Related papers: Cross-Entropy method: convergence issues for exten…
Semi-supervised clustering techniques have emerged as valuable tools for leveraging prior information in the form of constraints to improve the quality of clustering outcomes. Despite the proliferation of such methods, the ability to…
Rare event probability estimation is an important topic in reliability analysis. Stochastic methods, such as importance sampling, have been developed to estimate such probabilities but they often fail in high dimension. In this paper, we…
Statistical model checking avoids the exponential growth of states associated with probabilistic model checking by estimating properties from multiple executions of a system and by giving results within confidence bounds. Rare properties…
The correspondence between the cross-entropy method and the zero-variance approximation to simulate a rare event problem in Markov chains is shown. This leads to a sufficient condition that the cross-entropy estimator is asymptotically…
In this paper, we provide a new algorithm for the problem of prediction in Reinforcement Learning, \emph{i.e.}, estimating the Value Function of a Markov Reward Process (MRP) using the linear function approximation architecture, with memory…
Recent works in high-dimensional model-predictive control and model-based reinforcement learning with learned dynamics and reward models have resorted to population-based optimization methods, such as the Cross-Entropy Method (CEM), for…
The R Package CEC performs clustering based on the cross-entropy clustering (CEC) method, which was recently developed with the use of information theory. The main advantage of CEC is that it combines the speed and simplicity of $k$-means…
Chance-constrained optimization is a suitable modeling framework for safety-critical applications where violating constraints is nearly unacceptable. The scenario approach is a popular solution method for these problems, due to its…
Chance constraints provide a principled framework to mitigate the risk of high-impact extreme events by modifying the controllable properties of a system. The low probability and rare occurrence of such events, however, impose severe…
We study two adaptive importance sampling schemes for estimating the probability of a rare event in the high-dimensional regime $d \to \infty$ with $d$ the dimension. The first scheme is the prominent cross-entropy (CE) method, and the…
Traditional empirical risk minimization (ERM) for semantic segmentation can disproportionately advantage or disadvantage certain target classes in favor of an (unfair but) improved overall performance. Inspired by the recently introduced…
Loss functions play a central role in supervised classification. Cross-entropy (CE) is widely used, whereas the mean absolute error (MAE) loss can offer robustness but is difficult to optimize. Interpolating between the CE and MAE losses,…
Cross-Entropy Method (CEM) is commonly used for planning in model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) where a centralized approach is typically utilized to update the sampling distribution based on only the top-$k$ operation's results on…
Machine learning models must continuously self-adjust themselves for novel data distribution in the open world. As the predominant principle, entropy minimization (EM) has been proven to be a simple yet effective cornerstone in existing…
Flexibility in shape and scale of Burr XII distribution can make close approximation of numerous well-known probability density functions. Due to these capabilities, the usages of Burr XII distribution are applied in risk analysis, lifetime…
We propose "collision cross-entropy" as a robust alternative to Shannon's cross-entropy (CE) loss when class labels are represented by soft categorical distributions y. In general, soft labels can naturally represent ambiguous targets in…
Rare event simulation and estimation for systems in equilibrium are among the most challenging topics in molecular dynamics. As was shown by Jarzynski and others, nonequilibrium forcing can theoretically be used to obtain equilibrium rare…
Unknown constraints arise in many types of expensive black-box optimization problems. Several methods have been proposed recently for performing Bayesian optimization with constraints, based on the expected improvement (EI) heuristic.…
The minimum error entropy (MEE) criterion has been verified as a powerful approach for non-Gaussian signal processing and robust machine learning. However, the implementation of MEE on robust classification is rather a vacancy in the…
Identifying future congestion points in electricity distribution networks is an important challenge distribution system operators face. A proven approach for addressing this challenge is to assess distribution grid adequacy using…