Related papers: Piecewise Deterministic Sampling for Constrained D…
Piecewise-deterministic Markov processes (PDMPs) offer a powerful stochastic modeling framework that combines deterministic trajectories with random perturbations at random times. Estimating their local characteristics (particularly the…
Undersampling is a common method in Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) to subsample the number of data points in k-space, reducing acquisition times at the cost of decreased image quality. A popular approach is to employ undersampling…
We study the policy testing problem in discounted Markov decision processes (MDPs) in the fixed-confidence setting under a generative model with static sampling. The goal is to decide whether the value of a given policy exceeds a specified…
In this article we consider computing expectations w.r.t.~probability laws associated to a certain class of stochastic systems. In order to achieve such a task, one must not only resort to numerical approximation of the expectation, but…
This paper presents a novel approach to pricing American options using piecewise diffusion Markov processes (PDifMPs), a type of generalised stochastic hybrid system that integrates continuous dynamics with discrete jump processes. Standard…
A determinantal point process (DPP) on a collection of $M$ items is a model, parameterized by a symmetric kernel matrix, that assigns a probability to every subset of those items. Recent work shows that removing the kernel symmetry…
A popular class of algorithms to optimize the dual LP relaxation of the discrete energy minimization problem (a.k.a.\ MAP inference in graphical models or valued constraint satisfaction) are convergent message-passing algorithms, such as…
Probabilistic sampling-based algorithms, such as the probabilistic roadmap (PRM) and the rapidly-exploring random tree (RRT) algorithms, represent one of the most successful approaches to robotic motion planning, due to their strong…
Sampling is an important tool for estimating large, complex sums and integrals over high dimensional spaces. For instance, important sampling has been used as an alternative to exact methods for inference in belief networks. Ideally, we…
In this paper we introduce a new sampling algorithm which has the potential to be adopted as a universal replacement to the Metropolis--Hastings algorithm. It is related to the slice sampler, and motivated by an algorithm which is…
The pairwise objective paradigms are an important and essential aspect of machine learning. Examples of machine learning approaches that use pairwise objective functions include differential network in face recognition, metric learning,…
We present new policy mirror descent (PMD) methods for solving reinforcement learning (RL) problems with either strongly convex or general convex regularizers. By exploring the structural properties of these overall highly nonconvex…
A determinantal point process (DPP) is an elegant model that assigns a probability to every subset of a collection of $n$ items. While conventionally a DPP is parameterized by a symmetric kernel matrix, removing this symmetry constraint,…
Planning under uncertainty is critical to robotics. The Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) is a mathematical framework for such planning problems. It is powerful due to its careful quantification of the non-deterministic…
Sampling from log-concave distributions is a well researched problem that has many applications in statistics and machine learning. We study the distributions of the form $p^{*}\propto\exp(-f(x))$, where…
Markov Decision Processes (Mdps) form a versatile framework used to model a wide range of optimization problems. The Mdp model consists of sets of states, actions, time steps, rewards, and probability transitions. When in a given state and…
Stochastic gradient methods are the workhorse (algorithms) of large-scale optimization problems in machine learning, signal processing, and other computational sciences and engineering. This paper studies Markov chain gradient descent, a…
We propose solution methods for previously-unsolved constrained MDPs in which actions can continuously modify the transition probabilities within some acceptable sets. While many methods have been proposed to solve regular MDPs with large…
Diffusion models excel at creating visually-convincing images, but they often struggle to meet subtle constraints inherent in the training data. Such constraints could be physics-based (e.g., satisfying a PDE), geometric (e.g., respecting…
Sparse Bayesian learning is a state-of-the-art supervised learning algorithm that can choose a subset of relevant samples from the input data and make reliable probabilistic predictions. However, in the presence of high-dimensional data…