图形神经网络（GNNS）提供了一种强大而可扩展的解决方案，可用于建模连续空间数据。然而，在没有关于数据的几何结构上的进一步上下文的情况下，它们通常依赖于欧几里德距离来构造输入图。这种假设可以在许多现实世界的环境中不可能实现，其中空间结构更复杂，明确地非欧几里德（例如，道路网络）。在本文中，我们提出了PE-GNN，这是一个新的框架，该框架结合到模型中的空间上下文和相关性。建立在地理空间辅助任务学习和语义空间嵌入的最近进步，我们所提出的方法（1）学习地理坐标的上下文感知向量编码，（2）与主要任务并行地预测数据中的空间自相关。在空间回归任务中，我们展示了我们方法的有效性，提高了不同最先进的GNN方法的性能。我们还测试了我们的空间插值方法，即没有节点功能的空间回归，GNN目前不竞争的任务。我们观察到，我们的方法不仅大大改进了GNN基线，而且可以匹配高斯过程，是空间插值问题的最常用方法。

共享的电子移动服务已被广泛测试和在全球城市中驾驶，并且已经编织成现代城市规划的结构。本文研究了这些系统中的实用而重要的问题：如何在空间和时间跨空间和时间部署和管理其基础架构，以便在可持续的盈利能力的同时对用户无处不在。然而，在现实世界的系统中，评估不同部署策略的性能，然后找到最佳计划是非常昂贵的，因为它通常是不可行的，可以对试用和错误进行许多迭代。我们通过设计高保真仿真环境来解决这一目标，该环境摘要在细粒度下共享电子移动系统的关键操作细节，并使用从现实世界中收集的数据进行校准。这使我们能够尝试任意部署计划来学习在实际在实际系统中实施任何内容之前的特定上下文。特别是，我们提出了一种新的多代理神经检索方法，其中我们设计了一个分层控制器以产生暂定部署计划。然后使用多模拟范例，即并行评估的生成的部署计划进行测试，其中结果用于用深增强学习训练控制器。通过这种闭环，控制器可以被引导以在将来的迭代中产生更好的部署计划的概率。在我们的仿真环境中，已经广泛评估了所提出的方法，实验结果表明它优于基于基于基于基于的基于基于基于的启发式的服务覆盖范围和净收入的方法。

This paper addresses the kinodynamic motion planning for non-holonomic robots in dynamic environments with both static and dynamic obstacles -- a challenging problem that lacks a universal solution yet. One of the promising approaches to solve it is decomposing the problem into the smaller sub problems and combining the local solutions into the global one. The crux of any planning method for non-holonomic robots is the generation of motion primitives that generates solutions to local planning sub-problems. In this work we introduce a novel learnable steering function (policy), which takes into account kinodynamic constraints of the robot and both static and dynamic obstacles. This policy is efficiently trained via the policy optimization. Empirically, we show that our steering function generalizes well to unseen problems. We then plug in the trained policy into the sampling-based and lattice-based planners, and evaluate the resultant POLAMP algorithm (Policy Optimization that Learns Adaptive Motion Primitives) in a range of challenging setups that involve a car-like robot operating in the obstacle-rich parking-lot environments. We show that POLAMP is able to plan collision-free kinodynamic trajectories with success rates higher than 92%, when 50 simultaneously moving obstacles populate the environment showing better performance than the state-of-the-art competitors.

Consensus clustering aggregates partitions in order to find a better fit by reconciling clustering results from different sources/executions. In practice, there exist noise and outliers in clustering task, which, however, may significantly degrade the performance. To address this issue, we propose a novel algorithm -- robust consensus clustering that can find common ground truth among experts' opinions, which tends to be minimally affected by the bias caused by the outliers. In particular, we formalize the robust consensus clustering problem as a constraint optimization problem, and then derive an effective algorithm upon alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) with rigorous convergence guarantee. Our method outperforms the baselines on benchmarks. We apply the proposed method to the real-world advertising campaign segmentation and forecasting tasks using the proposed consensus clustering results based on the similarity computed via Kolmogorov-Smirnov Statistics. The accurate clustering result is helpful for building the advertiser profiles so as to perform the forecasting.

In computational advertising, a challenging problem is how to recommend the bid for advertisers to achieve the best return on investment (ROI) given budget constraint. This paper presents a bid recommendation scenario that discovers the concavity changes in click prediction curves. The recommended bid is derived based on the turning point from significant increase (i.e. concave downward) to slow increase (convex upward). Parametric learning based method is applied by solving the corresponding constraint optimization problem. Empirical studies on real-world advertising scenarios clearly demonstrate the performance gains for business metrics (including revenue increase, click increase and advertiser ROI increase).

