A locally-built, LLM-digested index of recent arXiv papers in quant finance, geometry/topology, and statistical ML — keyword search served straight from SQLite on this machine.
We discuss the relative merits of optimistic and randomized approaches to exploration in reinforcement learning. Optimistic approaches presented in the literature apply an optimistic boost to the value estimate at each state-action pair and select actions that are greedy with respect to the resulting optimistic value f…
We show that the optimistic limits of the colored Jones polynomials of the hyperbolic knots coincide with the optimistic limits of the Kashaev invariants modulo 4π2.
Robust Optimization has traditionally taken a pessimistic, or worst-case viewpoint of uncertainty which is motivated by a desire to find sets of optimal policies that maintain feasibility under a variety of operating conditions. In this paper, we explore an optimistic, or best-case view of uncertainty and show that it …
The optimistic limit is the mathematical formulation of the classical limit which is a physical method to expect the actual limit by using saddle point method of certain potential function. The original optimistic limit of the Kashaev invariant was formulated by Yokota, and a modified formulation was suggested by the a…
We show how to take any two parameter-free online learning algorithms with different regret guarantees and obtain a single algorithm whose regret is the minimum of the two base algorithms. Our method is embarrassingly simple: just add the iterates. This trick can generate efficient algorithms that adapt to many norms s…
A generalized optimistic method for saddle point problems with improved complexity.
problem Solving convex-concave saddle point problems efficiently.
method Proposes a generalized optimistic method that includes the optimistic gradient method as a special case, handling constrained saddle point problems with composite objective functions and arbitrary norms.
result Best-known global iteration complexity bounds for first-, second-, and higher-order methods.
It is well known that in stochastic multi-armed bandits (MAB), the sample mean of an arm is typically not an unbiased estimator of its true mean. In this paper, we decouple three different sources of this selection bias: adaptive \emph{sampling} of arms, adaptive \emph{stopping} of the experiment, and adaptively \emph{…
In this paper we consider solving saddle point problems using two variants of Gradient Descent-Ascent algorithms, Extra-gradient (EG) and Optimistic Gradient Descent Ascent (OGDA) methods. We show that both of these algorithms admit a unified analysis as approximations of the classical proximal point method for solving…
A fundamental problem arising in many areas of machine learning is the evaluation of the likelihood of a given observation under different nominal distributions. Frequently, these nominal distributions are themselves estimated from data, which makes them susceptible to estimation errors. We thus propose to replace each…
This paper develops a model of reference-dependent assessment of subjective beliefs in which loss-averse people optimally choose the expectation as the reference point to balance the current felicity from the optimistic anticipation and the future disappointment from the realisation. The choice of over-optimism or over…
In many cases an intelligent agent may want to learn how to mimic a single observed demonstrated trajectory. In this work we consider how to perform such procedural learning from observation, which could help to enable agents to better use the enormous set of video data on observation sequences. Our approach exploits t…
We address the issue of limit cycling behavior in training Generative Adversarial Networks and propose the use of Optimistic Mirror Decent (OMD) for training Wasserstein GANs. Recent theoretical results have shown that optimistic mirror decent (OMD) can enjoy faster regret rates in the context of zero-sum games. WGANs …
In this paper, we prove some convergence results of a special case of optimistic policy iteration algorithm for stochastic shortest path problem. We consider both Monte Carlo and TD(λ) methods for the policy evaluation step under the condition that the termination state will eventually be reached almost surely.
Bayesian optimisation is a powerful tool to solve expensive black-box problems, but fails when the stationary assumption made on the objective function is strongly violated, which is the case in particular for ill-conditioned or discontinuous objectives. We tackle this problem by proposing a new Bayesian optimisation f…
Yokota suggested an optimistic limit method of the Kashaev invariants of hyperbolic knots and showed it determines the complex volumes of the knots. His method is very effective and gives almost combinatorial method of calculating the complex volumes. However, to describe the triangulation of the knot complement, he re…