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We study stochastic approximation algorithms with Markovian noise and constant step-size $\alpha$. We develop a method based on infinitesimal generator comparisons to study the bias of the algorithm, which is the expected difference between…
Decision makers involved in the management of civil assets and systems usually take actions under constraints imposed by societal regulations. Some of these constraints are related to epistemic quantities, as the probability of failure…
The Version Age of Information (VAoI) quantifies information freshness by measuring the number of versions the receiver lags behind. This paper studies VAoI minimization in an $M$-user uplink non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) system…
Age-of-Information (AoI) is a recently introduced metric for network operation with sensor applications which quantifies the freshness of data. In the context of networked control systems (NCSs), we compare the worth of the AoI metric with…
The mutual information is a core statistical quantity that has applications in all areas of machine learning, whether this is in training of density models over multiple data modalities, in maximising the efficiency of noisy transmission…
A tunable measure for information leakage called \textit{maximal $\alpha$-leakage} is introduced. This measure quantifies the maximal gain of an adversary in refining a tilted version of its prior belief of any (potentially random) function…
We consider the following sequential decision problem. Given a set of items of unknown utility, we need to select one of as high a utility as possible (``the selection problem''). Measurements (possibly noisy) of item values prior to…
Influence diagrams have recently been used to analyse the safety and fairness properties of AI systems. A key building block for this analysis is a graphical criterion for value of information (VoI). This paper establishes the first…
The privacy-utility tradeoff problem is formulated as determining the privacy mechanism (random mapping) that minimizes the mutual information (a metric for privacy leakage) between the private features of the original dataset and a…
Information flow analysis is a powerful technique for reasoning about the sensitive information exposed by a program during its execution. While past work has proposed information theoretic metrics (e.g., Shannon entropy, min-entropy,…
In his 1948 seminal paper A Mathematical Theory of Communication that birthed information theory, Claude Shannon introduced mutual information (MI), which he called "rate of transmission", as a way to quantify information gain (IG) and…
Objectives: Value of information (VOI) analyses can help policy-makers make informed decisions about whether to conduct and how to design future studies. Historically, a computationally expensive method to compute the Expected Value of…
We present a variational characterization for the R\'{e}nyi divergence of order infinity. Our characterization is related to guessing: the objective functional is a ratio of maximal expected values of a gain function applied to the…
Variational approaches based on neural networks are showing promise for estimating mutual information (MI) between high dimensional variables. However, they can be difficult to use in practice due to poorly understood bias/variance…
Value iteration (VI) is a ubiquitous algorithm for optimal control, planning, and reinforcement learning schemes. Under the right assumptions, VI is a vital tool to generate inputs with desirable properties for the controlled system, like…
There are (at least) three approaches to quantifying information. The first, algorithmic information or Kolmogorov complexity, takes events as strings and, given a universal Turing machine, quantifies the information content of a string as…
The Shapley value has been proposed as a solution to many applications in machine learning, including for equitable valuation of data. Shapley values are computationally expensive and involve the entire dataset. The query for a point's…
Recently, Sidford, Wang, Wu and Ye (2018) developed an algorithm combining variance reduction techniques with value iteration to solve discounted Markov decision processes. This algorithm has a sublinear complexity when the discount factor…
In this paper we propose a novel algorithm, factored value iteration (FVI), for the approximate solution of factored Markov decision processes (fMDPs). The traditional approximate value iteration algorithm is modified in two ways. For one,…
In this paper, we present a novel stochastic method for solving variational inequalities (VI) in the context of Markovian noise. By leveraging Extragradient technique, we can productively solve VI optimization problems characterized by…