Peter J. Stuckey

Peter J. Stuckey
University of Melbourne | MSD · Department of Computing and Information Systems

About

454
Publications
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9,375
Citations

Publications

Publications (454)
Preprint
Full-text available
Despite the practical success of Artificial Intelligence (AI), current neural AI algorithms face two significant issues. First, the decisions made by neural architectures are often prone to bias and brittleness. Second, when a chain of reasoning is required, neural systems often perform poorly. Neuro-symbolic artificial intelligence is a promising...
Chapter
Full-text available
AWAIRE is one of two extant methods for conducting risk-limiting audits of instant-runoff voting (IRV) elections. In principle AWAIRE can audit IRV contests with any number of candidates, but the original implementation incurred memory and computation costs that grew superexponentially with the number of candidates. This paper improves the algorith...
Preprint
Full-text available
Single Transferable Vote (STV) counting, used in several jurisdictions in Australia, is a system for choosing multiple election winners given voters' preferences over candidates. There are a variety of different versions of STV legislated and/or applied across Australia. This paper shows some of the unintuitive properties of some of these systems.
Preprint
Full-text available
This paper addresses the problem of autonomous UAV search missions, where a UAV must locate specific Entities of Interest (EOIs) within a time limit, based on brief descriptions in large, hazard-prone environments with keep-out zones. The UAV must perceive, reason, and make decisions with limited and uncertain information. We propose NEUSIS, a comp...
Conference Paper
Various risk-limiting audit (RLA) methods have been developed for instant-runoff voting (IRV) elections. A recent method, AWAIRE, is the first efficient approach that can take advantage of but does not require cast vote records (CVRs). AWAIRE involves adaptively weighted averages of test statistics, essentially"learning"an effective set of hypothes...
Preprint
Full-text available
AWAIRE is one of two extant methods for conducting risk-limiting audits of instant-runoff voting (IRV) elections. In principle AWAIRE can audit IRV contests with any number of candidates, but the original implementation incurred memory and computation costs that grew superexponentially with the number of candidates. This paper improves the algorith...
Article
Given a loop-free sequence of instructions, superoptimization techniques use a constraint solver to search for an equivalent sequence that is optimal for a desired objective. The complexity of the search grows exponentially with the length of the solution being constructed, and the problem becomes intractable for large sequences of instructions. Th...
Article
Symmetry breaking and weighted-suboptimal search are two popular speed up techniques used in pathfinding search. It is a commonly held assumption that they are orthogonal and easily combined. In this paper we illustrate that this is not necessarily the case when combining a number of symmetry breaking methods, based on Jump Point Search, with Weigh...
Article
In applications of Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF), it is often the sum of planning and execution times that needs to be minimised (i.e., the Goal Achievement Time). Yet current methods seldom optimise for this objective. Optimal algorithms reduce execution time, but may require exponential planning time. Non-optimal algorithms reduce planning time...
Article
Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) is a fundamental problem in robotics that asks us to compute collision-free paths for a team of agents, all moving across a shared map. Existing scalable approaches struggle as the number of agents grows, as they typically plan free-flow optimal paths, which creates congestion. To tackle this issue, we propose a new...
Article
Facility Location Problems (FLPs) arise while serving multiple customers in a shared environment, minimizing transportation and other costs. Hence, they involve the optimal placement of facilities. They are defined on graphs as well as in Euclidean spaces with or without obstacles; and they are typically NP-hard to solve optimally. There are many h...
Article
In applications of Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF), it is often the sum of planning and execution times that needs to be minimised (i.e., the Goal Achievement Time). Yet current methods seldom optimise for this objective. Optimal algorithms reduce execution time, but may require exponential planning time. Non-optimal algorithms reduce planning time...
Conference Paper
This paper presents new methods of encoding the multiplication of a binary encoded integer variable with a constant value for Boolean Satisfiability (SAT) solvers. This problem, known as the Single Constant Multiplication (SCM) problem, is widely studied for its application in hardware design, but its techniques are currently not employed for SAT e...
