Related papers: PUSH: a primal heuristic based on Feasibility PUmp…
Production systems use heuristics because they are faster or scale better than their optimal counterparts. Yet, practitioners are often unaware of the performance gap between a heuristic and the optimum or between two heuristics in…
Large language models (LLMs) are currently aligned using techniques such as reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). However, these methods use scalar rewards that can only reflect user preferences on average. Pluralistic…
In recent years, there has been growing interest in utilizing modern machine learning techniques to learn heuristic functions for forward search algorithms. Despite this, there has been little theoretical understanding of what they should…
Probabilistic behavior is omnipresent in computer controlled systems, in particular, so-called safety-critical hybrid systems, because of various reasons, like uncertain environments, or fundamental properties of nature. In this paper, we…
Metaheuristics are general methods that guide application of concrete heuristic(s) to problems that are too hard to solve using exact algorithms. However, even though a growing body of literature has been devoted to their statistical…
The role of mental simulation in human physical reasoning is widely acknowledged, but whether it is employed across scenarios with varying simulation costs and where its boundary lies remains unclear. Using a pouring-marble task, our human…
Particle swarm optimisation is a metaheuristic algorithm which finds reasonable solutions in a wide range of applied problems if suitable parameters are used. We study the properties of the algorithm in the framework of random dynamical…
VHPOP is a partial order causal link (POCL) planner loosely based on UCPOP. It draws from the experience gained in the early to mid 1990's on flaw selection strategies for POCL planning, and combines this with more recent developments in…
Mobile robots are increasingly deployed in cluttered environments with movable objects, posing challenges for traditional methods that prohibit interaction. In such settings, the mobile robot must go beyond traditional obstacle avoidance,…
The aim of this paper is to propose a generalization of previous approaches in qualitative decision making. Our work is based on the binary possibilistic utility (PU), which is a possibilistic counterpart of Expected Utility (EU).We first…
We study a posterior sampling approach to efficient exploration in constrained reinforcement learning. Alternatively to existing algorithms, we propose two simple algorithms that are more efficient statistically, simpler to implement and…
Metaheuristic algorithms are becoming an important part of modern optimization. A wide range of metaheuristic algorithms have emerged over the last two decades, and many metaheuristics such as particle swarm optimization are becoming…
We review the superiorization methodology, which can be thought of, in some cases, as lying between feasibility-seeking and constrained minimization. It is not quite trying to solve the full fledged constrained minimization problem; rather,…
Prompt optimization aims to find the best prompt to a large language model (LLM) for a given task. LLMs have been successfully used to help find and improve prompt candidates for single-step tasks. However, realistic tasks for agents are…
Modern platforms are using accelerators in conjunction with standard processing units in order to reduce the running time of specific operations, such as matrix operations, and improve their performance. Scheduling on such hybrid platforms…
Recent work has demonstrated that water supply pumps in the drinking water distribution network can be leveraged to provide flexibility to the power network, but existing approaches are computationally demanding and/or overly conservative.…
The authors propose a robust semi-parametric empirical likelihood method to integrate all available information from multiple samples with a common center of measurements. Two different sets of estimating equations are used to improve the…
In evolutionary algorithms a critical parameter that must be tuned is that of selection pressure. If it is set too low then the rate of convergence towards the optimum is likely to be slow. Alternatively if the selection pressure is set too…
Walking and push recovery controllers for humanoid robots have advanced throughout the years while unsolved gaps leading to undesirable behaviours still exist. Because previous studies are mainly pure engineering methods, while the use of…
In this work, a heuristic as operational tool to estimate the lactate threshold and to facilitate its integration into the training process of recreational runners is proposed. To do so, we formalize the principles for the lactate threshold…