5 accepted papers
We analytically solve the Mountain Car problem, a canonical benchmark in RL, and derive an optimal control solution, closing a gap after 36 years. This enables us to reveal two surprising insights: The optimal control is quite simple, yet modern RL agents display a large gap to optimality. Motivated…
We consider the problem of computing persistent homology (PH) for large-scale Euclidean point cloud data, aimed at downstream machine learning tasks, where the exponential growth of the most widely-used Vietoris-Rips complex imposes serious computational limitations. Although more scalable alternati…
We consider the problem of learning the dynamics in the topology of time-evolving point clouds, the prevalent spatiotemporal model for systems exhibiting collective behavior, such as swarms of insects and birds or particles in physics. In such systems, patterns emerge from (local) interactions among…
Topological data analysis offers a rich source of valuable information to study vision problems. Yet, so far we lack a theoretically sound connection to popular kernel-based learning techniques, such as kernel SVMs or kernel PCA. In this work, we establish such a connection by designing a multi-scal…
We consider the problem of statistical computations with persistence diagrams, a summary representation of topological features in data. These diagrams encode persistent homology, a widely used invariant in topological data analysis. While several avenues towards a statistical treatment of the diagr…