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Crowd-sourcing is a cheap and popular means of creating training and evaluation datasets for machine learning, however it poses the problem of `truth inference', as individual workers cannot be wholly trusted to provide reliable…
Compact and discriminative visual codebooks are preferred in many visual recognition tasks. In the literature, a number of works have taken the approach of hierarchically merging visual words of an initial large-sized codebook, but…
The goal of a traditional Markov decision process (MDP) is to maximize expected cumulative reward over a defined horizon (possibly infinite). In many applications, however, a decision maker may be interested in optimizing a specific…
We present a novel framework for analyzing blockchain consensus mechanisms by modeling blockchain growth as a Partially Observable Stochastic Game (POSG) which we reduce to a set of Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs)…
Tensor models play an increasingly prominent role in many fields, notably in machine learning. In several applications, such as community detection, topic modeling and Gaussian mixture learning, one must estimate a low-rank signal from a…
In this paper, we investigate the concentration properties of cumulative reward in Markov Decision Processes (MDPs), focusing on both asymptotic and non-asymptotic settings. We introduce a unified approach to characterize reward…
This paper generalizes an important result from the PAC-Bayesian literature for binary classification to the case of ensemble methods for structured outputs. We prove a generic version of the \Cbound, an upper bound over the risk of models…
We study infinite-horizon Markov decision processes (MDPs) where the decision maker evaluates each of her strategies by aggregating the infinite stream of expected stage-rewards. The crucial feature of our approach is that the aggregation…
Metric distortion in social choice is a framework for evaluating how well voting rules minimize social cost when both voters and candidates exist in a shared metric space, with a voter's cost defined by their distance to a candidate. Voters…
Keeping track of how lawmakers vote is essential for government transparency. While many parliamentary voting records are available online, they are often difficult to interpret, making it challenging to understand legislative behavior…
We consider Markov decision processes (MDPs) with unknown disturbance distribution and address this problem using the robust Markov decision process (RMDP) approach. We construct the empirical distribution of the unknown disturbance…
Recent advances such as self-consistency and test-time reinforcement learning (TTRL) improve the reliability of large language models (LLMs) without additional supervision, yet their underlying mechanisms and statistical guarantees remain…
Recently, diffusion probabilistic models (DPMs) have achieved promising results in diverse generative tasks. A typical DPM framework includes a forward process that gradually diffuses the data distribution and a reverse process that…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods to sample from a probability distribution $\pi$ defined on a space $(\Theta,\mathcal{T})$ consist of the simulation of realisations of Markov chains $\{\theta_{n},n\geq1\}$ of invariant distribution…
Identifying leading measurement units from a large collection is a common inference task in various domains of large-scale inference. Testing approaches, which measure evidence against a null hypothesis rather than effect magnitude, tend to…
We consider Markov decision processes (MDPs) which are a standard model for probabilistic systems. We focus on qualitative properties for MDPs that can express that desired behaviors of the system arise almost-surely (with probability 1) or…
Motivated by undetectable risks in generative AI, we study a general robust aggregation problem: how to aggregate several probability distributions to boost safety. We present consensus sampling, a black-box algorithm that, given k…
The window mean-payoff objective strengthens the classical mean-payoff objective by computing the mean-payoff over a finite window that slides along an infinite path. Two variants have been considered: in one variant, the maximum window…
Entropy based ideas find wide-ranging applications in finance for calibrating models of portfolio risk as well as options pricing. The abstracted problem, extensively studied in the literature, corresponds to finding a probability measure…
With the increased interest in machine learning and big data problems, the need for large amounts of labelled data has also grown. However, it is often infeasible to get experts to label all of this data, which leads many practitioners to…