Preprint
Full-text available
Polymorphic types are an important feature in most strongly typed programming languages. They allow functions to be written in a way that can be used with different data types, while still enforcing the relationship and constraints between the values. However, programmers often find polymorphic types difficult to use and understand and tend to reas...
Preprint
Full-text available
Statically typed languages offer significant advantages, such as bug prevention, enhanced code quality, and reduced maintenance costs. However, these benefits often come at the expense of a steep learning curve and a slower development pace. Haskell, known for its expressive and strict type system, poses challenges for inexperienced programmers in...
Article
Just-In-Time (JIT) defect prediction has been proposed to help teams to prioritize the limited resources on the most risky commits (or pull requests), yet it remains largely a black-box, whose predictions are not explainable nor actionable to practitioners. Thus, prior studies have applied various model-agnostic techniques to explain the prediction...
Article
In the quest for Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) one of the questions that frequently arises given a decision made by an AI system is, ``why was the decision made in this way?'' Formal approaches to explainability build a formal model of the AI system and use this to reason about the properties of the system. Given a set of feature values...
Article
Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) is a fundamental problem in robotics that asks us to compute collision-free paths for a team of agents, all moving across a shared map. Although many works appear on this topic, all current algorithms struggle as the number of agents grows. The principal reason is that existing approaches typically plan free-flow opt...
Preprint
Full-text available
This paper presents new methods of encoding the multiplication of a binary encoded integer variable with a constant value for Boolean Satisfiability (SAT) solvers. This problem, known as the Single Constant Multiplication (SCM) problem, is widely studied for its application in hardware design, but this technique are currently not employed for SAT e...
Article
Full-text available
Nontermination is an unwanted program property for some software systems, and a safety property for other systems. In either case, automated discovery of preconditions for nontermination is of interest. We introduce NtHorn, a fast lightweight nontermination analyser, which is able to deduce non-trivial sufficient conditions for nontermination. Usin...
Chapter
In graph theory and network analysis, various measures of centrality are used to characterize the importance of vertices in a graph. Although different measures of centrality have been invented to suit the nature and requirements of different underlying problem domains, their application is restricted to explicit graphs. In this paper, we first def...
Chapter
Elections where electors rank the candidates (or a subset of the candidates) in order of preference allow the collection of more information about the electors’ intent. The most widely used election of this type is Instant-Runoff Voting (IRV), where candidates are eliminated one by one, until a single candidate holds the majority of the remaining b...
Chapter
Full-text available
An election audit is risk-limiting if the audit limits (to a pre-specified threshold) the chance that an erroneous electoral outcome will be certified. Extant methods for auditing instant-runoff voting (IRV) elections are either not risk-limiting or require cast vote records (CVRs), the voting system’s electronic record of the votes on each ballot....
Preprint
Full-text available
Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) is a fundamental problem in robotics that asks us to compute collision-free paths for a team of agents, all moving across a shared map. Although many works appear on this topic, all current algorithms struggle as the number of agents grows. The principal reason is that existing approaches typically plan free-flow opt...
Preprint
Full-text available
A complete time-parameterized statistical model quantifying the divergent evolution of protein structures in terms of the patterns of conservation of their secondary structures is inferred from a large collection of protein 3D structure alignments. This provides a better alternative to time-parameterized sequence-based models of protein relatedness...
Conference Paper
Using a regular language as a pattern for string matching is nowadays a common -and sometimes unsafe- operation, provided as a built-in feature by most programming languages. A proper constraint solver over string variables should support most of the operations over regular expressions and related constructs. However, state-of-the-art string solver...
Chapter
Risk-limiting audits (RLAs) are an increasingly important method for checking that the reported outcome of an election is, in fact, correct. Indeed, their use is increasingly being legislated. While effective methods for RLAs have been developed for many forms of election—for example: first-past-the-post, instant-runoff voting, and D’Hondt election...
Preprint
Full-text available
An election audit is risk-limiting if the audit limits (to a pre-specified threshold) the chance that an erroneous electoral outcome will be certified. Extant methods for auditing instant-runoff voting (IRV) elections are either not risk-limiting or require cast vote records (CVRs), the voting system's electronic record of the votes on each ballot....
