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Multi-stage stochastic linear programs (MSLPs) are notoriously hard to solve in general. Linear decision rules (LDRs) yield an approximation of an MSLP by restricting the decisions at each stage to be an affine function of the observed…
We propose a stochastic optimization method for minimizing loss functions, expressed as an expected value, that adaptively controls the batch size used in the computation of gradient approximations and the step size used to move along such…
This work addresses an extended class of optimal control problems where a target for a system state has the form of an ellipsoid rather than a fixed, single point. As a computationally affordable method for resolving the extended problem,…
The most common approaches for solving multistage stochastic programming problems in the research literature have been to either use value functions ("dynamic programming") or scenario trees ("stochastic programming") to approximate the…
There has been widespread interest in the use of grid-level storage to handle the variability from increasing penetrations of wind and solar energy. This problem setting requires optimizing energy storage and release decisions for anywhere…
A matrix optimization problem over an uncertain linear system on finite horizon (abbreviated as MOPUL) is studied, in which the uncertain transition matrix is regarded as a decision variable. This problem is in general NP-hard. By using the…
This paper studies optimal motion planning subject to motion and environment uncertainties. By modeling the system as a probabilistic labeled Markov decision process (PL-MDP), the control objective is to synthesize a finite-memory policy,…
Approximate computing is a computation domain which can be used to trade time and energy with quality and therefore is useful in embedded systems. Energy is the prime resource in battery-driven embedded systems, like robots. Approximate…
This paper considers an optimal impulse control problem of dynamical systems generated by a flow. The performance criteria are total costs over the infinite time horizon. Apart from the main performance to be minimized, there are multiple…
A numerical method is developed to solve linear semi-infinite programming problem (LSIP) in which the iterates produced by the algorithm are feasible for the original problem. This is achieved by constructing a sequence of standard linear…
We implement the adaptive step size scheme from the optimization methods AdaGrad and Adam in a novel variant of the Proximal Gradient Method (PGM). Our algorithm, dubbed AdaProx, avoids the need for explicit computation of the Lipschitz…
This paper studies motion planning of a mobile robot under uncertainty. The control objective is to synthesize a {finite-memory} control policy, such that a high-level task specified as a Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) formula is satisfied…
We study approximation algorithms for scheduling problems with the objective of minimizing total weighted completion time, under identical and related machine models with job precedence constraints. We give algorithms that improve upon many…
Line of Sight (LoS) networks were designed to model wireless communication in settings which may contain obstacles restricting node visibility. For fixed positive integer $d$, and positive integer $\omega$, a graph $G=(V,E)$ is a…
Proximal policy optimization (PPO) has yielded state-of-the-art results in policy search, a subfield of reinforcement learning, with one of its key points being the use of a surrogate objective function to restrict the step size at each…
Self-adjusting computation is an approach for automatically producing dynamic algorithms from static ones. The approach works by tracking control and data dependencies, and propagating changes through the dependencies when making an update.…
A widely used heuristic for solving stochastic optimization problems is to use a deterministic rolling horizon procedure, which has been modified to handle uncertainty (e.g. buffer stocks, schedule slack). This approach has been criticized…
This paper considers stochastic optimization problems with weakly convex objective and constraint functions. We propose Prox-PEP, a proximal method equipped with quadratic subproblems. To handle nonlinear equality constraints, we employ an…
There is a growing interest in using electric vehicles (EVs) and drones for many applications. However, battery-oriented issues, including range anxiety and battery degradation, impede adoption. Battery swap stations are one alternative to…
Backtracking linesearch is the de facto approach for minimizing continuously differentiable functions with locally Lipschitz gradient. In recent years, it has been shown that in the convex setting it is possible to avoid linesearch…