We consider pricing problems when customers choose among the products according to the nested logit model and there is a quality consistency constraint on the prices charged for the products. We consider two types of quality consistency constraints. In the first type of constraint, there is an inherent ordering between the qualities of the products in a particular nest and the price for the pro...

Inspired by the popularity of anytime algorithms in solving complex real world problems, we define a class of scheduling problems. In addition to the normal resource constrained project scheduling assumptions, each activity in a project has a quality profile with an anytime property, which means that it can be stopped at any time and the quality of the output is proportional to its duration. In...

Modeling overlapping phrases in an alignment model can improve alignment quality but comes with a high inference cost. For example, the model of DeNero and Klein (2010) uses an ITG constraint and beam-based Viterbi decoding for tractability, but is still slow. We first show that their model can be approximated using structured belief propagation, with a gain in alignment quality stemming from t...

Kanglin Liu Abstract Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are powerful generative models, but suffer from training instability. The recent proposed Wasserstein GAN with gradient penalty (WGAN-GP) makes progress toward stable training. Gradient penalty acts as the role of enforcing a Lipschitz constraint. Further investigation on gradient penalty shows that gradient penalty may impose restrict...

Privacy has been a major concern for agents in distributed constraint reasoning. In this work, we approach this issue in distributed constraint reasoning by letting agents compromise solution quality for preserving privacy, using utility theory. We formalize privacy in the context of distributed constraint reasoning, detail its different aspects, and present model and solvers, as well as their ...

We present a syntax-based constraint for word alignment, known as the cohesion constraint. It requires disjoint English phrases to be mapped to non-overlapping intervals in the French sentence. We evaluate the utility of this constraint in two different algorithms. The results show that it can provide a significant improvement in alignment quality.

Constraint modelling requires considerable expertise and therefore automating this process is highly desirable to encourage the widespread use of constraint programming techniques. One approach is to refine a high-level problem specification into a solver-independent constraint model that is then tailored to a particular solver. We further investigate tailoring, the last step of the modelling p...