Related papers: Algorithms and Bounds for Rollout Sampling Approxi…
We consider a single stage stochastic program without recourse with a strictly convex loss function. We assume a compact decision space and grid it with a finite set of points. In addition, we assume that the decision maker can generate…
System state estimation constitutes a key problem in several applications involving multi-agent system architectures. This rests upon the estimation of the state of each agent in the group, which is supposed to access only relative…
We propose a general and scalable approximate sampling strategy for probabilistic models with discrete variables. Our approach uses gradients of the likelihood function with respect to its discrete inputs to propose updates in a…
We study the problem of programmatic reinforcement learning, in which policies are represented as short programs in a symbolic language. Programmatic policies can be more interpretable, generalizable, and amenable to formal verification…
Reachability analysis is an important method in providing safety guarantees for systems with unknown or uncertain dynamics. Due to the computational intractability of exact reachability analysis for general nonlinear, high-dimensional…
This paper investigates the use of stratified sampling as a variance reduction technique for approximating integrals over large dimensional spaces. The accuracy of this method critically depends on the choice of the space partition, the…
We present an approximate sampling framework and discuss how risk-limiting audits can compensate for these approximations, while maintaining their "risk-limiting" properties. Our framework is general and can compensate for counting mistakes…
This paper investigates the optimization of memory sampling in status updating systems, where source updates are published in shared memory, and reader process samples the memory for source updates by paying a sampling cost. We formulate a…
In this paper, we propose a stratified sampling algorithm in which the random drawings made in the strata to compute the expectation of interest are also used to adaptively modify the proportion of further drawings in each stratum. These…
Reinforcement learning provides a mathematical framework for learning-based control, whose success largely depends on the amount of data it can utilize. The efficient utilization of historical trajectories obtained from previous policies is…
In this work, we analyze an efficient sampling-based algorithm for general-purpose reachability analysis, which remains a notoriously challenging problem with applications ranging from neural network verification to safety analysis of…
SMOTE (Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique) is the established geometric approach to random oversampling to balance classes in the imbalanced learning problem, followed by many extensions. Its idea is to introduce synthetic data…
Marginalized importance sampling (MIS), which measures the density ratio between the state-action occupancy of a target policy and that of a sampling distribution, is a promising approach for off-policy evaluation. However, current…
We introduce collapsed compilation, a novel approximate inference algorithm for discrete probabilistic graphical models. It is a collapsed sampling algorithm that incrementally selects which variable to sample next based on the partial…
Assigning jobs onto identical machines with the objective to minimize the maximal load is one of the most basic problems in combinatorial optimization. Motivated by product planing and data placement, we study a natural extension called…
This paper is concerned with the problem of policy evaluation with linear function approximation in discounted infinite horizon Markov decision processes. We investigate the sample complexities required to guarantee a predefined estimation…
Importance Sampling methods are broadly used to approximate posterior distributions or some of their moments. In its standard approach, samples are drawn from a single proposal distribution and weighted properly. However, since the…
We investigate the problem of best policy identification in discounted linear Markov Decision Processes in the fixed confidence setting under a generative model. We first derive an instance-specific lower bound on the expected number of…
Searching the space of policies directly for the optimal policy has been one popular method for solving partially observable reinforcement learning problems. Typically, with each change of the target policy, its value is estimated from the…
Recent progress in randomized motion planners has led to the development of a new class of sampling-based algorithms that provide asymptotic optimality guarantees, notably the RRT* and the PRM* algorithms. Careful analysis reveals that the…