20,783 research outputs found
A Survey of Monte Carlo Tree Search Methods
Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) is a recently proposed search method that combines the precision of tree search with the generality of random sampling. It has received considerable interest due to its spectacular success in the difficult problem of computer Go, but has also proved beneficial in a range of other domains. This paper is a survey of the literature to date, intended to provide a snapshot of the state of the art after the first five years of MCTS research. We outline the core algorithm's derivation, impart some structure on the many variations and enhancements that have been proposed, and summarize the results from the key game and nongame domains to which MCTS methods have been applied. A number of open research questions indicate that the field is ripe for future work
Explicit Learning Curves for Transduction and Application to Clustering and Compression Algorithms
Inductive learning is based on inferring a general rule from a finite data
set and using it to label new data. In transduction one attempts to solve the
problem of using a labeled training set to label a set of unlabeled points,
which are given to the learner prior to learning. Although transduction seems
at the outset to be an easier task than induction, there have not been many
provably useful algorithms for transduction. Moreover, the precise relation
between induction and transduction has not yet been determined. The main
theoretical developments related to transduction were presented by Vapnik more
than twenty years ago. One of Vapnik's basic results is a rather tight error
bound for transductive classification based on an exact computation of the
hypergeometric tail. While tight, this bound is given implicitly via a
computational routine. Our first contribution is a somewhat looser but explicit
characterization of a slightly extended PAC-Bayesian version of Vapnik's
transductive bound. This characterization is obtained using concentration
inequalities for the tail of sums of random variables obtained by sampling
without replacement. We then derive error bounds for compression schemes such
as (transductive) support vector machines and for transduction algorithms based
on clustering. The main observation used for deriving these new error bounds
and algorithms is that the unlabeled test points, which in the transductive
setting are known in advance, can be used in order to construct useful data
dependent prior distributions over the hypothesis space
Fast Approximate Max-n Monte Carlo Tree Search for Ms Pac-Man
We present an application of Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) for the game of Ms Pac-Man. Contrary to most applications of MCTS to date, Ms Pac-Man requires almost real-time decision making and does not have a natural end state. We approached the problem by performing Monte Carlo tree searches on a five player maxn tree representation of the game with limited tree search depth. We performed a number of experiments using both the MCTS game agents (for pacman and ghosts) and agents used in previous work (for ghosts). Performance-wise, our approach gets excellent scores, outperforming previous non-MCTS opponent approaches to the game by up to two orders of magnitude. © 2011 IEEE
Functional Bandits
We introduce the functional bandit problem, where the objective is to find an
arm that optimises a known functional of the unknown arm-reward distributions.
These problems arise in many settings such as maximum entropy methods in
natural language processing, and risk-averse decision-making, but current
best-arm identification techniques fail in these domains. We propose a new
approach, that combines functional estimation and arm elimination, to tackle
this problem. This method achieves provably efficient performance guarantees.
In addition, we illustrate this method on a number of important functionals in
risk management and information theory, and refine our generic theoretical
results in those cases
PAC-Bayesian Theory Meets Bayesian Inference
We exhibit a strong link between frequentist PAC-Bayesian risk bounds and the
Bayesian marginal likelihood. That is, for the negative log-likelihood loss
function, we show that the minimization of PAC-Bayesian generalization risk
bounds maximizes the Bayesian marginal likelihood. This provides an alternative
explanation to the Bayesian Occam's razor criteria, under the assumption that
the data is generated by an i.i.d distribution. Moreover, as the negative
log-likelihood is an unbounded loss function, we motivate and propose a
PAC-Bayesian theorem tailored for the sub-gamma loss family, and we show that
our approach is sound on classical Bayesian linear regression tasks.Comment: Published at NIPS 2015
(http://papers.nips.cc/paper/6569-pac-bayesian-theory-meets-bayesian-inference
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