Related papers: Theoretical Foundations of {\delta}-margin Majorit…

We consider distributed estimation of the inverse covariance matrix, also called the concentration or precision matrix, in Gaussian graphical models. Traditional centralized estimation often requires global inference of the covariance…

The Markov assumption in Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) is fundamental in reinforcement learning, influencing both theoretical research and practical applications. Existing methods that rely on the Bellman equation benefit tremendously…

The linear Markov Decision Process (MDP) framework offers a principled foundation for reinforcement learning (RL) with strong theoretical guarantees and sample efficiency. However, its restrictive assumption-that both transition dynamics…

In an election in which each voter ranks all of the candidates, we consider the head-to-head results between each pair of candidates and form a labeled directed graph, called the margin graph, which contains the margin of victory of each…

Jung et al. (2025) introduce a hypothesis testing framework for guaranteeing agreement between large language models (LLMs) and human judgments, relying on the assumption that the model's estimated confidence is monotonic with respect to…

Web crawling, snowball sampling, and respondent-driven sampling (RDS) are three types of network sampling techniques used to contact individuals in hard-to-reach populations. This paper studies these procedures as a Markov process on the…

By transferring knowledge learned from seen/previous tasks, meta learning aims to generalize well to unseen/future tasks. Existing meta-learning approaches have shown promising empirical performance on various multiclass classification…

Speculative Decoding (SD) accelerates autoregressive large language model (LLM) inference by decoupling generation and verification. While recent methods improve draft quality by tightly coupling the drafter with the target model, the…

Current frameworks for consensus statement generation with large language models lack the inherent structure needed to provide provable fairness guarantees when aggregating diverse free-form opinions. We model the task as a multi-objective,…

The online Markov decision process (MDP) is a generalization of the classical Markov decision process that incorporates changing reward functions. In this paper, we propose practical online MDP algorithms with policy iteration and…

In this paper we establish a new margin-based generalization bound for voting classifiers, refining existing results and yielding tighter generalization guarantees for widely used boosting algorithms such as AdaBoost (Freund and Schapire,…

Collaborative filtering (CF) has become a popular method for developing recommender systems (RSs) where ratings of a user for new items are predicted based on her past preferences and available preference information of other users. Despite…

Markov decision processes (MDPs) are standard models for probabilistic systems with non-deterministic behaviours. Mean payoff (or long-run average reward) provides a mathematically elegant formalism to express performance related…

We consider parametric Markov decision processes (pMDPs) that are augmented with unknown probability distributions over parameter values. The problem is to compute the probability to satisfy a temporal logic specification with any concrete…

This paper investigates the limit behavior of Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) made of independent particles evolving in a common environment, when the number of particles goes to infinity. In the finite horizon case or with a discounted…

In this paper, we show how a simulated Markov decision process (MDP) built by the so-called \emph{baseline} policies, can be used to compute a different policy, namely the \emph{simulated optimal} policy, for which the performance of this…

The perceived advantage of machine learning (ML) models is that they are flexible and can incorporate a large number of features. However, many of these are typically correlated or dependent, and incorporating all of them can hinder model…

Motivated by wide-ranging applications such as video delivery over networks using Multiple Description Codes, congestion control, and inventory management, we study the state-tracking of a Markovian random process with a known transition…

Markov decision processes (MDPs) are the defacto frame-work for sequential decision making in the presence ofstochastic uncertainty. A classical optimization criterion forMDPs is to maximize the expected discounted-sum pay-off, which…

We consider the batch (off-line) policy learning problem in the infinite horizon Markov Decision Process. Motivated by mobile health applications, we focus on learning a policy that maximizes the long-term average reward. We propose a…