Related papers: Automated Tail Bound Analysis for Probabilistic Re…

In this work, we study the fully automated inference of expected result values of probabilistic programs in the presence of natural programming constructs such as procedures, local variables and recursion. While crucial, capturing these…

We derive upper bounds for probabilities of the form $P(g(\mathbf{X})\geq t)$ using the southwest boundary (recently introduced in our previous work) $\partial_{\mathrm{SW}} Q(g^{-1}[t,\infty))$, where $Q$ is a reflection to the first…

Given a finite collection of stochastic alternatives, we study the problem of sequentially allocating a fixed sampling budget to identify the optimal alternative with a high probability, where the optimal alternative is defined as the one…

Generative retrieval (GR) has emerged as a promising paradigm in recommendation systems by autoregressively decoding identifiers of target items. Despite its potential, current approaches typically rely on the next-token prediction schema,…

We present a novel static analysis technique to derive higher moments for program variables for a large class of probabilistic loops with potentially uncountable state spaces. Our approach is fully automatic, meaning it does not rely on…

Fully automatic worst-case complexity analysis has a number of applications in computer-assisted program manipulation. A classical and powerful approach to complexity analysis consists in formally deriving, from the program syntax, a set of…

We consider a multivariate distributional recursion of sum-type as arising in the probabilistic analysis of algorithms and random trees. We prove an upper tail bound for the solution using Chernoff's bounding technique by estimating the…

We study the almost surely finite random variable $S$ defined by the distributional fixed-point equation \[ S \stackrel{d}{=} 1 + \max\{US', (1-U)S''\}, \qquad U \sim \mathrm{Unif}(0,1), \] where $S'$ and $S''$ are independent copies of…

We present a novel algorithm that efficiently computes near-optimal deterministic policies for constrained reinforcement learning (CRL) problems. Our approach combines three key ideas: (1) value-demand augmentation, (2) action-space…

In this work, we study the convergence \emph{in high probability} of clipped gradient methods when the noise distribution has heavy tails, ie., with bounded $p$th moments, for some $1<p\le2$. Prior works in this setting follow the same…

During the last decade, sampling-based path planning algorithms, such as Probabilistic RoadMaps (PRM) and Rapidly-exploring Random Trees (RRT), have been shown to work well in practice and possess theoretical guarantees such as…

In this work, we propose a new bounded arithmetic theory, denoted $APX_1$, designed to formalize a broad class of probabilistic arguments commonly used in theoretical computer science. Under plausible assumptions, $APX_1$ is strictly weaker…

We develop two iterative algorithms for solving the low rank phase retrieval (LRPR) problem. LRPR refers to recovering a low-rank matrix $\X$ from magnitude-only (phaseless) measurements of random linear projections of its columns. Both…

We consider a step search method for continuous optimization under a stochastic setting where the function values and gradients are available only through inexact probabilistic zeroth- and first-order oracles. Unlike the stochastic gradient…

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a predominant technique to align language models (LMs) with human preferences or promote outputs which are deemed to be desirable by a given reward function. Standard RL approaches optimize average…

We present an algorithm based on posterior sampling (aka Thompson sampling) that achieves near-optimal worst-case regret bounds when the underlying Markov Decision Process (MDP) is communicating with a finite, though unknown, diameter. Our…

Personalized PageRank (PPR) is an extensively studied and applied node proximity measure in graphs. For a pair of nodes $s$ and $t$ on a graph $G=(V,E)$, the PPR value $\pi(s,t)$ is defined as the probability that an $\alpha$-discounted…

In this note we prove bounds on the upper and lower probability tails of sums of independent geometric or exponentially distributed random variables. We also prove negative results showing that our established tail bounds are asymptotically…

We consider reusing established non-probabilistic output analyses (either forward or backwards) that yield over-approximations of a program's pre-image or image relation, e.g., interval analyses. We assume a probability measure over the…

We present a new algorithm based on posterior sampling for learning in constrained Markov decision processes (CMDP) in the infinite-horizon undiscounted setting. The algorithm achieves near-optimal regret bounds while being advantageous…