Related papers: Notes on the runtime of A* sampling
Rejection sampling is a well-known method to sample from a target distribution, given the ability to sample from a given distribution. The method has been first formalized by von Neumann (1951) and has many applications in classical…
One of the fundamental open questions in computational complexity is whether the class of problems solvable by use of stochasticity under the Random Polynomial time (RP) model is larger than the class of those solvable in deterministic…
Asymptotically-optimal motion planners such as RRT* have been shown to incrementally approximate the shortest path between start and goal states. Once an initial solution is found, their performance can be dramatically improved by…
Sample average approximation (SAA) is a widely popular approach to data-driven decision-making under uncertainty. Under mild assumptions, SAA is both tractable and enjoys strong asymptotic performance guarantees. Similar guarantees,…
In the hypothesis selection problem, we are given sample and query access to finite set of candidate distributions (hypotheses), $\mathcal{H} = \{H_1, \ldots, H_n\}$, and samples from an unknown distribution $P$, both over a domain…
The computational equivalence between approximate counting and sampling is well established for polynomial-time algorithms. The most efficient general reduction from counting to sampling is achieved via simulated annealing, where the…
Sampling-based motion planning algorithms are widely used in robotics because they are very effective in high-dimensional spaces. However, the success rate and quality of the solutions are determined by an adequate selection of their…
Motion planning under differential constraints is a classic problem in robotics. To date, the state of the art is represented by sampling-based techniques, with the Rapidly-exploring Random Tree algorithm as a leading example. Yet, the…
Since its introduction Boson Sampling has been the subject of intense study in the world of quantum computing. The task is to sample independently from the set of all $n \times n$ submatrices built from possibly repeated rows of a larger $m…
Since many real-world problems arising in the fields of compiler optimisation, automated software engineering, formal proof systems, and so forth are equivalent to the Halting Problem--the most notorious undecidable problem--there is a…
The era of huge data necessitates highly efficient machine learning algorithms. Many common machine learning algorithms, however, rely on computationally intensive subroutines that are prohibitively expensive on large datasets. Oftentimes,…
RRT* is one of the most widely used sampling-based algorithms for asymptotically-optimal motion planning. This algorithm laid the foundations for optimality in motion planning as a whole, and inspired the development of numerous new…
We describe a general technique that yields the first {\em Statistical Query lower bounds} for a range of fundamental high-dimensional learning problems involving Gaussian distributions. Our main results are for the problems of (1) learning…
We study distribution testing without direct access to a source of relevant data, but rather to one where only a tiny fraction is relevant. To enable this, we introduce the following verification query model. The goal is to perform a…
We consider channel simulation protocols between two communicating parties, Alice and Bob. First, Alice receives a target distribution $Q$, unknown to Bob. Then, she employs a shared coding distribution $P$ to send the minimum amount of…
Adaptive Random Testing (ART) has faced criticism, particularly for its computational inefficiency, as highlighted by Arcuri and Briand. Their analysis clarified how ART requires a quadratic number of distance computations as the number of…
Given a probability distribution in R^n with general (non-white) covariance, a classical estimator of the covariance matrix is the sample covariance matrix obtained from a sample of N independent points. What is the optimal sample size N =…
Many testing problems are readily amenable to randomised tests such as those employing data splitting. However despite their usefulness in principle, randomised tests have obvious drawbacks. Firstly, two analyses of the same dataset may…
In the matter of selection of sample time points for the estimation of the power spectral density of a continuous time stationary stochastic process, irregular sampling schemes such as Poisson sampling are often preferred over regular…
A long series of recent results and breakthroughs have led to faster and better distributed approximation algorithms for single source shortest paths (SSSP) and related problems in the CONGEST model. The runtime of all these algorithms,…