Related papers: The inverse problem for power distributions in com…
We consider the problem of electing a committee of $k$ candidates, subject to some constraints as to what this committee is supposed to look like. In our framework, the candidates are given labels as an abstraction of a politician's…
We demonstrate that distributions of human response times have power-law tails and, among closed-form distributions, are best fit by the generalized inverse gamma distribution. We speculate that the task difficulty tracks the half-width of…
We consider the problem of steering a multi-agent system to multi-consensus, namely a regime where groups of agents agree on a given value which may be different from group to group. We first address the problem by using distributed…
Consider the family of power divergence statistics based on $n$ trials, each leading to one of $r$ possible outcomes. This includes the log-likelihood ratio and Pearson's statistic as important special cases. It is known that in certain…
We propose a general framework for entropy-regularized average-reward reinforcement learning in Markov decision processes (MDPs). Our approach is based on extending the linear-programming formulation of policy optimization in MDPs to…
A multicanonical formalism is applied to the problem of statistical equilibrium in a complex system with a hierarchy of dynamical structures. At the small scales the system is in quasi-equilibrium and follows a Maxwell-Boltzmann…
We study the problem of fairly allocating indivisible goods to groups of agents. Agents in the same group share the same set of goods even though they may have different preferences. Previous work has focused on unanimous fairness, in which…
We develop an approach to policy selection in active inference that allows us to efficiently search large policy spaces by mapping each policy to its embedding in a vector space. We sample the expected free energy of representative points…
In this paper, we study how to shape opinions in social networks when the matrix of interactions is unknown. We consider classical opinion dynamics with some stubborn agents and the possibility of continuously influencing the opinions of a…
The index coding problem is studied from an interference alignment perspective, providing new results as well as new insights into, and generalizations of, previously known results. An equivalence is established between multiple unicast…
Value-based methods for reinforcement learning lack generally applicable ways to derive behavior from a value function. Many approaches involve approximate value iteration (e.g., $Q$-learning), and acting greedily with respect to the…
This work presents new results and understanding of the Ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF) for inverse problems. In particular, using a Lagrangian dual perspective we show that EnKF can be derived from the sample average approximation (SAA) of…
We study the inverse medium scattering problem to reconstruct the unknown inhomogeneous medium from the far-field patterns of scattered waves. The inverse scattering problem is generally ill-posed and nonlinear, and the iterative…
We introduce a new multivariate statistical problem that we refer to as the Ensemble Inverse Problem (EIP). The aim of EIP is to invert for an ensemble that is distributed according to the pushforward of a prior under a forward process. In…
The Bayesian perspective on inverse problems has attracted much mathematical attention in recent years. Particular attention has been paid to Bayesian inverse problems (BIPs) in which the parameter to be inferred lies in an…
In distributional reinforcement learning not only expected returns but the complete return distributions of a policy are taken into account. The return distribution for a fixed policy is given as the solution of an associated distributional…
In inverse problems, one attempts to infer spatially variable functions from indirect measurements of a system. To practitioners of inverse problems, the concept of "information" is familiar when discussing key questions such as which parts…
We consider inference problems for a class of continuous state collective hidden Markov models, where the data is recorded in aggregate (collective) form generated by a large population of individuals following the same dynamics. We propose…
Let $X,X_1,\ldots,X_n$ be independent identically distributed random variables. In this paper we study the behavior of concentration functions of weighted sums $\sum_{k=1}^{n} X_k a_k$ with respect to the arithmetic structure of…
In ordinary statistical mechanics the Boltzmann-Shannon entropy is related to the Maxwell-Bolzmann distribution $p_i$ by means of a twofold link. The first link is differential and is offered by the Jaynes Maximum Entropy Principle. The…