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Stochastic approximation methods play a central role in maximum likelihood estimation problems involving intractable likelihood functions, such as marginal likelihoods arising in problems with missing or incomplete data, and in parametric…

Computation · Statistics 2020-06-02 Valentin De Bortoli , Alain Durmus , Marcelo Pereyra , Ana F. Vidal

In this paper, we propose a stochastic search algorithm for solving general optimization problems with little structure. The algorithm iteratively finds high quality solutions by randomly sampling candidate solutions from a parameterized…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2013-01-08 Enlu Zhou , Jiaqiao Hu

Under a Bayesian framework, we formulate the fully sequential sampling and selection decision in statistical ranking and selection as a stochastic control problem, and derive the associated Bellman equation. Using value function…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-10-10 Yijie Peng , Edwin K. P. Chong , Chun-Hung Chen , Michael C. Fu

Beam search is the default decoding strategy for many sequence generation tasks in NLP. The set of approximate K-best items returned by the algorithm is a useful summary of the distribution for many applications; however, the candidates…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-03-03 Clara Meister , Afra Amini , Tim Vieira , Ryan Cotterell

This article considers stochastic algorithms for efficiently solving a class of large scale non-linear least squares (NLS) problems which frequently arise in applications. We propose eight variants of a practical randomized algorithm where…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2015-01-27 Farbod Roosta-Khorasani , Gábor J. Székely , Uri Ascher

Nonlinear Mixed effects models are hidden variables models that are widely used in many fields such as pharmacometrics. In such models, the distribution characteristics of hidden variables can be specified by including several parameters…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-10-19 Edouard Ollier

In this paper we examine the problem of inference in Bayesian Networks with discrete random variables that have very large or even unbounded domains. For example, in a domain where we are trying to identify a person, we may have variables…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2012-12-12 Rita Sharma , David L Poole

We propose a novel randomized linear programming algorithm for approximating the optimal policy of the discounted Markov decision problem. By leveraging the value-policy duality and binary-tree data structures, the algorithm adaptively…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-06-04 Mengdi Wang

The most common approaches for solving multistage stochastic programming problems in the research literature have been to either use value functions ("dynamic programming") or scenario trees ("stochastic programming") to approximate the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-01-04 Warren B Powell , Saeed Ghadimi

Stochastic memoization is a higher-order construct of probabilistic programming languages that is key in Bayesian nonparametrics, a modular approach that allows us to extend models beyond their parametric limitations and compose them in an…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2024-02-14 Younesse Kaddar , Sam Staton

Decision trees, owing to their interpretability, are attractive as control policies for (dynamical) systems. Unfortunately, constructing, or synthesising, such policies is a challenging task. Previous approaches do so by imitating a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-04-23 Emir Demirović , Christian Schilling , Anna Lukina

To model combinatorial decision problems involving uncertainty and probability, we extend the stochastic constraint programming framework proposed in [Walsh, 2002] along a number of important dimensions (e.g. to multiple chance constraints…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2009-05-26 Suresh Manandhar , Armagan Tarim , Toby Walsh

Rolling forecasts have been almost overlooked in the renewable energy storage literature. In this paper, we provide a new approach for handling uncertainty not just in the accuracy of a forecast, but in the evolution of forecasts over time.…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-04-18 Saeed Ghadimi , Warren B. Powell

A policy in deep reinforcement learning (RL), either deterministic or stochastic, is commonly parameterized as a Gaussian distribution alone, limiting the learned behavior to be unimodal. However, the nature of many practical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-20 SM Mazharul Islam , Manfred Huber

The goal of this paper is to analyze distributional Markov Decision Processes as a class of control problems in which the objective is to learn policies that steer the distribution of a cumulative reward toward a prescribed target law,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-09 Nicole Bäuerle , Athanasios Vasileiadis

We are concerned with a novel Bayesian statistical framework for the characterization of natural subsurface formations, a very challenging task. Because of the large dimension of the stochastic space of the prior distribution in the…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2023-02-23 Alsadig Ali , Abdullah Al-Mamun , Felipe Pereira , Arunasalam Rahunanthan

This paper proposes a new randomized strategy for adaptive MCMC using Bayesian optimization. This approach applies to non-differentiable objective functions and trades off exploration and exploitation to reduce the number of potentially…

Computation · Statistics 2011-11-01 Nimalan Mahendran , Ziyu Wang , Firas Hamze , Nando de Freitas

We consider chance-constrained problems with discrete random distribution. We aim for problems with a large number of scenarios. We propose a novel method based on the stochastic gradient descent method which performs updates of the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-05-28 Lukáš Adam , Martin Branda

Seamlessly integrating rules in Learning-from-Demonstrations (LfD) policies is a critical requirement to enable the real-world deployment of AI agents. Recently, Signal Temporal Logic (STL) has been shown to be an effective language for…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-03-06 Jasmine Jerry Aloor , Jay Patrikar , Parv Kapoor , Jean Oh , Sebastian Scherer

Deterministic compartmental models are predominantly used in the modeling of infectious diseases, though stochastic models are considered more realistic, yet are complicated to estimate due to missing data. In this paper we present a novel…

Computation · Statistics 2022-06-22 Shuying Wang , Stephen G. Walker