Related papers: Exponential Steepest Ascent from Valued Constraint…
We study reward maximisation in a wide class of structured stochastic multi-armed bandit problems, where the mean rewards of arms satisfy some given structural constraints, e.g. linear, unimodal, sparse, etc. Our aim is to develop methods…
Constraint programming (CP) is a powerful technique for solving constraint satisfaction and optimization problems. In CP solvers, the variable ordering strategy used to select which variable to explore first in the solving process has a…
We study the computational complexity of planar valued constraint satisfaction problems (VCSPs), which require the incidence graph of the instance be planar. First, we show that intractable Boolean VCSPs have to be self-complementary to be…
Gradient boosting, a method of building additive ensembles from weak learners, has established itself as a practical and theoretically-motivated approach to approximate functions, especially using decision tree weak learners. Comparable…
We consider the problem of learning the structure of undirected graphical models with bounded treewidth, within the maximum likelihood framework. This is an NP-hard problem and most approaches consider local search techniques. In this…
This paper reviews the connections between Graphplan's planning-graph and the dynamic constraint satisfaction problem and motivates the need for adapting CSP search techniques to the Graphplan algorithm. It then describes how explanation…
We study the maximum constraint satisfaction problem, Max-CSP, in the streaming setting. Given $n$ variables, the constraints arrive sequentially in an arbitrary order, with each constraint involving only a small subset of the variables.…
Constrained Optimum Path (COP) problems appear in many real-life applications, especially on communication networks. Some of these problems have been considered and solved by specific techniques which are usually difficult to extend. In…
A valued constraint satisfaction problem (VCSP) instance $(V,\Pi,w)$ is a set of variables $V$ with a set of constraints $\Pi$ weighted by $w$. Given a VCSP instance, we are interested in a re-weighted sub-instance $(V,\Pi'\subset \Pi,w')$…
Owing to their stability and convergence speed, extragradient methods have become a staple for solving large-scale saddle-point problems in machine learning. The basic premise of these algorithms is the use of an extrapolation step before…
MAP is the problem of finding a most probable instantiation of a set of variables in a Bayesian network, given evidence. Unlike computing marginals, posteriors, and MPE (a special case of MAP), the time and space complexity of MAP is not…
We describe an approximate dynamic programming approach to compute lower bounds on the optimal value function for a discrete time, continuous space, infinite horizon setting. The approach iteratively constructs a family of lower bounding…
Valued constraint satisfaction problems (VCSPs) constitute a large class of computational optimization problems. It was shown recently that, over finite domains, every VCSP is in P or NP-complete, depending on the admitted cost functions.…
We study a new version of the Traveling Salesperson Problem, called \VectorTSP, where the traveler is subject to discrete acceleration constraints, as defined in the paper-and-pencil game Racetrack (also known as Vector Racer). In this…
We study offline Reinforcement Learning in large infinite-horizon discounted Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) when the reward and transition models are linearly realizable under a known feature map. Starting from the classic linear-program…
Many resource allocation problems in the cloud can be described as a basic Virtual Network Embedding Problem (VNEP): finding mappings of request graphs (describing the workloads) onto a substrate graph (describing the physical…
The purpose of this work is to introduce and characterize the Bounded Acceleration Shortest Path (BASP) problem, a generalization of the Shortest Path (SP) problem. This problem is associated to a graph: the nodes represent positions of a…
Constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs) consist of a set of variables taking values from some finite domain and a set of local constraints on these variables. The objective is to find an assignment to the variables that maximizes the…
We study the performance of stochastic first-order methods for finding saddle points of convex-concave functions. A notorious challenge faced by such methods is that the gradients can grow arbitrarily large during optimization, which may…
The Conditional Preference Network (CP-net) graphically represents user's qualitative and conditional preference statements under the ceteris paribus interpretation. The constrained CP-net is an extension of the CP-net, to a set of…