Related papers: Monte Carlo Policy Gradient Method for Binary Opti…
Variable selection is a key issue when analyzing high-dimensional data. The explosion of data with large sample sizes and dimensionality brings new challenges to this problem in both inference accuracy and computational complexity. To…
Optimal decision-making under partial observability requires agents to balance reducing uncertainty (exploration) against pursuing immediate objectives (exploitation). In this paper, we introduce a novel policy optimization framework for…
Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms are used to simulate from complex statistical distributions by way of a local exploration of these distributions. This local feature avoids heavy requests on understanding the nature of the target, but it…
Gradient-based methods are often used for policy optimization in deep reinforcement learning, despite being vulnerable to local optima and saddle points. Although gradient-free methods (e.g., genetic algorithms or evolution strategies) help…
The discrete nature of transmitted symbols poses challenges for achieving optimal detection in multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems associated with a large number of antennas. Recently, the combination of two powerful machine…
A Monte Carlo algorithm is said to be adaptive if it automatically calibrates its current proposal distribution using past simulations. The choice of the parametric family that defines the set of proposal distributions is critical for good…
In this paper, we present a Model-Based Reinforcement Learning (MBRL) algorithm named \emph{Monte Carlo Probabilistic Inference for Learning COntrol} (MC-PILCO). The algorithm relies on Gaussian Processes (GPs) to model the system dynamics…
Policy gradient (PG) is a reinforcement learning (RL) approach that optimizes a parameterized policy model for an expected return using gradient ascent. While PG can work well even in non-Markovian environments, it may encounter plateaus or…
Can Monte Carlo (MC) solvers be directly used in gradient-based methods for PDE-constrained optimization problems? In these problems, a gradient of the loss function is typically presented as a product of two PDE solutions, one for the…
We introduce a gradient-based learning method to automatically adapt Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) proposal distributions to intractable targets. We define a maximum entropy regularised objective function, referred to as generalised speed…
Binary optimization, a representative subclass of discrete optimization, plays an important role in mathematical optimization and has various applications in computer vision and machine learning. Usually, binary optimization problems are…
While standard reinforcement learning optimizes a single reward signal, many applications require optimizing a nonlinear utility $f(J_1^\pi,\dots,J_M^\pi)$ over multiple objectives, where each $J_m^\pi$ denotes the expected discounted…
We propose a Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm based on Gibbs sampling with parallel tempering to solve nonlinear optimal control problems. The algorithm is applicable to nonlinear systems with dynamics that can be approximately…
Binary optimization is a central problem in mathematical optimization and its applications are abundant. To solve this problem, we propose a new class of continuous optimization techniques which is based on Mathematical Programming with…
This paper deals with a complete bipartite matching problem with the objective of finding an optimal matching that maximizes a certain generic predefined utility function on the set of all matchings. After proving the NP-hardness of the…
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a well-established family of algorithms primarily used in Bayesian statistics to sample from a target distribution when direct sampling is challenging. Existing work on Bayesian decision trees uses MCMC.…
In many hierarchical inverse problems, not only do we want to estimate high- or infinite-dimensional model parameters in the parameter-to-observable maps, but we also have to estimate hyperparameters that represent critical assumptions in…
Stochastic gradient Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms have received much attention in Bayesian computing for big data problems, but they are only applicable to a small class of problems for which the parameter space has a fixed…
The problem of optimally scaling the proposal distribution in a Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm is critical to the quality of the generated samples. Much work has gone into obtaining such results for various Metropolis-Hastings (MH)…
We consider stochastic optimization when one only has access to biased stochastic oracles of the objective and the gradient, and obtaining stochastic gradients with low biases comes at high costs. This setting captures various optimization…