Related papers: A Minimax Algorithm Better Than Alpha-beta?: No an…

Optimization of searching the best possible action depending on various states like state of environment, system goal etc. has been a major area of study in computer systems. In any search algorithm, searching best possible solution from…

Recent work proposed the UCTMAXSAT algorithm to address Maximum Satisfiability Problems (MaxSAT) and shown improved performance over pure Stochastic Local Search algorithms (SLS). UCTMAXSAT is based on Monte Carlo Tree Search but it uses…

Despite the rich existing literature about minimax optimization in continuous settings, only very partial results of this kind have been obtained for combinatorial settings. In this paper, we fill this gap by providing a characterization of…

We initiate the study of tree structures in the context of scenario-based robust optimization. Specifically, we study Binary Search Trees (BSTs) and Huffman coding, two fundamental techniques for efficiently managing and encoding data based…

We study the problem of identifying the best action among a set of possible options when the value of each action is given by a mapping from a number of noisy micro-observables in the so-called fixed confidence setting. Our main motivation…

We study the Active Simple Hypothesis Testing (ASHT) problem, a simpler variant of the Fixed Budget Best Arm Identification problem. In this work, we provide novel game theoretic formulation of the upper bounds of the ASHT problem. This…

In this article, we prove the completeness of the following game search algorithms: unbounded best-first minimax with completion and descent with completion, i.e. we show that, with enough time, they find the best game strategy. We then…

We consider the problem of extracting a maximum-size reflected network in a linear program. This problem has been studied before and a state-of-the-art SGA heuristic with two variations have been proposed. In this paper we apply a new…

The combination of Monte-Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) and deep reinforcement learning is state-of-the-art in two-player perfect-information games. In this paper, we describe a search algorithm that uses a variant of MCTS which we enhanced by 1)…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable improvements in reasoning and planning through increased test-time compute, often by framing problem-solving as a search process. While methods like Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS)…

Much current research in AI and games is being devoted to Monte Carlo search (MCS) algorithms. While the quest for a single unified MCS algorithm that would perform well on all problems is of major interest for AI, practitioners often know…

Min-max optimization arises in many domains such as game theory, adversarial machine learning, etc. For these problems, gradient-based methods are well understood and enjoy strong guarantees. However, in the absence of convexity or…

In this paper, we study the single-source shortest-path (SSSP) problem with positive edge weights, which is a notoriously hard problem in the parallel context. In practice, the $\Delta$-stepping algorithm proposed by Meyer and Sanders has…

We present an extension of Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) that strongly increases its efficiency for trees with asymmetry and/or loops. Asymmetric termination of search trees introduces a type of uncertainty for which the standard upper…

AlphaZero, using a combination of Deep Neural Networks and Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), has successfully trained reinforcement learning agents in a tabula-rasa way. The neural MCTS algorithm has been successful in finding near-optimal…

Game tree search algorithms such as minimax have been used with enormous success in turn-based adversarial games such as Chess or Checkers. However, such algorithms cannot be directly applied to real-time strategy (RTS) games because a…

Efficient and automated design of optimizers plays a crucial role in full-stack AutoML systems. However, prior methods in optimizer search are often limited by their scalability, generability, or sample efficiency. With the goal of…

This paper considers minimax optimization $\min_x \max_y f(x, y)$ in the challenging setting where $f$ can be both nonconvex in $x$ and nonconcave in $y$. Though such optimization problems arise in many machine learning paradigms including…

This paper introduces Monte Carlo *-Minimax Search (MCMS), a Monte Carlo search algorithm for turned-based, stochastic, two-player, zero-sum games of perfect information. The algorithm is designed for the class of of densely stochastic…

LLM-powered systems require complex multi-step decision-making abilities to solve real-world tasks, yet current planning approaches face a trade-off between the high latency of inference-time search and the limited generalization of…