In cost-per-click (CPC) or cost-per-impression (CPM) advertising campaigns, advertisers always run the risk of spending the budget without getting enough conversions. Moreover, the bidding on advertising inventory has few connections with propensity one that can reach to target cost-per-acquisition (tCPA) goals. To address this problem, this paper presents a bid optimization scenario to achieve the desired tCPA goals for advertisers. In particular, we build the optimization engine to make a decision by solving the rigorously formalized constrained optimization problem, which leverages the bid landscape model learned from rich historical auction data using non-parametric learning. The proposed model can naturally recommend the bid that meets the advertisers' expectations by making inference over advertisers' historical auction behaviors, which essentially deals with the data challenges commonly faced by bid landscape modeling: incomplete logs in auctions, and uncertainty due to the variation and fluctuations in advertising bidding behaviors. The bid optimization model outperforms the baseline methods on real-world campaigns, and has been applied into a wide range of scenarios for performance improvement and revenue liftup.

Heuristic search algorithms, e.g. A*, are the commonly used tools for pathfinding on grids, i.e. graphs of regular structure that are widely employed to represent environments in robotics, video games etc. Instance-independent heuristics for grid graphs, e.g. Manhattan distance, do not take the obstacles into account and, thus, the search led by such heuristics performs poorly in the obstacle-rich environments. To this end, we suggest learning the instance-dependent heuristic proxies that are supposed to notably increase the efficiency of the search. The first heuristic proxy we suggest to learn is the correction factor, i.e. the ratio between the instance independent cost-to-go estimate and the perfect one (computed offline at the training phase). Unlike learning the absolute values of the cost-to-go heuristic function, which was known before, when learning the correction factor the knowledge of the instance-independent heuristic is utilized. The second heuristic proxy is the path probability, which indicates how likely the grid cell is lying on the shortest path. This heuristic can be utilized in the Focal Search framework as the secondary heuristic, allowing us to preserve the guarantees on the bounded sub-optimality of the solution. We learn both suggested heuristics in a supervised fashion with the state-of-the-art neural networks containing attention blocks (transformers). We conduct a thorough empirical evaluation on a comprehensive dataset of planning tasks, showing that the suggested techniques i) reduce the computational effort of the A* up to a factor of $4$x while producing the solutions, which costs exceed the costs of the optimal solutions by less than $0.3$% on average; ii) outperform the competitors, which include the conventional techniques from the heuristic search, i.e. weighted A*, as well as the state-of-the-art learnable planners.

To mitigate climate change, the share of renewable needs to be increased. Renewable energies introduce new challenges to power grids due to decentralization, reduced inertia and volatility in production. The operation of sustainable power grids with a high penetration of renewable energies requires new methods to analyze the dynamic stability. We provide new datasets of dynamic stability of synthetic power grids and find that graph neural networks (GNNs) are surprisingly effective at predicting the highly non-linear target from topological information only. To illustrate the potential to scale to real-sized power grids, we demonstrate the successful prediction on a Texan power grid model.

Correct scoring of a driver's risk is of great significance to auto insurance companies. While the current tools used in this field have been proven in practice to be quite efficient and beneficial, we argue that there is still a lot of room for development and improvement in the auto insurance risk estimation process. To this end, we develop a framework based on a combination of a neural network together with a dimensionality reduction technique t-SNE (t-distributed stochastic neighbour embedding). This enables us to visually represent the complex structure of the risk as a two-dimensional surface, while still preserving the properties of the local region in the features space. The obtained results, which are based on real insurance data, reveal a clear contrast between the high and low risk policy holders, and indeed improve upon the actual risk estimation performed by the insurer. Due to the visual accessibility of the portfolio in this approach, we argue that this framework could be advantageous to the auto insurer, both as a main risk prediction tool and as an additional validation stage in other approaches.

Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) is one of the key components of a control system that aims to ensure autonomous navigation of a mobile robot in unknown environments. In a variety of practical cases a robot might need to travel long distances in order to accomplish its mission. This requires long-term work of SLAM methods and building large maps. Consequently the computational burden (including high memory consumption for map storage) becomes a bottleneck. Indeed, state-of-the-art SLAM algorithms include specific techniques and optimizations to tackle this challenge, still their performance in long-term scenarios needs proper assessment. To this end, we perform an empirical evaluation of two widespread state-of-the-art RGB-D SLAM methods, suitable for long-term navigation, i.e. RTAB-Map and Voxgraph. We evaluate them in a large simulated indoor environment, consisting of corridors and halls, while varying the odometer noise for a more realistic setup. We provide both qualitative and quantitative analysis of both methods uncovering their strengths and weaknesses. We find that both methods build a high-quality map with low odometry noise but tend to fail with high odometry noise. Voxgraph has lower relative trajectory estimation error and memory consumption than RTAB-Map, while its absolute error is higher.