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Supplementary Material Misspecified GP Bandit Optimization Ilija Bogunovic and Andreas Krause (NeurIPS 2021) A GP bandits: Useful definitions and auxiliary results (Realizable setting)

Neural Information Processing Systems

Such assumptions on the noise variables are frequently used in bandit optimization. Gaussian process with posterior mean and variance that correspond to Eq. (8) and Eq. It also allows us to rewrite Eq. Gaussian Process (supported on D) with the corresponding kernel function. Suppose the learner's hypothesis class is While the first two terms in this bound can be effectively controlled and bounded as in the proof of Theorem 1, the last term, i.e., Such a function can easily be constructed, e.g., via the approach outlined in [36].



Pathwise Learning of Stochastic Dynamical Systems with Partial Observations

Yang, Nicole Tianjiao

arXiv.org Machine Learning

The reconstruction and inference of stochastic dynamical systems from data is a fundamental task in inverse problems and statistical learning. While surrogate modeling advances computational methods to approximate these dynamics, standard approaches typically require high-fidelity training data. In many practical settings, the data are indirectly observed through noisy and nonlinear measurement. The challenge lies not only in approximating the coefficients of the SDEs, but in simultaneously inferring the posterior updates given the observations. In this work, we present a neural path estimation approach to solve stochastic dynamical systems based on variational inference. We first derive a stochastic control problem that solve filtering posterior path measure corresponding to a pathwise Zakai equation. We then construct a generative model that maps the prior path measure to posterior measure through the controlled diffusion and the associated Randon-Nykodym derivative. Through an amortization of sample paths of the observation process, the control is learned by an embedding of the noisy observation paths. Thus, we learn the unknown prior SDE and the control can recover the conditional path measure given the observation sample paths and we learn an associated SDE which induces the same path measure. In the end, we perform experiments on nonlinear dynamical systems, demonstrating the model's ability to learn multimodal, chaotic, or high dimensional systems.


Perturbation-mitigated USV Navigation with Distributionally Robust Reinforcement Learning

Zhang, Zhaofan, Yang, Minghao, Xie, Sihong, Xiong, Hui

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The robustness of Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USV) is crucial when facing unknown and complex marine environments, especially when heteroscedastic observational noise poses significant challenges to sensor-based navigation tasks. Recently, Distributional Reinforcement Learning (DistRL) has shown promising results in some challenging autonomous navigation tasks without prior environmental information. However, these methods overlook situations where noise patterns vary across different environmental conditions, hindering safe navigation and disrupting the learning of value functions. To address the problem, we propose DRIQN to integrate Distributionally Robust Optimization (DRO) with implicit quantile networks to optimize worst-case performance under natural environmental conditions. Leveraging explicit subgroup modeling in the replay buffer, DRIQN incorporates heterogeneous noise sources and target robustness-critical scenarios. Experimental results based on the risk-sensitive environment demonstrate that DRIQN significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving +13.51\% success rate, -12.28\% collision rate and +35.46\% for time saving, +27.99\% for energy saving, compared with the runner-up.


Aspiration-based Perturbed Learning Automata in Games with Noisy Utility Measurements. Part A: Stochastic Stability in Non-zero-Sum Games

Chasparis, Georgios C.

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Reinforcement-based learning has attracted considerable attention both in modeling human behavior as well as in engineering, for designing measurement- or payoff-based optimization schemes. Such learning schemes exhibit several advantages, especially in relation to filtering out noisy observations. However, they may exhibit several limitations when applied in a distributed setup. In multi-player weakly-acyclic games, and when each player applies an independent copy of the learning dynamics, convergence to (usually desirable) pure Nash equilibria cannot be guaranteed. Prior work has only focused on a small class of games, namely potential and coordination games. To address this main limitation, this paper introduces a novel payoff-based learning scheme for distributed optimization, namely aspiration-based perturbed learning automata (APLA). In this class of dynamics, and contrary to standard reinforcement-based learning schemes, each player's probability distribution for selecting actions is reinforced both by repeated selection and an aspiration factor that captures the player's satisfaction level. We provide a stochastic stability analysis of APLA in multi-player positive-utility games under the presence of noisy observations. This is the first part of the paper that characterizes stochastic stability in generic non-zero-sum games by establishing equivalence of the induced infinite-dimensional Markov chain with a finite dimensional one. In the second part, stochastic stability is further specialized to weakly acyclic games.


Optimization of Smooth Functions with Noisy Observations: Local Minimax Rates

Neural Information Processing Systems

We consider the problem of global optimization of an unknown non-convex smooth function with noisy zeroth-order feedback. We propose a local minimax framework to study the fundamental difficulty of optimizing smooth functions with adaptive function evaluations. We show that for functions with fast growth around their global minima, carefully designed optimization algorithms can identify a near global minimizer with many fewer queries than worst-case global minimax theory predicts. For the special case of strongly convex and smooth functions, our implied convergence rates match the ones developed for zeroth-order convex optimization problems. On the other hand, we show that in the worst case no algorithm can converge faster than the minimax rate of estimating an unknown functions in linf-norm. Finally, we show that non-adaptive algorithms, although optimal in a global minimax sense, do not attain the optimal local minimax rate.



Model-free filtering in high dimensions via projection and score-based diffusions

Christensen, Sören, Kallsen, Jan, Strauch, Claudia, Trottner, Lukas

arXiv.org Machine Learning

We consider the problem of recovering a latent signal $X$ from its noisy observation $Y$. The unknown law $\mathbb{P}^X$ of $X$, and in particular its support $\mathscr{M}$, are accessible only through a large sample of i.i.d.\ observations. We further assume $\mathscr{M}$ to be a low-dimensional submanifold of a high-dimensional Euclidean space $\mathbb{R}^d$. As a filter or denoiser $\widehat X$, we suggest an estimator of the metric projection $π_{\mathscr{M}}(Y)$ of $Y$ onto the manifold $\mathscr{M}$. To compute this estimator, we study an auxiliary semiparametric model in which $Y$ is obtained by adding isotropic Laplace noise to $X$. Using score matching within a corresponding diffusion model, we obtain an estimator of the Bayesian posterior $\mathbb{P}^{X \mid Y}$ in this setup. Our main theoretical results show that, in the limit of high dimension $d$, this posterior $\mathbb{P}^{X\mid Y}$ is concentrated near the desired metric projection $π_{\mathscr{M}}(Y)$.