Related papers: Statistical mechanics methods and phase transition…
In many human-in-the-loop robotic applications such as robot-assisted surgery and remote teleoperation, predicting the intended motion of the human operator may be useful for successful implementation of shared control, guidance virtual…
Computational mechanics is a method for discovering, describing and quantifying patterns, using tools from statistical physics. It constructs optimal, minimal models of stochastic processes and their underlying causal structures. These…
We give an introduction to phase transitions in the steady states of systems that evolve stochastically with equilibrium and nonequilibrium dynamics, the latter defined as those that do not possess a time-reversal symmetry. We try as much…
Monte Carlo is a versatile and frequently used tool in statistical physics and beyond. Correspondingly, the number of algorithms and variants reported in the literature is vast, and an overview is not easy to achieve. In this pedagogical…
Finding optimal solutions to combinatorial optimization problems is pivotal in both scientific and technological domains, within academic research and industrial applications. A considerable amount of effort has been invested in the…
We present an optimization-based method to plan the motion of an autonomous robot under the uncertainties associated with dynamic obstacles, such as humans. Our method bounds the marginal risk of collisions at each point in time by…
There is a growing cross-disciplinary effort in the broad domain of optimization and learning with streams of data, applied to settings where traditional batch optimization techniques cannot produce solutions at time scales that match the…
Large graphs abound in machine learning, data mining, and several related areas. A useful step towards analyzing such graphs is that of obtaining certain summary statistics - e.g., or the expected length of a shortest path between two…
Mathematical optimization is one of the cornerstones of modern engineering research and practice. Yet, throughout all application domains, mathematical optimization is, for the most part, considered to be a numerical discipline.…
Statistical physics provides a useful perspective for the analysis of many complex systems; it allows us to relate microscopic fluctuations to macroscopic observations. Developmental biology, but also cell biology more generally, are…
Learning is a complex dynamical process shaped by a range of interconnected decisions. Careful design of hyperparameter schedules for artificial neural networks or efficient allocation of cognitive resources by biological learners can…
To analyze high-dimensional systems, many fields in science and engineering rely on high-level descriptions, sometimes called "macrostates," "coarse-grainings," or "effective theories". Examples of such descriptions include the…
Many combinatorial optimization problems can be mapped to finding the ground states of the corresponding Ising Hamiltonians. The physical systems that can solve optimization problems in this way, namely Ising machines, have been attracting…
Many optimization problems incorporate uncertainty affecting their parameters and thus their objective functions and constraints. As an example, in chance-constrained optimization the constraints need to be satisfied with a certain…
Optimization is central to both modern machine learning (ML) and scientific machine learning (SciML), yet the structure of the underlying optimization problems differs substantially across these domains. Classical ML typically relies on…
This paper proposes a framework that formulates a wide range of graph combinatorial optimization problems using permutation-based representations. These problems include the travelling salesman problem, maximum independent set, maximum cut,…
An overview is given of recent advances in nonequilibrium statistical mechanics about the statistics of random paths and current fluctuations. Although statistics is carried out in space for equilibrium statistical mechanics, statistics is…
Recent research indicates that many convex optimization problems with random constraints exhibit a phase transition as the number of constraints increases. For example, this phenomenon emerges in the $\ell_1$ minimization method for…
Recently there has been a surge of interest in operations research (OR) and the machine learning (ML) community in combining prediction algorithms and optimization techniques to solve decision-making problems in the face of uncertainty.…
A new approach for enhancing the process-variation tolerance of digital circuits is described. We extend recent advances in statistical timing analysis into an optimization framework. Our objective is to reduce the performance variance of a…