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The key to Black-Box Optimization is to efficiently search through input regions with potentially widely-varying numerical properties, to achieve low-regret descent and fast progress toward the optima. Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) methods…

UCT, a state-of-the art algorithm for Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) in games and Markov decision processes, is based on UCB, a sampling policy for the Multi-armed Bandit problem (MAB) that minimizes the cumulative regret. However, search…

Abstraction (in its various forms) is a powerful established technique in model-checking; still, when unbounded data-structures are concerned, it cannot always cope with divergence phenomena in a satisfactory way. Acceleration is an…

Standard approaches for global optimization of non-convex functions, such as branch-and-bound, maintain partition trees to systematically prune the domain. The tree size grows exponentially in the number of dimensions. We propose new…

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 Upper Confidence Bounds For Trees (UCT) algorithm is not agnostic to the reward scale of the game it is applied to. For zero-sum games with the sparse rewards of $\{-1,0,1\}$ at the end of the game, this is not a problem, but many games…

Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) is a sampling best-first method to search for optimal decisions. The success of MCTS depends heavily on how the tree is built and the selection process plays a fundamental role in this. One particular…

One-shot neural architecture search (NAS) methods significantly reduce the search cost by considering the whole search space as one network, which only needs to be trained once. However, current methods select each operation independently…

The combination of multi-armed bandit (MAB) algorithms with Monte-Carlo tree search (MCTS) has made a significant impact in various research fields. The UCT algorithm, which combines the UCB bandit algorithm with MCTS, is a good example of…

Monte-Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) is one of the most-widely used methods for planning, and has powered many recent advances in artificial intelligence. In MCTS, one typically performs computations (i.e., simulations) to collect statistics…

Tackling simulation optimization problems with non-convex objective functions remains a fundamental challenge in operations research. In this paper, we propose a class of random search algorithms, called Regular Tree Search, which…

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) methods have proven powerful in planning for sequential decision-making problems such as Go and video games, but their performance can be poor when the planning depth and sampling trajectories are limited or…

Bandit based methods for tree search have recently gained popularity when applied to huge trees, e.g. in the game of go (Gelly et al., 2006). The UCT algorithm (Kocsis and Szepesvari, 2006), a tree search method based on Upper Confidence…

While scaling test-time compute through trajectory-level sampling has significantly improved Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents, the lack of regressive ability prevents the reuse of partial successes and the recovery from early missteps.…

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…

Although real-world decision-making problems can often be encoded as causal multi-armed bandits (CMABs) at different levels of abstraction, a general methodology exploiting the information and computational advantages of each abstraction…

Models of intrinsic motivation present an important means to produce sensible behaviour in the absence of extrinsic rewards. Applications in video games are varied, and range from intrinsically motivated general game-playing agents to…

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…

Abstraction plays a key role in concept learning and knowledge discovery; this paper is concerned with computational abstraction. In particular, we study the nature of abstraction through a group-theoretic approach, formalizing it as…