Related papers: Proxitaxis: an adaptive search strategy based on p…
When designing optimal controllers for any system, it is often the case that the true state of the system is unknown to the controller, for example due to noisy measurements or partially observable states. Incomplete state information must…
In a typical stochastic multi-armed bandit problem, the objective is often to maximize the expected sum of rewards over some time horizon $T$. While the choice of a strategy that accomplishes that is optimal with no additional information,…
In this paper, we propose a stochastic search algorithm for solving general optimization problems with little structure. The algorithm iteratively finds high quality solutions by randomly sampling candidate solutions from a parameterized…
Probabilistic sampling methods have become very popular to solve single-shot path planning problems. Rapidly-exploring Random Trees (RRTs) in particular have been shown to be very efficient in solving high dimensional problems. Even though…
We commonly encounter the problem of identifying an optimally weight adjusted version of the empirical distribution of observed data, adhering to predefined constraints on the weights. Such constraints often manifest as restrictions on the…
The input to the stochastic orienteering problem consists of a budget $B$ and metric $(V,d)$ where each vertex $v$ has a job with deterministic reward and random processing time (drawn from a known distribution). The processing times are…
Adaptive random search approaches have been shown to be effective for global optimization problems, where under certain conditions, the expected performance time increases only linearly with dimension. However, previous analyses assume that…
We study stochastic optimization of nonconvex loss functions, which are typical objectives for training neural networks. We propose stochastic approximation algorithms which optimize a series of regularized, nonlinearized losses on large…
Stochastic localization is a pathwise analysis technique originating from convex geometry. This paper explores certain algorithmic aspects of stochastic localization as a computational tool. First, we unify various existing stochastic…
Multi-time-scale stochastic approximation is an iterative algorithm for finding the fixed point of a set of $N$ coupled operators given their noisy samples. It has been observed that due to the coupling between the decision variables and…
We consider a minimal model of persistent random searcher with short range memory. We calculate exactly for such searcher the mean first-passage time to a target in a bounded domain and find that it admits a non trivial minimum as function…
We consider minimizing a function consisting of a quadratic term and a proximable term which is possibly nonconvex and nonsmooth. This problem is also known as scaled proximal operator. Despite its simple form, existing methods suffer from…
We present a framework for performing efficient regression in general metric spaces. Roughly speaking, our regressor predicts the value at a new point by computing a Lipschitz extension --- the smoothest function consistent with the…
Brownian diffusion subject to stochastic resetting to a fixed position has been widely studied for applications to random search processes. In an unbounded domain, the mean first-passage time at a target site can be minimized for a…
This paper describes stochastic search approaches, including a new stochastic algorithm and an adaptive mutation operator, for learning Bayesian networks from incomplete data. This problem is characterized by a huge solution space with a…
We consider the stochastic gradient method with random reshuffling ($\mathsf{RR}$) for tackling smooth nonconvex optimization problems. $\mathsf{RR}$ finds broad applications in practice, notably in training neural networks. In this work,…
The problem of searching for an unknown object occurs in important applications ranging from security, medicine and defense. Sensors with the capability to process information rapidly require adaptive algorithms to control their search in…
Driving on the limits of vehicle dynamics requires predictive planning of future vehicle states. In this work, a search-based motion planning is used to generate suitable reference trajectories of dynamic vehicle states with the goal to…
Consider a stochastic search model with resetting for an unknown stationary target $a\in\mathbb{R}$ with known distribution $\mu$. The searcher begins at the origin and performs Brownian motion with diffusion constant $D$. The searcher is…
We consider random search processes alternating stochastically between diffusion and ballistic motion, in which the distribution function of ballistic motion directions varies from point to point in space. The specific space dependence of…