Preprint
Recent years have witnessed the widespread use of artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms and machine learning (ML) models. Despite their tremendous success, a number of vital problems like ML model brittleness, their fairness, and the lack of interpretability warrant the need for the active developments in explainable artificial intelligence (XAI)...
Article
JPS (Jump Point Search) is a state-of-the-art optimal algorithm for online grid-based pathfinding. Widely used in games and other navigation scenarios, JPS nevertheless can exhibit pathological behaviours which are not well studied: (i) it may repeatedly scan the same area of the map to find successors; (ii) it may generate and expand suboptimal se...
Article
Current approaches for real-world Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) usually start with a simplified MAPF model and modify the resulting plans so they are kinematically feasible. We investigate one such problem, called MAPF with turn actions MAPF_T, and show that ignoring the kinematic constraints significantly increases solution cost. A first modific...
Article
The guillotine rectangular cutting problem deals with a single rectangular plate of raw material and a collection of rectangular items to be cut from the plate. Each item is associated with a profit and a demand. The problem searches for a feasible layout of a subset of items on the plate so as to maximize the total profit of selected items. The gu...
Article
In Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF), we are asked to plan collision-free paths for teams of moving agents. Among the leading methods for optimal MAPF is Conflict-Based Search (CBS), an algorithmic family which has received intense attention in recent years and for which large advancements in efficiency and effectiveness have been reported. Yet all o...
Article
Given a set of agents on a grid, the multi-agent path finding problem aims to find a path that moves each agent from its given start location to its target location such that they do not collide and that the sum of arrival times is minimized. LNS2 is a state-of-the-art algorithm for anytime, suboptimal solving. It is an upper-bounding algorithm tha...
Article
Full-text available
Unlabelled: The tendency of an amino acid to adopt certain configurations in folded proteins is treated here as a statistical estimation problem. We model the joint distribution of the observed mainchain and sidechain dihedral angles (〈ϕ,ψ,χ1,χ2,…〉) of any amino acid by a mixture of a product of von Mises probability distributions. This mixture mo...
Preprint
Full-text available
JPS (Jump Point Search) is a state-of-the-art optimal algorithm for online grid-based pathfinding. Widely used in games and other navigation scenarios, JPS nevertheless can exhibit pathological behaviours which are not well studied: (i) it may repeatedly scan the same area of the map to find successors; (ii) it may generate and expand suboptimal se...
Preprint
Full-text available
In the quest for Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) one of the questions that frequently arises given a decision made by an AI system is, ``why was the decision made in this way?'' Formal approaches to explainability build a formal model of the AI system and use this to reason about the properties of the system. Given a set of feature values...
Article
In many computer games up to hundreds of agents navigate in real-time across a dynamically changing weighted grid map. Pathfinding in these situations is challenging because the grids are large, traversal costs are not uniform, and because each shortest path has many symmetric permutations, all of which must be considered by an optimal online searc...
Article
The rise of AI methods to make predictions and decisions has led to a pressing need for more explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) methods. One common approach for XAI is to produce a post-hoc explanation, explaining why a black box ML model made a certain prediction. Formal approaches to post-hoc explanations provide succinct reasons for why a...
Preprint
Full-text available
The Flatland Challenge, which was first held in 2019 and reported in NeurIPS 2020, is designed to answer the question: How to efficiently manage dense traffic on complex rail networks? Considering the significance of punctuality in real-world railway network operation and the fact that fast passenger trains share the network with slow freight train...
Preprint
Full-text available
Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) is an important core problem for many new and emerging industrial applications. Many works appear on this topic each year, and a large number of substantial advancements and performance improvements have been reported. Yet measuring overall progress in MAPF is difficult: there are many potential competitors, and the...
Preprint
Elections where electors rank the candidates (or a subset of the candidates) in order of preference allow the collection of more information about the electors' intent. The most widely used election of this type is Instant-Runoff Voting (IRV), where candidates are eliminated one by one, until a single candidate holds the majority of the remaining b...
