Related papers: Bethe Bounds and Approximating the Global Optimum

We investigate a relaxation of the notion of fractional treewidth-fragility, namely fractional tree-independence-number-fragility. In particular, we obtain polynomial-time approximation schemes for meta-problems such as finding a…

We consider one-dimensional branching Brownian motion in spatially random branching environment (BBMRE) and show that for almost every realisation of the environment, the distributions of the maximal particle of the BBMRE re-centred around…

We study zeroth-order optimization where solutions must minimize a cost $d(s)$ while maintaining high probability under a complex generative prior $L(s)$ (e.g., a parameterized model). This reduces to sampling from a target distribution…

Consider the global optimisation of a function $U$ defined on a finite set $V$ endowed with an irreducible and reversible Markov generator.By integration, we extend $U$ to the set $\mathcal{P}(V)$ of probability distributions on $V$ and we…

Computing the conditional mode of a distribution, better known as the $\mathit{maximum\ a\ posteriori}$ (MAP) assignment, is a fundamental task in probabilistic inference. However, MAP estimation is generally intractable, and remains hard…

In this work, we study the learning theory of reward modeling with pairwise comparison data using deep neural networks. We establish a novel non-asymptotic regret bound for deep reward estimators in a non-parametric setting, which depends…

Finding tight bounds on the optimal solution is a critical element of practical solution methods for discrete optimization problems. In the last decade, decision diagrams (DDs) have brought a new perspective on obtaining upper and lower…

This work addresses the problem of efficient sampling of Markov random fields (MRF). The sampling of Potts or Ising MRF is most often based on Gibbs sampling, and is thus computationally expensive. We consider in this work how to circumvent…

Within the framework of probably approximately correct Markov decision processes (PAC-MDP), much theoretical work has focused on methods to attain near optimality after a relatively long period of learning and exploration. However,…

We study Bayesian optimization (BO) in high-dimensional and non-stationary scenarios. Existing algorithms for such scenarios typically require extensive hyperparameter tuning, which limits their practical effectiveness. We propose a…

Extreme environmental events frequently exhibit spatial and temporal dependence. These data are often modeled using max stable processes (MSPs). MSPs are computationally prohibitive to fit for as few as a dozen observations, with supposed…

The Markov chain random field (MCRF) model/theory provides a non-linear spatial Bayesian updating solution at the neighborhood nearest data level for simulating categorical spatial variables. In the MCRF solution, the spatial dependencies…

Despite a surge of interest in submodular maximization in the data stream model, there remain significant gaps in our knowledge about what can be achieved in this setting, especially when dealing with multiple constraints. In this work, we…

Graphical models with bi-directed edges (<->) represent marginal independence: the absence of an edge between two vertices indicates that the corresponding variables are marginally independent. In this paper, we consider maximum likelihood…

In this work we study the interleaving distance between merge trees from a combinatorial point of view. We use a particular type of matching between trees to obtain a novel formulation of the distance. With such formulation, we tackle the…

Motivated by several applications, we consider the problem of randomly rounding a fractional solution in a matroid (base) polytope to an integral one. We consider the pipage rounding technique and also present a new technique, randomized…

In applications with significant class imbalance or asymmetric costs, metrics such as the $F_\beta$-measure, AM measure, Jaccard similarity coefficient, and weighted accuracy offer more suitable evaluation criteria than standard binary…

Techniques to reduce the energy burden of an industrial ecosystem often require solving a multiobjective optimization problem. However, collecting experimental data can often be either expensive or time-consuming. In such cases, statistical…

We study the classical NP-hard problems of finding maximum-size subsets from given sets of $k$ terminal pairs that can be routed via edge-disjoint paths (MaxEDP) or node-disjoint paths (MaxNDP) in a given graph. The approximability of…

Finding the optimal configuration of parameters in ResNet is a nonconvex minimization problem, but first-order methods nevertheless find the global optimum in the overparameterized regime. We study this phenomenon with mean-field analysis,…