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

Monte-Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) is a powerful tool for many non-differentiable search related problems such as adversarial games. However, the performance of such approach highly depends on the order of the nodes that are considered at each…

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling methods are widely used but often encounter either slow convergence or biased sampling when applied to multimodal high dimensional distributions. In this paper, we present a general framework of…

We examine a type of modified Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) for strategising in combinatorial games. The modifications are derived by analysing simplified strategies and simplified versions of the underlying game and then using the results…

We analyze a tree search problem with an underlying Markov decision process, in which the goal is to identify the best action at the root that achieves the highest cumulative reward. We present a new tree policy that optimally allocates a…

The problem of optimising functions with intractable gradients frequently arise in machine learning and statistics, ranging from maximum marginal likelihood estimation procedures to fine-tuning of generative models. Stochastic approximation…

Recent work proposed the UCTMAXSAT algorithm to address Maximum Satisfiability Problems (MaxSAT) and shown improved performance over pure Stochastic Local Search algorithms (SLS). UCTMAXSAT is based on Monte Carlo Tree Search but it uses…

Efficient sampling from constraint manifolds, and thereby generating a diverse set of solutions for feasibility problems, is a fundamental challenge. We consider the case where a problem is factored, that is, the underlying nonlinear…

In this work, a non-gaited framework for legged system locomotion is presented. The approach decouples the gait sequence optimization by considering the problem as a decision-making process. The redefined contact sequence problem is solved…

Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) algorithms perform simulation-based search to improve policies online. During search, the simulation policy is adapted to explore the most promising lines of play. MCTS has been used by state-of-the-art…

Bayesian model-based reinforcement learning is a formally elegant approach to learning optimal behaviour under model uncertainty, trading off exploration and exploitation in an ideal way. Unfortunately, finding the resulting Bayes-optimal…

Monte Carlo integration is a commonly used technique to compute intractable integrals and is typically thought to perform poorly for very high-dimensional integrals. To show that this is not always the case, we examine Monte Carlo…

The majorization-minimization (MM) principle is an extremely general framework for deriving optimization algorithms. It includes the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm, proximal gradient algorithm, concave-convex procedure, quadratic…

Bayesian optimization (BO) is a popular method for computationally expensive black-box optimization. However, traditional BO methods need to solve new problems from scratch, leading to slow convergence. Recent studies try to extend BO to a…

The Job Shop Scheduling Problem (JSSP) is a well-known optimization problem in manufacturing, where the goal is to determine the optimal sequence of jobs across different machines to minimize a given objective. In this work, we focus on…

The discovery of patterns that accurately discriminate one class label from another remains a challenging data mining task. Subgroup discovery (SD) is one of the frameworks that enables to elicit such interesting hypotheses from labeled…

This paper presents a piecewise convexification method for solving non-convex multi-objective optimization problems with box constraints. Based on the ideas of the $\alpha$-based Branch and Bound (${\rm \alpha BB}$) method of global…

We tackle the problem of goal-directed graph construction: given a starting graph, a budget of modifications, and a global objective function, the aim is to find a set of edges whose addition to the graph achieves the maximum improvement in…

As the number of samples and dimensionality of optimization problems related to statistics an machine learning explode, block coordinate descent algorithms have gained popularity since they reduce the original problem to several smaller…

Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) methods have achieved great success in many Artificial Intelligence (AI) benchmarks. The in-tree operations become a critical performance bottleneck in realizing parallel MCTS on CPUs. In this work, we develop…

We propose a provably correct Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) algorithm for solving risk-aware Markov decision processes (MDPs) with entropic risk measure (ERM) objectives. We provide a non-asymptotic analysis of our proposed algorithm,…