Preprint
Full-text available
Dynamically typed programming languages are popular in education and the software industry. While presenting a low barrier to entry, they suffer from run-time type errors and longer-term problems in code quality and maintainability. Statically typed languages, while showing strength in these aspects, lack in learnability and ease of use. In particu...
Chapter
Instant-runoff voting (IRV) is used in several countries around the world. It requires voters to rank candidates in order of preference, and uses a counting algorithm that is more complex than systems such as first-past-the-post or scoring rules. An even more complex system, the single transferable vote (STV), is used when multiple candidates need...
Preprint
Instant-runoff voting (IRV) is used in several countries around the world. It requires voters to rank candidates in order of preference, and uses a counting algorithm that is more complex than systems such as first-past-the-post or scoring rules. An even more complex system, the single transferable vote (STV), is used when multiple candidates need...
Conference Paper
In optimisation problems involving multiple agents (stakeholders) we often want to make sure that the solution is balanced and fair. That is, we want to maximise total utility subject to an upper bound on the statistical dispersion (e.g., spread or the Gini coefficient) of the utility given to different agents, or minimise dispersion subject to som...
Article
Multi-Train Path Finding (MTPF) is a coordination problem that asks us to plan collision-free paths for a team of moving agents, where each agent occupies a sequence of locations at any given time. MTPF is useful for planning a range of real-world vehicles, including rail trains and road convoys. MTPF is closely related to another coordination prob...
Article
The Euclidean Shortest Path Problem (ESPP) asks us to find a minimum length path between two points on a 2D plane while avoiding a set of polygonal obstacles. Existing approaches for ESPP, based on Dijkstra or A* search, are primal methods that gradually build up longer and longer valid paths until they reach the target. In this paper we define an...
Preprint
The Euclidean shortest path problem (ESPP) is a well studied problem with many practical applications. Recently a new efficient online approach to this problem, RayScan, has been developed, based on ray shooting and polygon scanning. In this paper we show how we can improve RayScan by carefully reasoning about polygon scans. We also look into how R...
Preprint
Ranked voting systems, such as instant-runoff voting (IRV) and single transferable vote (STV), are used in many places around the world. They are more complex than plurality and scoring rules, presenting a challenge for auditing their outcomes: there is no known risk-limiting audit (RLA) method for STV other than a full hand count. We present a new...
Article
Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) is the problem of planning collision-free paths for multiple agents in a shared environment. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm MAPF-LNS2 based on large neighborhood search for solving MAPF efficiently. Starting from a set of paths that contain collisions, MAPF-LNS2 repeatedly selects a subset of colliding a...
Article
Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) is the problem of finding collision-free paths for multiple agents that minimize the sum of path costs. EECBS is a leading two-level algorithm that solves MAPF bounded-suboptimally, that is, within some factor w of the minimum sum of path costs C*. It uses focal search to find bounded-suboptimal paths on the low leve...
Article
The predict+optimize problem combines machine learning and combinatorial optimization by predicting the problem coefficients first and then using these coefficients to solve the optimization problem. While this problem can be solved in two separate stages, recent research shows end to end models can achieve better results. This requires differentia...
Article
Tree ensembles (TEs) denote a prevalent machine learning model that do not offer guarantees of interpretability, that represent a challenge from the perspective of explainable artificial intelligence. Besides model agnostic approaches, recent work proposed to explain TEs with formally-defined explanations, which are computed with oracles for propos...
Article
Full-text available
Motivation: Alignments are correspondences between sequences. How reliable are alignments of amino acid sequences of proteins, and what inferences about protein relationships can be drawn? Using techniques not previously applied to these questions, by weighting every possible sequence alignment by its posterior probability we derive a formal mathe...
Preprint
The rise of AI methods to make predictions and decisions has led to a pressing need for more explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) methods. One common approach for XAI is to produce a post-hoc explanation, explaining why a black box ML model made a certain prediction. Formal approaches to post-hoc explanations provide succinct reasons for why a...
