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For many tasks of data analysis, we may only have the information of the explanatory variable and the evaluation of the response values are quite expensive. While it is impractical or too costly to obtain the responses of all units, a…

Computation · Statistics 2023-04-07 Wei Zheng , Ting Tian , Xueqin Wang

We study problem-dependent rates, i.e., generalization errors that scale near-optimally with the variance, the effective loss, or the gradient norms evaluated at the "best hypothesis." We introduce a principled framework dubbed "uniform…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-12-25 Yunbei Xu , Assaf Zeevi

We consider the problem of sequentially making decisions that are rewarded by "successes" and "failures" which can be predicted through an unknown relationship that depends on a partially controllable vector of attributes for each instance.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-09-18 Yingfei Wang , Chu Wang , Warren Powell

Bandit algorithms sequentially accumulate data using adaptive sampling policies, offering flexibility for real-world applications. However, excessive sampling can be costly, motivating the devolopment of early stopping methods and reliable…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-02-06 Zihan Cui

This paper studies the robust optimal gain selection problem for financial trading systems, formulated within a \emph{double linear policy} framework, which allocates capital across long and short positions. The key objective is to…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-01-20 Chung-Han Hsieh

Motivated by practical needs of experimentation and policy learning in online platforms, we study the problem of safe data collection. Specifically, our goal is to develop a logging policy that efficiently explores different actions to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-08 Ruihao Zhu , Branislav Kveton

We study the sample complexity of learning an $\epsilon$-optimal policy in the Stochastic Shortest Path (SSP) problem. We first derive sample complexity bounds when the learner has access to a generative model. We show that there exists a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-20 Jean Tarbouriech , Matteo Pirotta , Michal Valko , Alessandro Lazaric

We explore the question of how to learn an optimal search strategy within the example of a parking problem where parking opportunities arrive according to an unknown inhomogeneous Poisson process. The optimal policy is a threshold-type…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Stefan Ankirchner , Maximilian Philipp Thiel

Optimal stopping is a fundamental problem in optimization with applications in risk management, finance, robotics, and machine learning. We extend the standard framework to a multi-agent setting, named multi-agent optimal stopping (MAOS),…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-06-10 Lorenzo Magnino , Yuchen Zhu , Mathieu Laurière

Stochastic process discovery is concerned with deriving a model capable of reproducing the stochastic character of observed executions of a given process, stored in a log. This leads to an optimisation problem in which the model's parameter…

Formal Languages and Automata Theory · Computer Science 2025-05-01 Pierre Cry , Paolo Ballarini , András Horváth , Pascale Le Gall

We propose a method to optimise the parameters of a policy which will be used to safely perform a given task in a data-efficient manner. We train a Gaussian process model to capture the system dynamics, based on the PILCO framework. Our…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-12-03 Kyriakos Polymenakos , Alessandro Abate , Stephen Roberts

In a classical optimal stopping problem the aim is to maximize the expected value of a functional of a diffusion evaluated at a stopping time. This note considers optimal stopping problems beyond this paradigm. We study problems in which…

Probability · Mathematics 2017-08-04 Vicky Henderson , David Hobson , Matthew Zeng

Sample efficiency is one of the most critical issues for online reinforcement learning (RL). Existing methods achieve higher sample efficiency by adopting model-based methods, Q-ensemble, or better exploration mechanisms. We, instead,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-31 Jiafei Lyu , Le Wan , Zongqing Lu , Xiu Li

The optimal power flow problem plays an important role in the market clearing and operation of electric power systems. However, with increasing uncertainty from renewable energy operation, the optimal operating point of the system changes…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-01-25 Yeesian Ng , Sidhant Misra , Line A. Roald , Scott Backhaus

Choosing optimal (or at least better) policies is an important problem in domains from medicine to education to finance and many others. One approach to this problem is through controlled experiments/trials - but controlled experiments are…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-02-26 Onur Atan , William R. Zame , M van der Schaar

We describe a variational approach to solving optimal stopping problems for diffusion processes, as an alternative to the traditional approach based on the solution of the free-boundary problem. We study smooth pasting conditions from a…

Probability · Mathematics 2015-08-06 V. I. Arkin , A. D. Slastnikov

Reconstructing PDE solutions from sparse observations is a core challenge in scientific computing. We present FM4PDE, a flow-matching generative framework that learns the joint distribution of PDE coefficients (or initial states) and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-26 Xifeng Zhang , Jin Zhao

Bayesian optimization is a popular framework for efficiently tackling black-box search problems. As a rule, these algorithms operate by iteratively choosing what to evaluate next until some predefined budget has been exhausted. We…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-12-12 James T. Wilson

The problem of learning the structure of a high dimensional graphical model from data has received considerable attention in recent years. In many applications such as sensor networks and proteomics it is often expensive to obtain samples…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-04-08 Gautam Dasarathy , Aarti Singh , Maria-Florina Balcan , Jong Hyuk Park

In this paper, we consider a modified version of the control problem in a model free Markov decision process (MDP) setting with large state and action spaces. The control problem most commonly addressed in the contemporary literature is to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-02-01 Ajin George Joseph , Shalabh Bhatnagar