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Ride-sourcing services are now reshaping the way people travel by effectively connecting drivers and passengers through mobile internets. Online matching between idle drivers and waiting passengers is one of the most key components in a ride-sourcing system. The average pickup distance or time is an important measurement of system efficiency since it affects both passengers’ waiting time and drivers’ utilization rate. It is naturally expected that a more effective bipartite matching (with smaller average pickup time) can be implemented if the platform accumulates more idle drivers and waiting passengers in the matching pool. A specific passenger request can also benefit from a delayed matching since he/she may be matched with closer idle drivers after waiting for a few seconds. Motivated by the potential benefits of delayed matching, this paper establishes a two-stage framework which incorporates a combinatorial optimization and multi-agent deep reinforcement learning methods. The multi-agent reinforcement learning methods are used to dynamically determine the delayed time for each passenger request (or the time at which each request enters the matching pool), while the combinatorial optimization conducts an optimal bipartite matching between idle drivers and waiting passengers in the matching pool. Four tailored reinforcement learning methods, delayed multi-agent deep Q learning (Delayed-M-DQN), delayed multi-agent actor-critic (Delayed-M-A2C), delayed multi-agent Proximal Policy Optimization (Delayed-M-PPO), and delayed multi-agent actor-critic with experience replay (Delayed-M-ACER), are developed. Through extensive empirical experiments with a well-designed simulator, we show that the proposed framework is able to remarkably improve system performances, by well balancing the trade-off among pick-up time, matching time, successful matching rate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the stochastic optimization problem focusing on developing scalable parallel algorithms for deep learning tasks. Our solution involves a reformation of the objective function for stochastic optimization in neural network models, along with a novel parallel computing strategy, coined the weighted aggregating stochastic gradient descent (WASGD). Following a theoretical analysis on the characteristics of the new objective function, WASGD introduces a decentralized weighted aggregating scheme based on the performance of local workers. Without any center variable, the new method automatically gauges the importance of local workers and accepts them by their contributions. Furthermore, we have developed an enhanced version of the method, WASGD+, by (1) implementing a designed sample order and (2) upgrading the weight evaluation function. To validate the new method, we benchmark our pipeline against several popular algorithms including the state-of-the-art deep neural network classifier training techniques (e.g., elastic averaging SGD). Comprehensive validation studies have been conducted on four classic datasets: CIFAR-100, CIFAR-10, Fashion-MNIST, and MNIST. Subsequent results have firmly validated the superiority of the WASGD scheme in accelerating the training of deep architecture. Better still, the enhanced version, WASGD+, is shown to be a significant improvement over its prototype. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Online donation-based crowdfunding has brought new life to charity by soliciting small monetary contributions from crowd donors to help others in trouble or with dreams. However, a crucial issue for crowdfunding platforms as well as traditional charities is the problem of high donor attrition, i.e., many donors donate only once or very few times within a rather short lifecycle and then leave. Thus, it is an urgent task to analyze the factors of and then further predict the donors behaviors. Especially, we focus on two types of behavioral events, e.g., donation recurrence (whether one donor will make donations at some time slices in the future) and donor retention (whether she will remain on the crowdfunding platform until a future time). However, this problem has not been well explored due to many domain and technical challenges, such as the heterogeneous influence, the relevance of the two types of events, and the censoring phenomenon of retention records. In this paper, we present a focused study on donation recurrence and donor retention with the help of large-scale behavioral data collected from crowdfunding. Specifically, we propose a Joint Deep Survival model, i.e., JDS, which can integrate heterogeneous features, e.g., donor motives, projects recently donated to, social contacts, to jointly model the donation recurrence and donor retention since these two types of behavioral events are highly relevant. In addition, we model the censoring phenomenon and dependence relations of different behaviors from the survival analysis view by designing multiple innovative constraints and incorporating them into the objective functions. Finally, we conduct extensive analysis and validation experiments with large-scale data collected from Kiva.org. The experimental results clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed models for analyzing and predicting the donation recurrence and donor retention in crowdfunding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A growing number of multi-view data arises naturally in many scenarios, including medical diagnosis, webpage classification, and multimedia analysis. A challenge in learning from multi-view data is that not all instances are fully represented in all views, resulting in missing view data. In this paper, we focus on feature-level completion for missing view of multi-view data. Aiming at capturing both semantic complementarity and identical distribution among different views, an Isomorphic Linear Correlation Analysis (ILCA) method is proposed to linearly map multi-view data to a feature-isomorphic subspace through learning a set of excellent isomorphic features, thereby unfolding the shared information from different views. Meanwhile, we assume that missing view obeys normal distribution. Then, the missing view data matrix can be modeled as a low-rank component plus a sparse contribution. Thus, to accomplish missing view completion, an Identical Distribution Pursuit Completion (IDPC) model based on the learned features is proposed, in which the identical distribution constraint of missing view to the other available one in the feature-isomorphic subspace is fully exploited. Comprehensive experiments on several multi-view datasets demonstrate that our proposed framework yields promising results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been significant progress in unsupervised network representation learning (UNRL) approaches over graphs recently with flexible random-walk approaches, new optimization objectives, and deep architectures. However, there is no common ground for systematic comparison of embeddings to understand their behavior for different graphs and tasks. We argue that most of the UNRL approaches either model and exploit neighborhood or what we call context information of a node. These methods largely differ in their definitions and exploitation of context. Consequently, we propose a framework that casts a variety of approaches – random walk based, matrix factorization and deep learning based – into a unified context-based optimization function. We systematically group the methods based on their similarities and differences. We study their differences which we later use to explain their performance differences (on downstream tasks). We conduct a large-scale empirical study considering nine popular and recent UNRL techniques and 11 real-world datasets with varying structural properties and two common tasks – node classification and link prediction. We find that for non-attributed graphs there is no single method that is a clear winner and that the choice of a suitable method is dictated by certain properties of the embedding methods, task and structural properties of the underlying graph. In addition, we also report the common pitfalls in evaluation of UNRL methods and come up with suggestions for experimental design and interpretation of results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A critical challenge in machine learning is the vulnerability of learning models in defending attacks from malicious adversaries. In this research, we propose game theoretical learning between a variational adversary and a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), participating in a variable-sum two-player sequential Stackelberg game. Our adversary manipulates the input data distribution to make the CNN misclassify the manipulated data. Our ideal adversarial manipulation is a minimum change to the data which yet is large enough to mislead the CNNs. We propose an optimization procedure to find optimal adversarial manipulations by solving for the Nash equilibrium of the Stackelberg game. Specifically, the adversary's payoff function depends on the data manipulation which is determined by a Variational Autoencoder, while the CNN classifier's payoff functions are evaluated by misclassification errors. The optimization of our adversarial manipulations is defined by Alternating Least Squares and Simulated Annealing. Experimental results demonstrate that our game-theoretic manipulations are able to mislead CNNs that are well trained on the original data as well as on data generated by other models. We then let the CNNs to incorporate our manipulated data which leads to secure classifiers that are empirically the most robust in defending various types of adversarial attacks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]