Article
Temporal Jump Point Search (JPST) is a recently introduced algorithm for grid-optimal pathfinding among dynamic temporal obstacles. In this work we consider JPST as a low-level planner in Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF). We investigate how the canonical ordering of JPST can negatively impact MAPF performance and we consider several strategies which...
Article
Computing time-optimal shortest paths, in road networks, is one of the most popular applications of Artificial Intelligence. This problem is tricky to solve because road congestion affects travel times. The state-of-the-art in this area is an algorithm called Time-dependent Contraction Hierarchies (TCH). Although fast and optimal, TCH still suffers...
Chapter
Discrete optimisation problems often reason about finite sets of objects. While the underlying solvers will represent these objects as integer values, most modelling languages include enumerated types that allow the objects to be expressed as a set of names. Data attached to an object is made accessible through given arrays or functions from object...
Chapter
Block modeling algorithms are used to discover important latent structures in graphs. They are the graph equivalent of clustering algorithms. However, existing block modeling algorithms work directly on the given graphs, making them computationally expensive and less effective on large complex graphs. In this paper, we propose a FastMap-based algor...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Boolean satisfiability (SAT) solvers have dramatically improved their performance in the last twenty years, enabling them to solve large and complex problems. More recently MaxSAT solvers have appeared that efficiently solve optimisation problems based on SAT. This means that SAT solvers have become a competitive technology for tackling discrete op...
Preprint
Full-text available
This paper explains the main principles and some of the technical details for auditing the scanning and digitisation of the Australian Senate ballot papers. We give a short summary of the motivation for auditing paper ballots, explain the necessary supporting steps for a rigorous and transparent audit, and suggest some statistical methods that woul...
Chapter
Blockmodelling is the process of determining community structure in a graph. Real graphs contain noise and so it is up to the blockmodelling method to allow for this noise and reconstruct the most likely role memberships and role relationships. Relationships are encoded in a graph using the absence and presence of edges. Two objects are considered...
Article
The Electric Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows, Piecewise-Linear Recharging and Capacitated Recharging Stations aims to design minimum-cost routes for a fleet of electric vehicles subject to intra-route and inter-route constraints. Every vehicle is equipped with a rechargeable battery that depletes while it transports goods along its route....
Preprint
Risk-limiting audits (RLAs) are an increasingly important method for checking that the reported outcome of an election is, in fact, correct. Indeed, their use is increasingly being legislated. While effective methods for RLAs have been developed for many forms of election -- for example: first-past-the-post, instant-runoff voting, and D'Hondt elect...
Article
Decision sets and decision lists are two of the most easily explainable machine learning models. Given the renewed emphasis on explainable machine learning decisions, both of these machine learning models are becoming increasingly attractive, as they combine small size and clear explainability. In this paper, we define size as the total number of l...
Chapter
Non-termination is an unwanted program property (considered a bug) for some software systems, and a safety property for other systems. In either case, automated discovery of preconditions for non-termination is of interest. We introduce NtHorn, a fast lightweight non-termination analyser, able to deduce non-trivial sufficient conditions for non-ter...
Chapter
We revisit disjunctive interval analysis based on the Boxes abstract domain. We propose the use of what we call range decision diagrams (RDDs) to implement Boxes, and we provide algorithms for the necessary RDD operations. RDDs tend to be more compact than the linear decision diagrams (LDDs) that have traditionally been used for Boxes. Representing...
Article
We consider optimal and suboptimal algorithms for the Euclidean Shortest Path Problem (ESPP) in two dimensions. For optimal path planning, Our approach leverages ideas from two recent works: Polyanya, a mesh-based ESPP planner which we use to represent and reason about the environment, and Compressed Path Databases (CPD), a speedup technique for pa...
Article
Full-text available
Zones and Octagons are popular abstract domains for static program analysis. They enable the automated discovery of simple numerical relations that hold between pairs of program variables. Both domains are well understood mathematically but the detailed implementation of static analyses based on these domains poses many interesting algorithmic chal...
