Report examines Muskrat Falls Project's cost and schedule overruns.
problem Analyzing Muskrat Falls Project's cost and schedule overruns.
method Examines national and international context, causes, and recommendations.
result Provides insights into preventing cost and schedule overruns in hydroelectric dam projects.
Study estimates risks of nuclear waste storage projects.
problem Cost and schedule risks in nuclear waste storage projects.
method Reference class of 216 past projects for cost risk, 200 for schedule risk.
result Cost and schedule risks are substantial for nuclear waste storage projects.
Out-of-control information technology (IT) projects have ended the careers of top managers, such as EADS CEO Noel Forgeard and Levi Strauss' CIO David Bergen. Moreover, IT projects have brought down whole companies, like Kmart in the US and Auto Windscreen in the UK. Software and other IT is now such an integral part o…
This report reviews the Edinburgh tram project's risk management. Projects frequently overrun their cost and timelines and fall short on intended benefits. Cost, schedule, and benefit risk of projects need to be carefully considered to avoid this. The report describes and evaluates risk assessment and management for th…
This paper examines three independent explanatory variables and their relation with cost overrun in order to decide whether this is different for Dutch infrastructure projects compared to worldwide findings. The three independent variables are project type (road, rail, and fixed link projects), project size (measured i…
Using a methodology similar to that used the in the worldwide research, the cost performance of Dutch large-scale transport infrastructure projects is determined. In the Netherlands, cost overruns are as common as cost underruns but because cost overruns are larger than cost underruns projects on average have a cost ov…
Cost overruns in transport infrastructure projects know no geographical limits, overruns are a global phenomenon. Nevertheless, the size of cost overruns varies with location. In the Netherlands, cost overruns appear to be smaller compared to the rest of the world. This paper tests whether Dutch projects perform signif…
Empirical study finds IT project costs follow a power-law distribution, exposing risk underestimation.
problem IT project cost overruns are underestimated due to normal distribution assumptions.
method Analyzed 5,392 IT projects to examine cost overruns following a power-law distribution.
result IT project cost overruns follow a power-law distribution with a fat tail of extreme overruns.
Olympic Games remain costly and overrun, despite reforms.
problem High costs and cost overruns in Olympic Games.
method Analysis of past and current Olympic Games costs and overruns, assessment of IOC reforms, and comparison of reuse vs. new construction.
result Cost overruns are increasing, and reuse of venues is ineffective.
Lock-in, the escalating commitment of decision-makers to an ineffective course of action, has the potential to explain the large cost overruns in large scale transportation infrastructure projects. Lock-in can occur both at the decision-making level (before the decision to build) and at the project level (after the dec…
Managing large-scale transportation infrastructure projects is difficult due to frequent misinformation about the costs which results in large cost overruns that often threaten the overall project viability. This paper investigates the explanations for cost overruns that are given in the literature. Overall, four categ…
Strategic behaviour is one of the main explanations for cost overruns. It can theoretically be supported by agency theory, in which strategic behaviour is the result of asymmetric information between the principal and agent. This paper gives a formal account of this relation by a signalling game. This is a game with in…
A brisk building boom of hydropower mega-dams is underway from China to Brazil. Whether benefits of new dams will outweigh costs remains unresolved despite contentious debates. We investigate this question with the "outside view" or "reference class forecasting" based on literature on decision-making under uncertainty …
Olympic Games consistently exceed budgets, leading to unpredictable costs.
problem High costs and unpredictability of the Olympic Games.
method Statistical analysis of historical data to explain cost risks.
result Olympic costs follow a power-law distribution with infinite mean and variance.
The article first describes characteristics of major infrastructure projects. Second, it documents a much neglected topic in economics: that ex ante estimates of costs and benefits are often very different from actual ex post costs and benefits. For large infrastructure projects the consequence is cost overruns, benefi…
New method schedules learning rate without stopping time, outperforming existing methods.
problem Learning rate schedules that require stopping time are outperformed.
method Schedule-Free approach that avoids stopping time and introduces no additional hyper-parameters.
result Exhibits state-of-the-art performance across various problems.
This paper proposes a method to select project schedules with the lowest risk.
problem Selecting schedules that meet project deadlines while minimizing risk.
method Integrating aleatory uncertainty into project scheduling to quantify and compare risks.
result Proposes a method to select schedules with the lowest risk.
Optimizes financial auditor schedules to reduce time and costs.
problem Efficiently scheduling financial auditors with multiple constraints.
method Used Integer Linear Programming and compared two exact formulations.
result Multi-commodity network flow formulation is 24 times faster.
