Prof. Dr.

Wrobel, Stefan

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Research priorities to leverage smart digital technologies for sustainable crop production

2024-05 , Storm, Hugo , Seidel, Sabine Julia , Klingbeil, Lasse , Ewert, Frank , Vereecken, Harry , Amelung, Wulf , Behnke, Sven , Bennewitz, Maren , Börner, Jan , Döring, Thomas , Gall, Jürgen , Mahlein, Anne-Katrin , McCool, Chris , Rascher, Uwe , Wrobel, Stefan , Schnepf, Andrea , Stachniss, Cyrill , Kuhlmann, Heiner

Agriculture faces several challenges including climate change and biodiversity loss while, at the same time, the demand for food, feed, biofuels, and fiber is increasing. Sustainable intensification aims to increase productivity and input-use efficiency while enhancing the resilience of agricultural systems to adverse environmental conditions through improved management and technology. Recent advances in sensing, machine learning, modeling, and robotics offer opportunities for novel smart digital technologies to enable sustainable intensification. However, developing smart digital technologies and putting them into agricultural practice, requires closing major research gaps, related in particular to (1) the utilization of multi-scale multi-sensor monitoring in space and time, (2) using artificial intelligence for linking process and data-driven methods, (3) improving decision making and intervention in plant production, and finally (4) modeling conditions and consequences of farmers acceptance. Closing these gaps requires an interdisciplinary approach. Here, we present a research agenda and steps forward to steer research efforts, highlighting research priorities, and identifying required interdisciplinary research collaboration. Following this agenda will leverage the full potential of smart digital technologies for sustainable crop production.

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Maximal closed set and half-space separations in finite closure systems

2023-09-21 , Seiffarth, Florian , Horvath, Tamas , Wrobel, Stefan

Several concept learning problems can be regarded as special cases of half-space separation in abstract closure systems over finite ground sets. For the typical scenario that the closure system is given via a closure operator, we show that the half-space separation problem is NP-complete. As a first approach to overcome this negative result, we relax the problem to maximal closed set separation, give a simple generic greedy algorithm solving this problem with a linear number of closure operator calls, and show that this bound is sharp. For a second direction, we consider Kakutani closure systems and prove that they are algorithmically characterized by the greedy algorithm. As a first special case of the general problem setting, we consider Kakutani closure systems over graphs and give a sufficient condition for this kind of closure systems in terms of forbidden graph minors. For a second special case, we then focus on closure systems over finite lattices, give an improved adaptation of the generic greedy algorithm, and present an application concerning subsumption lattices.

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Data Ecosystems: A New Dimension of Value Creation Using AI and Machine Learning

2022-07-22 , Hecker, Dirk , Voß, Angelika , Wrobel, Stefan

Machine learning and artificial intelligence have become crucial factors for the competitiveness of individual companies and entire economies. Yet their successful deployment requires access to a large volume of training data often not even available to the largest corporations. The rise of trustworthy federated digital ecosystems will significantly improve data availability for all participants and thus will allow a quantum leap for the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence at all scales of companies and in all sectors of the economy. In this chapter, we will explain how AI systems are built with data science and machine learning principles and describe how this leads to AI platforms. We will detail the principles of distributed learning which represents a perfect match with the principles of distributed data ecosystems and discuss how trust, as a central value proposition of modern ecosystems, carries over to creating trustworthy AI systems.

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Multi-Agent Neural Rewriter for Vehicle Routing with Limited Disclosure of Costs

2022 , Paul, Nathalie , Wirtz, Tim , Wrobel, Stefan , Kister, Alexander

We interpret solving the multi-vehicle routing problem as a team Markov game with partially observable costs. For a given set of customers to serve, the playing agents (vehicles) have the common goal to determine the team-optimal agent routes with minimal total cost. Each agent thereby observes only its own cost. Our multi-agent reinforcement learning approach, the so-called multi-agent Neural Rewriter, builds on the single-agent Neural Rewriter to solve the problem by iteratively rewriting solutions. Parallel agent action execution and partial observability require new rewriting rules for the game. We propose the introduction of a so-called pool in the system which serves as a collection point for unvisited nodes. It enables agents to act simultaneously and exchange nodes in a conflict-free manner. We realize limited disclosure of agent-specific costs by only sharing them during learning. During inference, each agents acts decentrally, solely based on its own cost. First empirical results on small problem sizes demonstrate that we reach a performance close to the employed OR-Tools benchmark which operates in the perfect cost information setting.

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Wasserstein Dropout

2024 , Sicking, Joachim , Akila, Maram , Pintz, Maximilian Alexander , Wirtz, Tim , Wrobel, Stefan , Fischer, Asja

Despite of its importance for safe machine learning, uncertainty quantification for neural networks is far from being solved. State-of-the-art approaches to estimate neural uncertainties are often hybrid, combining parametric models with explicit or implicit (dropout-based) ensembling. We take another pathway and propose a novel approach to uncertainty quantification for regression tasks, Wasserstein dropout, that is purely non-parametric. Technically, it captures aleatoric uncertainty by means of dropout-based sub-network distributions. This is accomplished by a new objective which minimizes the Wasserstein distance between the label distribution and the model distribution. An extensive empirical analysis shows that Wasserstein dropout outperforms state-of-the-art methods, on vanilla test data as well as under distributional shift in terms of producing more accurate and stable uncertainty estimates.