Article
Precondition inference is a non-trivial problem with important applications in program analysis and verification. We present a novel iterative method for automatically deriving preconditions for the safety and unsafety of programs. Each iteration maintains over-approximations of the set of safe and unsafe initial states, which are used to partition...
Chapter
Presidential primaries are a critical part of the United States Presidential electoral process, since they are used to select the candidates in the Presidential election. While methods differ by state and party, many primaries involve proportional delegate allocation using the so-called Hamilton method. In this paper we show how to conduct risk-lim...
Chapter
Risk-limiting audits (RLAs), an ingredient in evidence-based elections, are increasingly common. They are a rigorous statistical means of ensuring that electoral results are correct, usually without having to perform an expensive full recount—at the cost of some controlled probability of error. A recently developed approach for conducting RLAs, SHA...
Article
Conflict-Based Search (CBS) is a leading algorithm for optimal Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) which features strong performance. In CBS, one conflict in a high-level node is resolved to generate two child nodes, until a node with no conflicts is found. Choosing the right conflict to resolve can greatly speed up the search. It is currently recommen...
Article
Contraction hierarchies are graph-based data structure developed to speed up shortest path search in road networks. Built during an offline pre-processing step, contraction hierarchies are always paired with an online query algorithm which is a variation on bi-directional Dijkstra search. Though effective and highly popular this combination can som...
Article
We consider two new types of pairwise path symmetries which appear in the context of Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF). The first of them, corridor symmetry, arises when two agents attempt to pass through the same narrow passage but in opposite directions. The second, target symmetry, arises when the shortest path of one agent requires the target loc...
Article
We describe a new way of reasoning about symmetric collisions for Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) on 4-neighbor grids. We also introduce a symmetry-breaking constraint to resolve these conflicts. This specialized technique allows us to identify and eliminate, in a single step, all permutations of two currently assigned but incompatible paths. Each...
Article
We study prioritized planning for Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF). Existing prioritized MAPF algorithms depend on rule-of-thumb heuristics and random assignment to determine a fixed total priority ordering of all agents a priori. We instead explore the space of all possible partial priority orderings as part of a novel systematic and conflict-drive...
Preprint
Full-text available
Precondition inference is a non-trivial problem with important applications in program analysis and verification. We present a novel iterative method for automatically deriving preconditions for the safety and unsafety of programs. Each iteration maintains over-approximations of the set of safe and unsafe initial states; which are used to partition...
Preprint
Full-text available
This document provides a brief introduction to learned automated planning problem where the state transition function is in the form of a binarized neural network (BNN), presents a general MaxSAT encoding for this problem, and describes the four domains, namely: Navigation, Inventory Control, System Administrator and Cellda, that are submitted as b...
Article
Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) is a challenging combinatorial problem that asks us to plan collision-free paths for a team of cooperative agents. In this work, we show that one of the reasons why MAPF is so hard to solve is due to a phenomenon called pairwise symmetry, which occurs when two agents have many different paths to their target location...
Conference Paper
Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) is the challenging problem of computing collision-free paths for multiple agents. Algorithms for solving MAPF can be categorized on a spectrum. At one end are (bounded-sub)optimal algorithms that can find high-quality solutions for small problems. At the other end are unbounded-suboptimal algorithms that can solve la...
Conference Paper
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is widely used in decision making procedures in myriads of real-world applications across important practical areas such as finance, healthcare, education, and safety critical systems. Due to its ubiquitous use in safety and privacy critical domains, it is often vital to understand the reasoning behind the AI decisions,...
Preprint
Risk-limiting audits (RLAs), an ingredient in evidence-based elections, are increasingly common. They are a rigorous statistical means of ensuring that electoral results are correct, usually without having to perform an expensive full recount -- at the cost of some controlled probability of error. A recently developed approach for conducting RLAs,...
Article
The shortest path problem (SPP) asks us to find a minimum length path between two points, usually on a graph. In a Euclidean environment the points are in a 2D plane and here the path must avoid a set of polygonal obstacles. Solution methods for this Euclidean SPP (ESPP) typically convert the continuous 2D map into a discretised representation, lik...