ScheduleFree+ improves large language model training without schedules or learning rates.
problem Scaling up Schedule-Free Learning to large language models.
method Learning-rate-free and schedule-free method for training large language models.
result ScheduleFree+ outperforms SOTA schedules by 31% at 1000 tokens per parameter.
Cosine schedule is optimal for discrete diffusion models.
problem Choosing the best discretization schedule for diffusion models.
method Optimized using Fisher-Rao geometry.
result Cosine schedule is Fisher-Rao optimal.
Optimal learning rate schedules derived for various tasks.
problem Inadequate learning rate schedules in practice compared to theory.
method Refined analysis of learning rate schedules for optimization algorithms.
result Derives new problem-adaptive learning rate schedules.
The paper optimizes interpolation schedules in generative models to improve sampling accuracy.
problem Improving sampling accuracy in generative models with fewer resources.
method Minimizing the averaged squared Lipschitzness of the drift field, using transfer formulas.
result Designed schedules yield more accurate fine-scale statistics at fixed integrator budget.
New method converts and optimizes sampling schedules for generative models.
problem Optimizing sampling schedules for generative models like flows and diffusions.
method Unified framework for stochastic interpolants, including point mass schedules.
result Demonstrated efficient generation of images with fewer steps.
Implementing large-scale information and communication technology (IT) projects carries large risks and easily might disrupt operations, waste taxpayers' money, and create negative publicity. Because of the high risks it is important that government leaders manage the attendant risks. We analysed a sample of 1,355 publ…
The paper presents a multi-power law for predicting loss curves across different learning rate schedules.
problem Understanding and optimizing the relationship between model performance and hyperparameters, especially learning rates.
method Proposes a multi-power law that combines power laws based on the sum of learning rates and additional laws for loss reduction due to decay.
result The multi-power law accurately predicts loss curves for unseen learning rate schedules and finds a schedule that outperforms cosine learning rate.
This paper proposes a system-agnostic policy for dynamic scheduling.
problem Dynamic scheduling in changing systems is challenging due to system-specific optimal policies.
method Descriptive policy that learns a system-agnostic scheduling principle.
result System-agnostic meta-learning enables adaptation to unseen system characteristics.
Adaptive scheduling improves multilingual neural machine translation models.
problem Training models on multiple tasks with uniform or proportional sampling leads to poor performance trade-offs.
method Exploring non-adaptive and adaptive task scheduling, including implicit schedules.
result Adaptive schedules improve model performance for low-resource tasks without negatively affecting high-resource tasks.
DL2 uses deep learning to optimize resource allocation in DL clusters.
problem Efficient resource scheduling for deep learning clusters is challenging.
method DL2 combines supervised learning and reinforcement learning to dynamically allocate resources.
result DL2 reduces average training completion time by 44.1% compared to fairness scheduler.
Current clinical practice to monitor patients' health follows either regular or heuristic-based lab test (e.g. blood test) scheduling. Such practice not only gives rise to redundant measurements accruing cost, but may even lead to unnecessary patient discomfort. From the computational perspective, heuristic-based test …
Solves the film scheduling and staggered showtimes problem for movie theaters.
problem Maximize attendance and revenue by scheduling films with staggered showtimes.
method Binary integer linear optimization to find optimal schedules for each cluster of neighboring locations.
result Optimal scheduling cannot be done for all locations at once, but must be done for each cluster.
Optimal learning rate schedules for SGD in changing data distributions.
problem Minimizing regret in online learning with changing data distributions.
method Characterized optimal schedules for linear regression, proposed schedules for general convex and non-convex losses, and defined a notion of regret for non-convex losses.
result Upper and lower bounds for regret with constants for convex losses, and an upper bound on total expected regret for non-convex losses.
Enhances multi-project scheduling with multiple priority rules.
problem Resource allocation in multi-project scheduling with limited time and resources.
method Simulation-based approach using composite priority rules.
result Increased probability of finding schedules with shortest duration.
Learning-rate schedules for large models match optimization theory closely, leading to better training.
problem Improving training of large models with optimal learning rates.
method Used a bound from non-smooth convex optimization theory to match learning-rate schedules with practical benefits.
result Extending the learning-rate schedule with optimal learning-rate and transferring it across schedules improves model training.
The study introduces anytime learning schedules for large language models without fixed horizons.
problem Training large language models without knowing the total training horizon.
method Theoretical analysis and weight averaging to create anytime learning schedules.
result Theoretical and empirical evidence shows that weight averaging with simple step sizes can achieve comparable final loss to well-tuned cosine schedules.
