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Online solvers for partially observable Markov decision processes have difficulty scaling to problems with large action spaces. This paper proposes a method called PA-POMCPOW to sample a subset of the action space that provides varying…
In this paper, a novel distributed optimization framework has been proposed. The key idea is to convert optimization problems into optimal control problems where the objective of each agent is to design the current control input minimizing…
The shrinking rank method is a variation of slice sampling that is efficient at sampling from multivariate distributions with highly correlated parameters. It requires that the gradient of the log-density be computable. At each individual…
The non-smooth finite-sum minimization is a fundamental problem in machine learning. This paper develops a distributed stochastic proximal-gradient algorithm with random reshuffling to solve the finite-sum minimization over time-varying…
The present study discuss the problem of estimating the finite population mean using auxiliary attribute in stratified random sampling. In this paper taking the advantage of point bi-serial correlation between the study variable and…
The multiple knapsack problem (MKP) generalizes the classical knapsack problem by assigning items to multiple knapsacks subject to capacity constraints. It is used to model many real-world resource allocation and scheduling problems. In…
Elliptical slice sampling, when adapted to linearly truncated multivariate normal distributions, is a rejection-free Markov chain Monte Carlo method. At its core, it requires analytically constructing an ellipse-polytope intersection. The…
In most common settings of Markov Decision Process (MDP), an agent evaluate a policy based on expectation of (discounted) sum of rewards. However in many applications this criterion might not be suitable from two perspective: first, in risk…
In this paper, we study the problem of estimating uniformly well the mean values of several distributions given a finite budget of samples. If the variance of the distributions were known, one could design an optimal sampling strategy by…
Specifying a proper input distribution is often a challenging task in simulation modeling. In practice, there may be multiple plausible distributions that can fit the input data reasonably well, especially when the data volume is not large.…
Feature attribution methods, or saliency maps, are one of the most popular approaches for explaining the decisions of complex machine learning models such as deep neural networks. In this study, we propose a stochastic optimization approach…
Balancing treatment allocation for influential covariates is critical in clinical trials. This has become increasingly important as more and more biomarkers are found to be associated with different diseases in translational research…
In a variety of domains, from robotics to finance, Quality-Diversity algorithms have been used to generate collections of both diverse and high-performing solutions. Multi-Objective Quality-Diversity algorithms have emerged as a promising…
This paper presents a methodology for using varying sample sizes in sequential quadratic programming (SQP) methods for solving equality constrained stochastic optimization problems. The first part of the paper deals with the delicate issue…
In parameter estimation problems one computes a posterior distribution over uncertain parameters defined jointly by a prior distribution, a model, and noisy data. Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is often used for the numerical solution of…
The problem of optimally scaling the proposal distribution in a Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm is critical to the quality of the generated samples. Much work has gone into obtaining such results for various Metropolis-Hastings (MH)…
New crop varieties are extensively tested in multi-environment trials in order to obtain a solid empirical basis for recommendations to farmers. When the target population of environments is large and heterogeneous, a division into…
We consider the problem of estimating the mean of a random vector based on i.i.d. observations and adversarial contamination. We introduce a multivariate extension of the trimmed-mean estimator and show its optimal performance under minimal…
Consider the problem of minimizing the expected value of a (possibly nonconvex) cost function parameterized by a random (vector) variable, when the expectation cannot be computed accurately (e.g., because the statistics of the random…
In the study of natural and artificial complex systems, responses that are not completely determined by the considered decision variables are commonly modelled probabilistically, resulting in response distributions varying across decision…