Related papers: Adapting Improved Upper Confidence Bounds for Mont…
We consider a finite-armed structured bandit problem in which mean rewards of different arms are known functions of a common hidden parameter $\theta^*$. Since we do not place any restrictions of these functions, the problem setting…
In many risk-aware and multi-objective reinforcement learning settings, the utility of the user is derived from a single execution of a policy. In these settings, making decisions based on the average future returns is not suitable. For…
This paper describes three different optimised implementations of playouts, as commonly used by game-playing algorithms such as Monte-Carlo Tree Search. Each of the optimised implementations is applicable only to specific sets of games,…
Games with large branching factors pose a significant challenge for game tree search algorithms. In this paper, we address this problem with a sampling strategy for Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) algorithms called {\em na\"{i}ve sampling},…
We study Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) in zero-sum extensive-form games with perfect information and simultaneous moves. We present a general template of MCTS algorithms for these games, which can be instantiated by various selection…
Standard approaches for global optimization of non-convex functions, such as branch-and-bound, maintain partition trees to systematically prune the domain. The tree size grows exponentially in the number of dimensions. We propose new…
We propose a novel Parallel Monte Carlo tree search with Batched Simulations (PMBS) algorithm for accelerating long-horizon, episodic robotic planning tasks. Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) is an effective heuristic search algorithm for…
AlphaZero in 2017 was able to master chess and other games without human knowledge by playing millions of games against itself (self-play), with a computation budget running in the tens of millions of dollars. It used a variant of the Monte…
Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) has been successful in a variety of domains, but faces challenges with long-horizon exploration when compared to sampling-based motion planning algorithms like Rapidly-Exploring Random Trees. To address these…
It is common practice to use large computational resources to train neural networks, as is known from many examples, such as reinforcement learning applications. However, while massively parallel computing is often used for training models,…
This work investigates the Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) method combined with dedicated heuristics for solving the Weighted Vertex Coloring Problem. In addition to the basic MCTS algorithm, we study several MCTS variants where the…
One approach to enhance Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) is to improve its sample efficiency by grouping/abstracting states or state-action pairs and sharing statistics within a group. Though state-action pair abstractions are mostly easy to…
Heterogeneous multi-robot systems are advantageous for operations in unknown environments because functionally specialised robots can gather environmental information, while others perform tasks. We define this decomposition as the…
We present ML-UCB, a generalized upper confidence bound algorithm that integrates arbitrary machine learning models into multi-armed bandit frameworks. A fundamental challenge in deploying sophisticated ML models for sequential…
Web-based applications such as chatbots, search engines and news recommendations continue to grow in scale and complexity with the recent surge in the adoption of LLMs. Online model selection has thus garnered increasing attention due to…
Bayesian optimization (BO) is a popular method for computationally expensive black-box optimization. However, traditional BO methods need to solve new problems from scratch, leading to slow convergence. Recent studies try to extend BO to a…
The prevailing principle of "Optimism in the Face of Uncertainty" advocates for the incorporation of an exploration bonus, generally assumed to be proportional to the inverse square root of the visit count ($1/\sqrt{n}$), where $n$ is the…
Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) has shown its strength for a lot of deterministic and stochastic examples, but literature lacks reports of applications to real world industrial processes. Common reasons for this are that there is no…
The design of neural network architectures for a new data set is a laborious task which requires human deep learning expertise. In order to make deep learning available for a broader audience, automated methods for finding a neural network…
In this paper we propose the Augmented-UCB (AugUCB) algorithm for a fixed-budget version of the thresholding bandit problem (TBP), where the objective is to identify a set of arms whose quality is above a threshold. A key feature of AugUCB…