17.06.2024
Auction-Based Scheduling: A Modular Framework for Multi-Objective Decision-Making
Abstract
Sequential decision-making tasks often require satisfaction of multiple, partially-contradictory objectives. Existing approaches are monolithic, where a single policy fulfills all objectives. I will present auction-based scheduling, a new modular framework for multi-objective sequential decision-making. In this framework, each objective is fulfilled using a separate and independent policy. The policies are then composed through a novel run-time composition mechanism, where at each step, they need to bid from pre-allocated budgets for the privilege of choosing the next action. The bidding encourages the policies to adjust their bids according to their urgencies to act, and whoever bids the highest gets scheduled first. We study the following decentralized synthesis problem: How to compute bidding-equipped policies whose composition will simultaneously fulfill all objectives? I will present solutions of the decentralized synthesis problem for path planning on finite graphs with two temporal objectives.
Bio
Kaushik Mallik is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA). His research interests are broadly in formal verification and synthesis of reactive software. He received the 2023 ETAPS Doctoral Dissertation Award, nominations for best paper awards in HSCC and TACAS, and a number of merit-based fellowships during his bachelor's and master’s studies. He holds B. Tech (2012) in Electrical Engineering from Meghnad Saha Institute of Technology (India), M. Tech (2015) in System and Control from IIT Roorkee (India), and Dr. rer. nat. (PhD, 2022) in Computer Science from RPTU Kaiserslautern (Germany).
Photo provided by speaker
Sequential decision-making tasks often require satisfaction of multiple, partially-contradictory objectives. Existing approaches are monolithic, where a single policy fulfills all objectives. I will present auction-based scheduling, a new modular framework for multi-objective sequential decision-making. In this framework, each objective is fulfilled using a separate and independent policy. The policies are then composed through a novel run-time composition mechanism, where at each step, they need to bid from pre-allocated budgets for the privilege of choosing the next action. The bidding encourages the policies to adjust their bids according to their urgencies to act, and whoever bids the highest gets scheduled first. We study the following decentralized synthesis problem: How to compute bidding-equipped policies whose composition will simultaneously fulfill all objectives? I will present solutions of the decentralized synthesis problem for path planning on finite graphs with two temporal objectives.
Bio
Kaushik Mallik is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA). His research interests are broadly in formal verification and synthesis of reactive software. He received the 2023 ETAPS Doctoral Dissertation Award, nominations for best paper awards in HSCC and TACAS, and a number of merit-based fellowships during his bachelor's and master’s studies. He holds B. Tech (2012) in Electrical Engineering from Meghnad Saha Institute of Technology (India), M. Tech (2015) in System and Control from IIT Roorkee (India), and Dr. rer. nat. (PhD, 2022) in Computer Science from RPTU Kaiserslautern (Germany).
Photo provided by speaker