from neighbors in different directions are just simply averaged to complete single-tasks by existing GCN based models, ignoring the specific requirements of forward and backward sub-tasks. In this paper, we propose a Direction-sensitive Multi-task GCN (DsMtGCN) to make full use of the direction information, the multi-head self-attention is applied to specifically combine embeddings in different directions based on various entities and sub-tasks, the geometric constraints are imposed to adjust the distribution of embeddings, and the traditional binary cross-entropy loss is modified to reflect the triple uncertainty. Moreover, the competitive experiments results on several benchmark datasets verify the effectiveness of our model.

Jining Wang, Delai Qiu, YouMing Liu et al.

Knowledge graph completion (KGC) aims to solve the incompleteness of knowledge graphs (KGs) by predicting missing links from known triples, numbers of knowledge graph embedding (KGE) models have been proposed to perform KGC by learning embeddings. Nevertheless, most existing embedding models map each relation into a unique vector, overlooking the specific fine-grained semantics of them under different entities. Additionally, the few available fine-grained semantic models rely on clustering algorithms, resulting in limited performance and applicability due to the cumbersome two-stage training process. In this paper, we present a novel method utilizing contextual dictionary lookup, enabling conventional embedding models to learn fine-grained semantics of relations in an end-to-end manner. More specifically, we represent each relation using a dictionary that contains multiple latent semantics. The composition of a given entity and the dictionary's central semantics serves as the context for generating a lookup, thus determining the fine-grained semantics of the relation adaptively. The proposed loss function optimizes both the central and fine-grained semantics simultaneously to ensure their semantic consistency. Besides, we introduce two metrics to assess the validity and accuracy of the dictionary lookup operation. We extend several KGE models with the method, resulting in substantial performance improvements on widely-used benchmark datasets.

Jianyou Wang, Xiaoxuan Zhang, Yuren Zhou et al.

Limerick generation exemplifies some of the most difficult challenges faced in poetry generation, as the poems must tell a story in only five lines, with constraints on rhyme, stress, and meter. To address these challenges, we introduce LimGen, a novel and fully automated system for limerick generation that outperforms state-of-the-art neural network-based poetry models, as well as prior rule-based poetry models. LimGen consists of three important pieces: the Adaptive Multi-Templated Constraint algorithm that constrains our search to the space of realistic poems, the Multi-Templated Beam Search algorithm which searches efficiently through the space, and the probabilistic Storyline algorithm that provides coherent storylines related to a user-provided prompt word. The resulting limericks satisfy poetic constraints and have thematically coherent storylines, which are sometimes even funny (when we are lucky).

Huizhuo Yuan, Xiangru Lian, Ji Liu et al.

In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm named STOchastic Recursive Momentum for Policy Gradient (STORM-PG), which operates a SARAH-type stochastic recursive variance-reduced policy gradient in an exponential moving average fashion. STORM-PG enjoys a provably sharp $O(1/ε^3)$ sample complexity bound for STORM-PG, matching the best-known convergence rate for policy gradient algorithm. In the mean time, STORM-PG avoids the alternations between large batches and small batches which persists in comparable variance-reduced policy gradient methods, allowing considerably simpler parameter tuning. Numerical experiments depicts the superiority of our algorithm over comparative policy gradient algorithms.

Jun He, Yu Chen, Yuren Zhou

In the empirical study of evolutionary algorithms, the solution quality is evaluated by either the fitness value or approximation error. The latter measures the fitness difference between an approximation solution and the optimal solution. Since the approximation error analysis is more convenient than the direct estimation of the fitness value, this paper focuses on approximation error analysis. However, it is straightforward to extend all related results from the approximation error to the fitness value. Although the evaluation of solution quality plays an essential role in practice, few rigorous analyses have been conducted on this topic. This paper aims at establishing a novel theoretical framework of approximation error analysis of evolutionary algorithms for discrete optimization. This framework is divided into two parts. The first part is about exact expressions of the approximation error. Two methods, Jordan form and Schur's triangularization, are presented to obtain an exact expression. The second part is about upper bounds on approximation error. Two methods, convergence rate and auxiliary matrix iteration, are proposed to estimate the upper bound. The applicability of this framework is demonstrated through several examples.

Jun He, Yong Wang, Yuren Zhou

Multi-objective optimisation is regarded as one of the most promising ways for dealing with constrained optimisation problems in evolutionary optimisation. This paper presents a theoretical investigation of a multi-objective optimisation evolutionary algorithm for solving the 0-1 knapsack problem. Two initialisation methods are considered in the algorithm: local search initialisation and greedy search initialisation. Then the solution quality of the algorithm is analysed in terms of the approximation ratio.

Xinsheng Lai, Yuren Zhou, Jun He et al.

Some experimental investigations have shown that evolutionary algorithms (EAs) are efficient for the minimum label spanning tree (MLST) problem. However, we know little about that in theory. As one step towards this issue, we theoretically analyze the performances of the (1+1) EA, a simple version of EAs, and a multi-objective evolutionary algorithm called GSEMO on the MLST problem. We reveal that for the MLST$_{b}$ problem the (1+1) EA and GSEMO achieve a $\frac{b+1}{2}$-approximation ratio in expected polynomial times of $n$ the number of nodes and $k$ the number of labels. We also show that GSEMO achieves a $(2ln(n))$-approximation ratio for the MLST problem in expected polynomial time of $n$ and $k$. At the same time, we show that the (1+1) EA and GSEMO outperform local search algorithms on three instances of the MLST problem. We also construct an instance on which GSEMO outperforms the (1+1) EA.