Maher Jridi

Bilel Abderrahmane Benziane, Benoit Lardeux, Ayoub Mcharek et al.

The use of artificial intelligence in supply chain forecasting has attracted many scientific studies for several decades. However, the process of selecting an appropriate forecasting solution becomes a daunting task. This complexity arises due to the distinct features inherent to each dataset. Research to tackle this issue has been performed since the eighties but recent development of demand forecasting has opened new perspectives. This research aims to enhance automatic forecasting model selection by proposing a novel architecture that acts as a double deep reinforcement learning agent, selecting automatically a forecasting model from the forecasting committee at the time of prediction. Moreover, a novel early-stopping approach based on average reward convergence has been introduced to expedite training time. To evaluate the model's performance, an empirical study was conducted utilizing grocery sales datasets and snack demands datasets. The experimental results demonstrate the robustness of the proposed approach when compared to state-of-the-art methods.

Ayoub Karine, Thibault Napoléon, Maher Jridi

This paper proposes a new knowledge distillation method tailored for image semantic segmentation, termed Intra- and Inter-Class Knowledge Distillation (I2CKD). The focus of this method is on capturing and transferring knowledge between the intermediate layers of teacher (cumbersome model) and student (compact model). For knowledge extraction, we exploit class prototypes derived from feature maps. To facilitate knowledge transfer, we employ a triplet loss in order to minimize intra-class variances and maximize inter-class variances between teacher and student prototypes. Consequently, I2CKD enables the student to better mimic the feature representation of the teacher for each class, thereby enhancing the segmentation performance of the compact network. Extensive experiments on three segmentation datasets, i.e., Cityscapes, Pascal VOC and CamVid, using various teacher-student network pairs demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.