The Machine Learning for Combinatorial Optimization Competition (ML4CO): Results and Insights

Combinatorial optimization is a well-established area in operations research and computer science. Until recently, its methods have focused on solving problem instances in isolation, ignoring that they often stem from related data distributions in practice. However, recent years have seen a surge of interest in using machine learning as a new approach for solving combinatorial problems, either directly as solvers or by enhancing exact solvers. Based on this context, the ML4CO aims at improving state-of-the-art combinatorial optimization solvers by replacing key heuristic components. The competition featured three challenging tasks: finding the best feasible solution, producing the tightest optimality certificate, and giving an appropriate solver configuration. Three realistic datasets were considered: balanced item placement, workload apportionment, and maritime inventory routing. This last dataset was kept anonymous for the contestants.

FTGAN: A Fully-trained Generative Adversarial Networks for Text to Face Generation

As a sub-domain of text-to-image synthesis, text-to-face generation has huge potentials in public safety domain. With lack of dataset, there are almost no related research focusing on text-to-face synthesis. In this paper, we propose a fully-trained Generative Adversarial Network (FTGAN) that trains the text encoder and image decoder at the same time for fine-grained text-to-face generation. With a novel fully-trained generative network, FTGAN can synthesize higher-quality images and urge the outputs of the FTGAN are more relevant to the input sentences. In addition, we build a dataset called SCU-Text2face for text-to-face synthesis. Through extensive experiments, the FTGAN shows its superiority in boosting both generated images' quality and similarity to the input descriptions. The proposed FTGAN outperforms the previous state of the art, boosting the best reported Inception Score to 4.63 on the CUB dataset. On SCU-text2face, the face images generated by our proposed FTGAN just based on the input descriptions is of average 59% similarity to the ground-truth, which set a baseline for text-to-face synthesis.

Ensemble-based kernel learning for a class of data assimilation problems with imperfect forward simulators

Simulator imperfection, often known as model error, is ubiquitous in practical data assimilation problems. Despite the enormous efforts dedicated to addressing this problem, properly handling simulator imperfection in data assimilation remains to be a challenging task. In this work, we propose an approach to dealing with simulator imperfection from a point of view of functional approximation that can be implemented through a certain machine learning method, such as kernel-based learning adopted in the current work. To this end, we start from considering a class of supervised learning problems, and then identify similarities between supervised learning and variational data assimilation. These similarities found the basis for us to develop an ensemble-based learning framework to tackle supervised learning problems, while achieving various advantages of ensemble-based methods over the variational ones. After establishing the ensemble-based learning framework, we proceed to investigate the integration of ensemble-based learning into an ensemble-based data assimilation framework to handle simulator imperfection. In the course of our investigations, we also develop a strategy to tackle the issue of multi-modality in supervised-learning problems, and transfer this strategy to data assimilation problems to help improve assimilation performance. For demonstration, we apply the ensemble-based learning framework and the integrated, ensemble-based data assimilation framework to a supervised learning problem and a data assimilation problem with an imperfect forward simulator, respectively. The experiment results indicate that both frameworks achieve good performance in relevant case studies, and that functional approximation through machine learning may serve as a viable way to account for simulator imperfection in data assimilation problems.