Publications

2024

1. Manuscript

   Complex Probes are Favored: A Revisit of Probe Complexity

   Yilei Tu, Jiaoda Li, and Ryan Cotterell

   Preprint, 2024

2023

1. AACL 2023

   SAINE: Scientific Annotation and Inference Engine of Scientific Research

   Susie Xi Rao, Yilei Tu, and Peter H. Egger

   IJCNLP-AACL 2023 System Demonstrations, 2023

   Abs arXiv

   We present SAINE, an Scientific Annotation and Inference ENgine based on a set of standard open-source software, such as Label Studio and MLflow. We show that our annotation engine can benefit the further development of a more accurate classification. Based on our previous work on hierarchical discipline classifications, we demonstrate its application using SAINE in understanding the space for scholarly publications. The user study of our annotation results shows that user input collected with the help of our system can help us better understand the classification process. We believe that our work will help to foster greater transparency and better understand scientific research. Our annotation and inference engine can further support the downstream meta-science projects. We welcome collaboration and feedback from the scientific community on these projects. The demonstration video can be accessed from this https URL. A live demo website is available at this https URL upon free registration.

2. IEEE TASE

   Reinforcement-Learning-Informed Prescriptive Analytics for Air Traffic Flow Management

   Yuan Wang, Weilin Cai, Yilei Tu, and Jianfeng Mao

   IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering, 2023

   Abs PDF

   Air Traffic Flow Management (ATFM) is a complex sequential decision-making problem that involves dynamically matching flights with sectors under changing environmental conditions. Finding an optimal solution for ATFM is challenging due to its dynamic nature and operational constraints. Reinforcement learning is a well-suited approach for sequential decision-making problems. However, ATFM poses three potential challenges: 1) large state space, 2) combinatorial action space, and 3) variational feasible action set, resulting from numerous agents with tightly-coupled constraints. These challenges can hinder the effectiveness of direct application of reinforcement learning methods. While prescriptive analytics can readily handle hard constraints via a mathematical optimization model, but it is computationally intractable for online sequential decision-making problems under changing environments. To address these challenges, we propose a novel framework, Reinforcement-Learning-Informed Prescriptive Analytics (RLIPA), in which an “informing” scheme is devised to integrate reinforcement learning and prescriptive analytics and leverage their strengths in predicting future reward and coping with hard constraints respectively. RLIPA is a general framework that can be adapted to other problems beyond ATFM, which typically involves many agents with tightly-coupled hard constraints. We demonstrate the usage and performance of RLIPA using numerical results and a real case study in comparison to two baseline approaches. Note to Practitioners —To improve Air Traffic Flow Management (ATFM) and reduce flight congestion, we propose a new method called reinforcement-learning-informed prescriptive analytics (RLIPA). RLIPA is a general framework that facilitates online sequential decision-making problems with multiple agents coupled with hard constraints. The approach consists of two stages: first, estimating future potential rewards for each agent via reinforcement learning, and second, informing the potential rewards to the following prescriptive analysis and using the information to construct and solve the downstream optimization problem dealing with hard coupling constraints among agents. Numerical experiments demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of RLIPA in the application of ATFM. In the most cases, RLIPA can offer more than 10x improvement in computational efficiency while maintaining or improving the level of optimality. The framework of RLIPA can be further extended to problems such as order dispatch in ride-hailing systems and food delivery.

3. TRC

   Prediction of estimated time of arrival for multi-airport systems via “Bubble” mechanism

   Lechen Wang, Jianfeng Mao, Lishuai Li, Xuechun Li, and Yilei Tu

   Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies, 2023

   Abs PDF

   Predicting Estimated Time of Arrival (ETA) for a Multi-Airport System (MAS) is much more challenging than for a single airport system because of complex air route structure, dense air traffic volume and vagaries of traffic conditions in an MAS. In this work, we propose a novel “Bubble” mechanism to accurately predict medium-term ETA for a Multi-Airport System (MAS), in which the prediction of travel time of an origin–destination (OD) pair is decomposed into two stages, termed as out-MAS and in-MAS stages. For the out-MAS stage, Auto-Regressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) is used to predict the travel time of a flight to reach the MAS boundary. For the in-MAS stage, we construct new spatio-temporal features based on clustering analysis of trajectory patterns facilitated by a novel data-driven hybrid polar sampling method. A sequence-to-sequence prediction model, Multi-variate Stacked Fully connected Bidirectional Long–Short Term Memory, is further developed to achieve multi-step-ahead predictions of in-MAS travel time for each trajectory pattern using the spatio-temporal features as input. Finally, the medium-term ETA prediction for an MAS is achieved by integrating the out-MAS and in-MAS prediction with the help of trajectory pattern prediction via random forest. A case study of predicting medium-term ETA for a typical MAS in China, Guangdong–Hong Kong–Macao Greater Bay Area, is conducted to demonstrate the usage and promising performance of the proposed method in comparison to several commonly used end-to-end learning methods.