Related papers: Sample-and-Bound for Non-Convex Optimization

We present a new Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) algorithm to solve the stochastic orienteering problem with chance constraints, i.e., a version of the problem where travel costs are random, and one is assigned a bound on the tolerable…

A tremendous range of design tasks in materials, physics, and biology can be formulated as finding the optimum of an objective function depending on many parameters without knowing its closed-form expression or the derivative. Traditional…

Popular Monte-Carlo tree search (MCTS) algorithms for online planning, such as epsilon-greedy tree search and UCT, aim at rapidly identifying a reasonably good action, but provide rather poor worst-case guarantees on performance improvement…

Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) is a powerful approach to designing game-playing bots or solving sequential decision problems. The method relies on intelligent tree search that balances exploration and exploitation. MCTS performs random…

We consider Monte-Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) applied to Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) and Partially Observable MDPs (POMDPs), and the well-known Upper Confidence bound for Trees (UCT) algorithm. In UCT, a tree with nodes (states) and edges…

In many risk-aware and multi-objective reinforcement learning settings, the utility of the user is derived from a single execution of a policy. In these settings, making decisions based on the average future returns is not suitable. For…

Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) efficiently balances exploration and exploitation in tree search based on count-derived uncertainty. However, these local visit counts ignore a second type of uncertainty induced by the size of the subtree…

In this article we propose a heuristic algorithm to explore search space trees associated with instances of combinatorial optimization problems. The algorithm is based on Monte Carlo tree search, a popular algorithm in game playing that is…

Bayesian optimization (BO) is a class of popular methods for expensive black-box optimization, and has been widely applied to many scenarios. However, BO suffers from the curse of dimensionality, and scaling it to high-dimensional problems…

Monte-Carlo planning and Reinforcement Learning (RL) are essential to sequential decision making. The recent AlphaGo and AlphaZero algorithms have shown how to successfully combine these two paradigms in order to solve large scale…

Online planning is crucial for high performance in many complex sequential decision-making tasks. Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) employs a principled mechanism for trading off exploration for exploitation for efficient online planning, and…

Symbolic regression aims to discover concise, interpretable mathematical expressions that satisfy desired objectives, such as fitting data, posing a highly combinatorial optimization problem. While genetic programming has been the dominant…

Non-monotone object rearrangement planning in confined spaces such as cabinets and shelves is a widely occurring but challenging problem in robotics. Both the robot motion and the available regions for object relocation are highly…

High dimensional black-box optimization has broad applications but remains a challenging problem to solve. Given a set of samples $\{\vx_i, y_i\}$, building a global model (like Bayesian Optimization (BO)) suffers from the curse of…

Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) is an effective test-time compute scaling (TTCS) method for improving the reasoning performance of large language models, but its highly variable execution time leads to severe long-tail latency in practice.…

Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) is particularly adapted to domains where the potential actions can be represented as a tree of sequential decisions. For an effective action selection, MCTS performs many simulations to build a reliable tree…

A novel method called mixed variable system Monte Carlo tree search (MVSMCTS) formulation is presented for optimization problems considering various types of variables with single and mixed continuous-discrete system. This method utilizes a…

Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) has been proposed as a transformative approach to join-order optimization in database query processing, with recent frameworks such as AlphaJoin and HyperQO claiming to outperform traditional methods. However,…

Tree search algorithms, such as branch-and-bound, are the most widely used tools for solving combinatorial and nonconvex problems. For example, they are the foremost method for solving (mixed) integer programs and constraint satisfaction…

Standard planners for sequential decision making (including Monte Carlo planning, tree search, dynamic programming, etc.) are constrained by an implicit sequential planning assumption: The order in which a plan is constructed is the same in…