With online calendar services gaining popularity worldwide, calendar data has become one of the richest context sources for understanding human behavior. However, event scheduling is still time-consuming even with the development of online calendars. Although machine learning based event scheduling models have automate…
Annealed importance sampling (AIS) is a common algorithm to estimate partition functions of useful stochastic models. One important problem for obtaining accurate AIS estimates is the selection of an annealing schedule. Conventionally, an annealing schedule is often determined heuristically or is simply set as a linear…
This work uses reinforcement learning to optimize task scheduling and execution in a dynamic multi-agent warehouse environment.
problem Optimizing task scheduling and execution in a dynamic multi-agent warehouse environment with limited observability.
method Deep reinforcement learning to solve both high-level scheduling and low-level multi-agent execution problems.
result Demonstrates the effectiveness of reinforcement learning in optimizing task scheduling and execution in a dynamic multi-agent environment.
Schedule-free SGD is optimal for nonconvex optimization problems.
problem Nonconvex optimization in neural networks.
method Developed a general framework for online-to-nonconvex conversion, which converts schedule-free SGD into an effective nonconvex optimization algorithm.
result Schedule-free SGD achieves optimal iteration complexity for nonsmooth, nonconvex optimization problems.
The paper analyzes the InfoNCE loss under different temperature schedules using Langevin dynamics.
problem Understanding the dynamics of InfoNCE loss under fixed versus annealed temperature schedules.
method Modeling embedding evolution under Langevin dynamics on a compact Riemannian manifold, with theoretical guarantees for convergence.
result Slow logarithmic inverse-temperature schedules ensure convergence to globally optimal representations, while faster schedules risk suboptimal minima.
MLR-SNet learns flexible LR schedules for diverse tasks.
problem Adapting LR schedules for non-convex optimization problems.
method Parameterizes LR schedules with an explicit mapping formulation.
result Meta-learned LR schedules are transferable and adaptable.
This study shows how DDPM can be represented by the OU process.
problem Designing optimal noise schedules for DDPM.
method Formal equivalence between DDPM and OU process, heuristic designs based on Fisher Information.
result Fisher-Information-motivated schedule corresponds to cosine noise schedule.
We improve private training accuracy with learning rate schedules and matrix factorizations.
problem Private training with learning rate schedules and correlated noise.
method General upper and lower bounds for learning rate schedules, memory-efficient constructions, and schedule-aware factorizations.
result Schedule-aware factorizations improve accuracy in private training.
A framework schedules hyperparameters for model-based reinforcement learning, improving performance.
problem Inadequate scheduling of hyperparameters in model-based reinforcement learning.
method Theoretical analysis and AutoMBPO framework to automatically schedule real data ratio and other hyperparameters.
result Training with hyperparameters scheduled by AutoMBPO significantly improves performance.
This paper optimizes diffusion schedules for better sampling from data distributions.
problem Choosing an optimal discretization schedule for denoising diffusion models.
method Adaptive algorithm that selects an optimal schedule based on a work cost measure.
result The learned schedule recovers and outperforms manually tuned schedules.
Proposes an automatic cyclical scheduling for gradient-based discrete sampling.
problem Gradient-based sampling in high-dimensional models can get stuck in local modes.
method Cyclical step size and balancing schedules with automatic hyperparameter tuning.
result Proves non-asymptotic convergence and inference guarantees for general discrete distributions.
Demon improves neural network training with a decaying momentum approach.
problem Improving neural network training efficiency and robustness.
method Proposes a decaying momentum ( extsc{Demon}) rule for neural network optimization.
result Demon achieves the highest number of Top-1 and Top-3 finishes across various settings and architectures.
Bayesian method optimizes rescheduling for multipurpose batch processes with incomplete look-ahead information.
problem Optimizing rescheduling for multipurpose batch processes under incomplete look-ahead information.
method Proposes a Bayesian dynamic scheduling method that learns from disturbances and updates schedules online.
result Achieves statistically better long-term costs and system nervousness compared to existing periodic rescheduling strategies.
New optimizer SF-NorMuon matches tuned AdamW across various horizons.
problem Fixed learning-rate schedules in neural network training lead to strong path dependence and costly re-tuning.
method Schedule-Free Spectral Optimization (SF-NorMuon)
result SF-NorMuon outperforms tuned AdamW on 125M and 772M parameter models across different horizons.