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Robustness in Fatigue Strength Estimation

2022-12-02 , Weichert, Dorina , Kister, Alexander , Houben, Sebastian , Ernis, Gunar , Wrobel, Stefan

Fatigue strength estimation is a costly manual material characterization process in which state-of-the-art approaches follow a standardized experiment and analysis procedure. In this paper, we examine a modular, Machine Learning-based approach for fatigue strength estimation that is likely to reduce the number of experiments and, thus, the overall experimental costs. Despite its high potential, deployment of a new approach in a real-life lab requires more than the theoretical definition and simulation. Therefore, we study the robustness of the approach against misspecification of the prior and discretization of the specified loads. We identify its applicability and its advantageous behavior over the state-of-the-art methods, potentially reducing the number of costly experiments.

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A generalized Weisfeiler-Lehman graph kernel

2022-04-27 , Schulz, Till Hendrik , Horvath, Tamas , Welke, Pascal , Wrobel, Stefan

After more than one decade, Weisfeiler-Lehman graph kernels are still among the most prevalent graph kernels due to their remarkable predictive performance and time complexity. They are based on a fast iterative partitioning of vertices, originally designed for deciding graph isomorphism with one-sided error. The Weisfeiler-Lehman graph kernels retain this idea and compare such labels with respect to equality. This binary valued comparison is, however, arguably too rigid for defining suitable graph kernels for certain graph classes. To overcome this limitation, we propose a generalization of Weisfeiler-Lehman graph kernels which takes into account a more natural and finer grade of similarity between Weisfeiler-Lehman labels than equality. We show that the proposed similarity can be calculated efficiently by means of the Wasserstein distance between certain vectors representing Weisfeiler-Lehman labels. This and other facts give rise to the natural choice of partitioning the vertices with the Wasserstein k-means algorithm. We empirically demonstrate on the Weisfeiler-Lehman subtree kernel, which is one of the most prominent Weisfeiler-Lehman graph kernels, that our generalization significantly outperforms this and other state-of-the-art graph kernels in terms of predictive performance on datasets which contain structurally more complex graphs beyond the typically considered molecular graphs.

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Explainable production planning under partial observability in high-precision manufacturing

2023-10 , Weichert, Dorina , Kister, Alexander , Volbach, Peter , Houben, Sebastian , Trost, Marcus , Wrobel, Stefan

Conceptually, high-precision manufacturing is a sequence of production and measurement steps, where both kinds of steps require to use non-deterministic models to represent production and measurement tolerances. This paper demonstrates how to effectively represent these manufacturing processes as Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDP) and derive an offline strategy with state-of-the-art Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) approaches. In doing so, we face two challenges: a continuous observation space and explainability requirements from the side of the process engineers. As a result, we find that a tradeoff between the quantitative performance of the solution and its explainability is required. In a nutshell, the paper elucidates the entire process of explainable production planning: We design and validate a white-box simulation from expert knowledge, examine state-of-the-art POMDP solvers, and discuss our results from both the perspective of machine learning research and as an illustration for high-precision manufacturing practitioners.

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A Fast Heuristic for Computing Geodesic Closures in Large Networks

2022-11-06 , Seiffarth, Florian , Horvath, Tamas , Wrobel, Stefan

Motivated by the increasing interest in applications of graph geodesic convexity in machine learning and data mining, we present a heuristic for approximating the geodesic convex hull of node sets in large networks. It generates a small set of (almost) maximal outerplanar spanning subgraphs for the input graph, computes the geodesic closure in each of these graphs, and regards a node as an element of the convex hull if it belongs to the closed sets for at least a user specified number of outerplanar graphs. Our heuristic algorithm runs in time linear in the number of edges of the input graph, i.e., it is faster with one order of magnitude than the standard algorithm computing the closure exactly. Its performance is evaluated empirically by approximating convexity based core-periphery decomposition of networks. Our experimental results with large real-world networks show that for most networks, the proposed heuristic was able to produce close approximations significantly faster than the standard algorithm computing the exact convex hulls. For example, while our algorithm calculated an approximate core-periphery decomposition in 5 h or less for networks with more than 20 million edges, the standard algorithm did not terminate within 50 days.

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Visual Analytics for Human-Centered Machine Learning

2022-01-25 , Andrienko, Natalia , Andrienko, Gennady , Adilova, Linara , Wrobel, Stefan

We introduce a new research area in visual analytics (VA) aiming to bridge existing gaps between methods of interactive machine learning (ML) and eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI), on one side, and human minds, on the other side. The gaps are, first, a conceptual mismatch between ML/XAI outputs and human mental models and ways of reasoning, and second, a mismatch between the information quantity and level of detail and human capabilities to perceive and understand. A grand challenge is to adapt ML and XAI to human goals, concepts, values, and ways of thinking. Complementing the current efforts in XAI towards solving this challenge, VA can contribute by exploiting the potential of visualization as an effective way of communicating information to humans and a strong trigger of human abstractive perception and thinking. We propose a cross-disciplinary research framework and formulate research directions for VA.

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