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This paper considers a distributed adaptive optimization problem, where all agents only have access to their local cost functions with a common unknown parameter, whereas they mean to collaboratively estimate the true parameter and find the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-09-03 Yaqun Yang , Jinlong Lei , Guanghui Wen , Yiguang Hong

Stochastic reaction network models are often used to explain and predict the dynamics of gene regulation in single cells. These models usually involve several parameters, such as the kinetic rates of chemical reactions, that are not…

Computation · Statistics 2020-01-07 Thomas A. Catanach , Huy D. Vo , Brian Munsky

Variants of fluctuation theorems recently discovered in the statistical mechanics of non-equilibrium processes may be used for the efficient determination of high-dimensional integrals as typically occurring in Bayesian data analysis. In…

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability · Physics 2015-06-19 Alberto Favaro , Daniel Nickelsen , Elena Barykina , Andreas Engel

A body of work has been done to automate machine learning algorithm to highlight the importance of model choice. Automating the process of choosing the best forecasting model and its corresponding parameters can result to improve a wide…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-02 Nadhir Hassen , Irina Rish

Attention-based neural networks have achieved state-of-the-art results on a wide range of tasks. Most such models use deterministic attention while stochastic attention is less explored due to the optimization difficulties or complicated…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-10 Shujian Zhang , Xinjie Fan , Bo Chen , Mingyuan Zhou

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) work well on large datasets. But labelled data is hard to collect, and in some applications larger amounts of data are not available. The problem then is how to use CNNs with small data -- as CNNs…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-01-19 Yarin Gal , Zoubin Ghahramani

Optimal control problem is typically solved by first finding the value function through Hamilton-Jacobi equation (HJE) and then taking the minimizer of the Hamiltonian to obtain the control. In this work, instead of focusing on the value…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-09-10 Alain Bensoussan , Jiayue Han , Sheung Chi Phillip Yam , Xiang Zhou

Sequential decision problems are often approximately solvable by simulating possible future action sequences. {\em Metalevel} decision procedures have been developed for selecting {\em which} action sequences to simulate, based on…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2012-07-26 Nicholas Hay , Stuart Russell , David Tolpin , Solomon Eyal Shimony

We introduce a distributional method for learning the optimal policy in risk averse Markov decision process with finite state action spaces, latent costs, and stationary dynamics. We assume sequential observations of states, actions, and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-01 Ziteng Cheng , Sebastian Jaimungal , Nick Martin

Approximate inference in complex probabilistic models such as deep Gaussian processes requires the optimisation of doubly stochastic objective functions. These objectives incorporate randomness both from mini-batch subsampling of the data…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-03-26 Ayman Boustati , Sattar Vakili , James Hensman , ST John

We consider the problem of optimizing a real-valued continuous function $f$ using a Bayesian approach, where the evaluations of $f$ are chosen sequentially by combining prior information about $f$, which is described by a random process…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2011-11-22 Romain Benassi , Julien Bect , Emmanuel Vazquez

We introduce a novel combination of Bayesian Models (BMs) and Neural Networks (NNs) for making predictions with a minimum expected risk. Our approach combines the best of both worlds, the data efficiency and interpretability of a BM with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-28 Mathias Löwe , Per Lunnemann Hansen , Sebastian Risi

When modeling a probability distribution with a Bayesian network, we are faced with the problem of how to handle continuous variables. Most previous work has either solved the problem by discretizing, or assumed that the data are generated…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2013-02-21 George H. John , Pat Langley

Inverse problems, i.e., estimating parameters of physical models from experimental data, are ubiquitous in science and engineering. The Bayesian formulation is the gold standard because it alleviates ill-posedness issues and quantifies…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-05-28 Sharmila Karumuri , Ilias Bilionis

Most bandit policies are designed to either minimize regret in any problem instance, making very few assumptions about the underlying environment, or in a Bayesian sense, assuming a prior distribution over environment parameters. The former…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-07 Branislav Kveton , Martin Mladenov , Chih-Wei Hsu , Manzil Zaheer , Csaba Szepesvari , Craig Boutilier

Classical parameter-space Bayesian inference for Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) suffers from several unresolved prior issues, such as knowledge encoding intractability and pathological behaviours in deep networks, which can lead to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-11 Mengjing Wu , Junyu Xuan , Jie Lu

Despite their successes, deep neural networks may make unreliable predictions when faced with test data drawn from a distribution different to that of the training data, constituting a major problem for AI safety. While this has recently…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-16 Erik Daxberger , José Miguel Hernández-Lobato

Likelihood-based policy gradient methods are the dominant approach for training robot control policies from rewards. These methods rely on differentiable action likelihoods, which constrain policy outputs to simple distributions like…

This work revisits standard policy gradient methods used on restricted policy classes, which are known to get stuck in suboptimal critical points. We identify an important cause for this phenomenon to be that the policy gradient is itself…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Alex DeWeese , Guannan Qu

Deriving Bayesian inference for exponential random graph models (ERGMs) is a challenging "doubly intractable" problem as the normalizing constants of the likelihood and posterior density are both intractable. Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC)…

Computation · Statistics 2019-11-26 Linda S. L. Tan , Nial Friel