Related papers: VBR: Version Based Reclamation
Modern computing systems face security threats, including memory corruption attacks, speculative execution vulnerabilities, and control-flow hijacking. Although existing solutions address these threats individually, they frequently…
We study the problem of reinforcement learning in infinite-horizon discounted linear Markov decision processes (MDPs), and propose the first computationally efficient algorithm achieving rate-optimal regret guarantees in this setting. Our…
HPC systems are a critical resource for scientific research. The increased demand for computational power and memory ushers in the exascale era, in which supercomputers are designed to provide enormous computing power to meet these needs.…
Mutual exclusion (ME) is a commonly used technique to handle conflicts in concurrent systems. With recent advancements in non-volatile memory technology, there is an increased focus on the problem of recoverable mutual exclusion (RME), a…
Markov decision processes are widely used for planning and verification in settings that combine controllable or adversarial choices with probabilistic behaviour. The standard analysis algorithm, value iteration, only provides a lower bound…
In this paper, we study the stochastic combinatorial multi-armed bandit problem under semi-bandit feedback. While much work has been done on algorithms that optimize the expected reward for linear as well as some general reward functions,…
Numerous machine learning problems require an exploration basis - a mechanism to explore the action space. We define a novel geometric notion of exploration basis with low variance, called volumetric spanners, and give efficient algorithms…
The safe linear bandit problem is a version of the classical stochastic linear bandit problem where the learner's actions must satisfy an uncertain constraint at all rounds. Due its applicability to many real-world settings, this problem…
Exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) remains an open challenge. RL algorithms rely on observing rewards to train the agent, and if informative rewards are sparse the agent learns slowly or may not learn at all. To improve exploration…
We propose a novel variant of the UCB algorithm (referred to as Efficient-UCB-Variance (EUCBV)) for minimizing cumulative regret in the stochastic multi-armed bandit (MAB) setting. EUCBV incorporates the arm elimination strategy proposed in…
We present a family of safe memory reclamation schemes, Hyaline, which are fast, scalable, and transparent to the underlying lock-free data structures. Hyaline is based on reference counting - considered impractical for memory reclamation…
How to find memory safety bugs efficiently when navigating a symbolic execution tree that suffers from path explosion? Existing solutions either adopt path search heuristics to maximize coverage rate or chopped symbolic execution to skip…
Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has recently shown that large language models (LLMs) can develop their own reasoning without direct supervision. However, applications in the medical domain, specifically for question…
This work addresses the problem of regret minimization in non-stochastic multi-armed bandit problems, focusing on performance guarantees that hold with high probability. Such results are rather scarce in the literature since proving them…
This paper delves into a comprehensive analysis of fault-tolerant memory systems, focusing on recovery techniques modeled using Markov chains to address transient errors. The study revolves around the application of scrubbing methods in…
While maximizing expected return is the goal in most reinforcement learning approaches, risk-sensitive objectives such as conditional value at risk (CVaR) are more suitable for many high-stakes applications. However, relatively little is…
Achieving sample efficiency in online episodic reinforcement learning (RL) requires optimally balancing exploration and exploitation. When it comes to a finite-horizon episodic Markov decision process with $S$ states, $A$ actions and…
Value-at-risk (VaR) is an established measure to assess risks in critical real-world applications with random environmental factors. This paper presents a novel VaR upper confidence bound (V-UCB) algorithm for maximizing the VaR of a…
The Variable Block Row (VBR) format is an influential blocked sparse matrix format designed for matrices with shared sparsity structure between adjacent rows and columns. VBR groups adjacent rows and columns, storing the resulting blocks…
We discuss the relative merits of optimistic and randomized approaches to exploration in reinforcement learning. Optimistic approaches presented in the literature apply an optimistic boost to the value estimate at each state-action pair and…