Jun Wen

Zenan Huang, Jun Wen, Siheng Chen et al.

Domain adaptation methods reduce domain shift typically by learning domain-invariant features. Most existing methods are built on distribution matching, e.g., adversarial domain adaptation, which tends to corrupt feature discriminability. In this paper, we propose Discriminative Radial Domain Adaptation (DRDA) which bridges source and target domains via a shared radial structure. It's motivated by the observation that as the model is trained to be progressively discriminative, features of different categories expand outwards in different directions, forming a radial structure. We show that transferring such an inherently discriminative structure would enable to enhance feature transferability and discriminability simultaneously. Specifically, we represent each domain with a global anchor and each category a local anchor to form a radial structure and reduce domain shift via structure matching. It consists of two parts, namely isometric transformation to align the structure globally and local refinement to match each category. To enhance the discriminability of the structure, we further encourage samples to cluster close to the corresponding local anchors based on optimal-transport assignment. Extensively experimenting on multiple benchmarks, our method is shown to consistently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches on varied tasks, including the typical unsupervised domain adaptation, multi-source domain adaptation, domain-agnostic learning, and domain generalization.

Feng Li, Wen Jun, Tan et al.

Distributed computing, such as cloud computing, provides promising platforms to execute multiple workflows. Workflow scheduling plays an important role in multi-workflow execution with multi-objective requirements. Although there exist many multi-objective scheduling algorithms, they focus mainly on optimizing makespan and cost for a single workflow. There is a limited research on multi-objective optimization for multi-workflow scheduling. Considering multi-workflow scheduling, there is an additional key objective to maintain the fairness of workflows using the resources. To address such issues, this paper first defines a new multi-objective optimization model based on makespan, cost, and fairness, and then proposes a global clustering-based multi-workflow scheduling strategy for resource allocation. Experimental results show that the proposed approach performs better than the compared algorithms without significant compromise of the overall makespan and cost as well as individual fairness, which can guide the simulation workflow scheduling on clouds.

Long Yang, Yu Zhang, Gang Zheng et al.

Improving sample efficiency has been a longstanding goal in reinforcement learning. This paper proposes $\mathtt{VRMPO}$ algorithm: a sample efficient policy gradient method with stochastic mirror descent. In $\mathtt{VRMPO}$, a novel variance-reduced policy gradient estimator is presented to improve sample efficiency. We prove that the proposed $\mathtt{VRMPO}$ needs only $\mathcal{O}(ε^{-3})$ sample trajectories to achieve an $ε$-approximate first-order stationary point, which matches the best sample complexity for policy optimization. The extensive experimental results demonstrate that $\mathtt{VRMPO}$ outperforms the state-of-the-art policy gradient methods in various settings.