Engineering design optimization seeks to automatically determine the shapes, topologies, or parameters of components that maximize performance under given conditions. This process often depends on physics-based simulations, which are difficult to install, computationally expensive, and require domain-specific expertise. To mitigate these challenges, we introduce EngiBench, the first open‐source library and datasets spanning diverse domains for data‐driven engineering design. EngiBench provides a unified API and a curated set of benchmarks---covering aeronautics, heat conduction, photonics, and more---that enable fair, reproducible comparisons of optimization and machine learning algorithms, such as generative or surrogate models. We also release EngiOpt, a companion library offering a collection of such algorithms compatible with the EngiBench interface. Both libraries are modular, letting users plug in novel algorithms or problems, automate end-to-end experiment workflows, and leverage built-in utilities for visualization, dataset generation, feasibility checks, and performance analysis. We demonstrate their versatility through experiments comparing state-of-the-art techniques across multiple engineering design problems, an undertaking that was previously prohibitively time-consuming to perform. Finally, we show that these problems pose significant challenges for standard machine learning methods due to highly sensitive and constrained design manifolds.

Interactive systems that facilitate exposure to examples can augment problem solving performance. However designers of such systems are often faced with many practical design decisions about how users will interact with examples, with little clear theoretical guidance. To understand how example interaction design choices affect whether/how people benefit from examples, we conducted an experiment where 182 participants worked on a controlled analog to an exploratory creativity task, with access to examples of varying diversity and presentation interfaces. Task performance was worse when examples were presented in a list, compared to contextualized in the exploration space or shown in a dropdown list. Example lists were associated with more fixation, whereas contextualized examples were associated with using examples to formulate a model of the problem space to guide exploration. We discuss implications of these results for a theoretical framework that maps design choices to fundamental psychological mechanisms of creative inspiration from examples.

This paper introduces Least Volume---a simple yet effective regularization inspired by geometric intuition---that can reduce the necessary number of latent dimensions needed by an autoencoder without requiring any prior knowledge of the intrinsic dimensionality of the dataset. We show that the Lipschitz continuity of the decoder is the key to making it work, provide a proof that PCA is just a linear special case of it, and reveal that it has a similar PCA-like importance ordering effect when applied to nonlinear models. We demonstrate the intuition behind the regularization on some pedagogical toy problems, and its effectiveness on several benchmark problems, including MNIST, CIFAR-10 and CelebA.

Bipartite b-matching, where agents on one side of a market are matched to one or more agents or items on the other, is a classical model that is used in myriad application areas such as healthcare, advertising, education, and general resource allocation. Traditionally, the primary goal of such models is to maximize a linear function of the constituent matches (e.g., linear social welfare maximization) subject to some constraints. Recent work has studied a new goal of balancing whole-match diversity and economic efficiency, where the objective is instead a monotone submodular function over the matching. Basic versions of this problem are solvable in polynomial time. In this work, we prove that the problem of simultaneously maximizing diversity along several features (e.g., country of citizenship, gender, skills) is NP-hard. To address this problem, we develop the first combinatorial algorithm that constructs provably-optimal diverse b-matchings in pseudo-polynomial time. We also provide a Mixed-Integer Quadratic formulation for the same problem and show that our method guarantees optimal solutions and takes less computation time for a reviewer assignment application. The source code is made available at https://github.com/faezahmed/diverse_matching.

Exposing people to concepts created by others can inspire novel combinations of concepts, or conversely, lead people to simply emulate others. But how does the type of exposure affect creative outcomes in online collaboration where dyads interact for short tasks? In this paper, we study the creative outcomes of dyads working together online on a slogan writing task under different types of interactions: providing both the partner's idea and their explanation for that idea, enabling synchronous chat, and only exposing a person to their partner's idea without any explanation. We measure the creative outcome and define text-similarity-based metrics (e.g., mimicry, convergence, and fixation) to disentangle the interactions. The results show that having partners explain their ideas leads to largest improvement in creative outcome. In contrast, participants who chatted were more likely to reach convergence on their final slogans. Our work sheds lights on how different online interactions may create trade-offs in creative collaborations.

This paper describes how to find or filter high-quality ideas submitted by members collaborating together in online communities. Typical means of organizing community submissions, such as aggregating community or crowd votes, suffer from the cold-start problem, the rich-get-richer problem, and the sparsity problem. To circumvent those, our approach learns a ranking model that combines 1) community feedback, 2) idea uniqueness, and 3) text features?e.g., readability, coherence, semantics, etc. This model can then rank order submissions by expected quality, supporting community members in finding content that can inspire them and improve collaboration among members. As illustrative example, we demonstrate the model on OpenIDEO--a collaborative community where high-quality submissions are rewarded by winning design challenges. We find that the proposed ranking model finds winning ideas more effectively than existing ranking techniques (comment sorting), as measured using both Discounted Cumulative Gain and human perceptions of idea quality. We also identify the elements of winning ideas that were highly predictive of subsequent success: 1) engagement with community feedback, 2) submission length, and 3) a submission's uniqueness. Ultimately, our approach enables community members and managers to more effectively manage creative stimuli created by large collaborative communities.

Bipartite matching, where agents on one side of a market are matched to agents or items on the other, is a classical problem in computer science and economics, with widespread application in healthcare, education, advertising, and general resource allocation. A practitioner's goal is typically to maximize a matching market's economic efficiency, possibly subject to some fairness requirements that promote equal access to resources. A natural balancing act exists between fairness and efficiency in matching markets, and has been the subject of much research.In this paper, we study a complementary goal---balancing diversity and efficiency---in a generalization of bipartite matching where agents on one side of the market can be matched to sets of agents on the other. Adapting a classical definition of the diversity of a set, we propose a quadratic programming-based approach to solving a submodular minimization problem that balances diversity and total weight of the solution. We also provide a scalable greedy algorithm with theoretical performance bounds. We then define the price of diversity, a measure of the efficiency loss due to enforcing diversity, and give a worst-case theoretical bound. Finally, we demonstrate the efficacy of our methods on three real-world datasets, and show that the price of diversity is not bad in practice. Our code is publicly accessible for further research.