Related papers: Sample Complexity Bounds for Stochastic Shortest P…
We consider a class of stochastic processing networks. Assume that the networks satisfy a complete resource pooling condition. We prove that each maximum pressure policy asymptotically minimizes the workload process in a stochastic…
We study zeroth-order optimization where solutions must minimize a cost $d(s)$ while maintaining high probability under a complex generative prior $L(s)$ (e.g., a parameterized model). This reduces to sampling from a target distribution…
We investigate statistical properties of the optimal value of the Sample Average Approximation of stochastic programs, continuing the study in Kr\"atschmer (2023). Central Limit Theorem type results are derived for the optimal value. As a…
Consider a general path planning problem of a robot on a graph with edge costs, and where each node has a Boolean value of success or failure (with respect to some task) with a given probability. The objective is to plan a path for the…
There is a growing body of work on sorting and selection in models other than the unit-cost comparison model. This work is the first treatment of a natural stochastic variant of the problem where the cost of comparing two elements is a…
Influence maximization (IM) is the problem of finding for a given $s\geq 1$ a set $S$ of $|S|=s$ nodes in a network with maximum influence. With stochastic diffusion models, the influence of a set $S$ of seed nodes is defined as the…
This paper addresses the problem of learning optimal policies for satisfying signal temporal logic (STL) specifications by agents with unknown stochastic dynamics. The system is modeled as a Markov decision process, in which the states…
We consider the infinite-horizon discounted optimal control problem formalized by Markov Decision Processes. We focus on several approximate variations of the Policy Iteration algorithm: Approximate Policy Iteration, Conservative Policy…
We consider stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for least-squares regression with potentially several passes over the data. While several passes have been widely reported to perform practically better in terms of predictive performance on…
This paper studies the sample complexity (aka number of comparisons) bounds for the active best-$k$ items selection from pairwise comparisons. From a given set of items, the learner can make pairwise comparisons on every pair of items, and…
Linear dynamical systems that obey stochastic differential equations are canonical models. While optimal control of known systems has a rich literature, the problem is technically hard under model uncertainty and there are hardly any…
Stochastic optimization is a widely used approach for optimization under uncertainty, where uncertain input parameters are modeled by random variables. Exact or approximation algorithms have been obtained for several fundamental problems in…
The stochastic shortest path problem (SSPP) asks to resolve the non-deterministic choices in a Markov decision process (MDP) such that the expected accumulated weight before reaching a target state is maximized. This paper addresses the…
We consider the problem of designing sample efficient learning algorithms for infinite horizon discounted reward Markov Decision Process. Specifically, we propose the Accelerated Natural Policy Gradient (ANPG) algorithm that utilizes an…
We present a new algorithm based on posterior sampling for learning in Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDP) in the infinite-horizon undiscounted setting. The algorithm achieves near-optimal regret bounds while being advantageous…
We formulate selecting the best optimizing system (SBOS) problems and provide solutions for those problems. In an SBOS problem, a finite number of systems are contenders. Inside each system, a continuous decision variable affects the…
We study computational and statistical aspects of learning Latent Markov Decision Processes (LMDPs). In this model, the learner interacts with an MDP drawn at the beginning of each epoch from an unknown mixture of MDPs. To sidestep known…
We revisit the stochastic variance-reduced policy gradient (SVRPG) method proposed by Papini et al. (2018) for reinforcement learning. We provide an improved convergence analysis of SVRPG and show that it can find an $\epsilon$-approximate…
We study contextual bandits in the stochastic i.i.d.\ setting, where a learner observes contexts drawn from an unknown distribution, selects actions from a finite set $A$, and aims to identify an approximately optimal policy from a given…
A fundamental challenge in interactive learning and decision making, ranging from bandit problems to reinforcement learning, is to provide sample-efficient, adaptive learning algorithms that achieve near-optimal regret. This question is…