Related papers: Mean-performance of Sharp Restart II: Inequality R…
Restart is a general framework, of prime importance and wide applicability, for expediting first-passage times and completion times of general stochastic processes. Restart protocols can use either deterministic or stochastic timers.…
When applied to a stochastic process of interest, a restart protocol alters the overall statistical distribution of the process' completion time; thus, the completion-time's mean and randomness change. The explicit effect of restart on the…
As has long been known to computer scientists, the performance of probabilistic algorithms characterized by relatively large runtime fluctuations can be improved by applying a restart, i.e., episodic interruption of a randomized…
Many tasks are accomplished via random processes. The completion time of such a task can be profoundly affected by restart: the occasional resetting of the task's underlying random process. Consequently, determining when restart will impede…
Restart has the potential of expediting or impeding the completion times of general random processes. Consequently, the issue of mean-performance takes center stage: quantifying how the application of restart on a process of interest…
Restart -- interrupting a stochastic process followed by a new start -- is known to improve the mean time to its completion, and the general conditions under which such an improvement is achieved are now well understood. Here, we explore…
The {\L}ojasiewicz inequality shows that sharpness bounds on the minimum of convex optimization problems hold almost generically. Sharpness directly controls the performance of restart schemes, as observed by Nemirovsky and Nesterov (1985).…
The mean completion time of a stochastic process may be rendered finite and minimised by a judiciously chosen restart protocol, which may either be stochastic or deterministic. Here we study analytically an arbitrary stochastic search…
Optimization of a random processes by restart is a subject of active theoretical research in statistical physics and has long found practical application in computer science. Meanwhile, one of the key issues remains largely unsolved: when…
Recently noticed ability of restart to reduce the expected completion time of first-passage processes allows appealing opportunities for performance improvement in a variety of settings. However, complex stochastic processes often exhibit…
In this overview article we will consider the deliberate restarting of algorithms, a meta technique, in order to improve the algorithm's performance, e.g., convergence rates or approximation guarantees. One of the major advantages is that…
Many tasks are subject to failure before completion. Two of the most common failure recovery strategies are restart and checkpointing. Under restart, once a failure occurs, it is restarted from the beginning. Under checkpointing, the task…
We study the effect of restart, and retry, on the mean completion time of a generic process. The need to do so arises in various branches of the sciences and we show that it can naturally be addressed by taking advantage of the classical…
Resetting plays a pivotal role in optimizing the completion time of complex first passage processes with single or multiple outcomes/exit possibilities. While it is well established that the coefficient of variation -- a statistical…
Sharpness is an almost generic assumption in continuous optimization that bounds the distance from minima by objective function suboptimality. It facilitates the acceleration of first-order methods through restarts. However, sharpness…
Poisson restart assumes that a stochastic process is interrupted and starts again at random time moments. A number of studies have demonstrated that this strategy may minimize the expected completion time in some classes of random search…
Numerous purportedly improved metaheuristics claim superior performance based on equivalent function evaluations (FEs), yet often conceal additional computational burdens in more intensive iterations, preprocessing stages, or hyperparameter…
Traditionally, recommender systems operate by returning a user a set of items, ranked in order of estimated relevance to that user. In recent years, methods relying on stochastic ordering have been developed to create "fairer" rankings that…
Stochastic restart may drastically reduce the expected run time of a computer algorithm, expedite the completion of a complex search process, or increase the turnover rate of an enzymatic reaction. These diverse first-passage-time (FPT)…
We propose a universal framework to compute record age statistics of a stochastic time-series that undergoes random restarts. The proposed framework makes minimal assumptions on the underlying process and is furthermore suited to treat…