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We consider a general class of Dynamic Programming (DP) problems with non-separable objective functions. We show that for any problem in this class, there exists an augmented-state DP problem which satisfies the Principle of Optimality and…
Solving optimal control problems for transport-dominated partial differential equations (PDEs) can become computationally expensive, especially when dealing with high-dimensional systems. To overcome this challenge, we focus on developing…
By enabling constraint-aware online model adaptation, model predictive control using Gaussian process (GP) regression has exhibited impressive performance in real-world applications and received considerable attention in the learning-based…
This paper describes an online off-policy data-driven reinforcement learning based-algorithm to regulate and control the relative position of a deputy satellite in an autonomous satellite docking problem. The optimal control policy is…
This paper presents two new approaches to decomposing and solving large Markov decision problems (MDPs), a partial decoupling method and a complete decoupling method. In these approaches, a large, stochastic decision problem is divided into…
This paper shows that the optimal policy and value functions of a Markov Decision Process (MDP), either discounted or not, can be captured by a finite-horizon undiscounted Optimal Control Problem (OCP), even if based on an inexact model.…
Discrete-time stochastic systems with continuous spaces are hard to verify and control, even with MDP abstractions due to the curse of dimensionality. We propose an abstraction-based framework with robust dynamic programming mappings that…
We consider the problem of optimizing a high-dimensional convex function using stochastic zeroth-order queries. Under sparsity assumptions on the gradients or function values, we present two algorithms: a successive component/feature…
We study differentially private (DP) algorithms for stochastic convex optimization (SCO). In this problem the goal is to approximately minimize the population loss given i.i.d. samples from a distribution over convex and Lipschitz loss…
In this work, we consider optimal control problems for mechanical systems on vector spaces with fixed initial and free final state and a quadratic Lagrange term. Specifically, the dynamics is described by a second order ODE containing an…
This study focuses on using direct methods (first-discretize-then-optimize) to solve optimal control problems for a class of nonsmooth dynamical systems governed by differential variational inequalities (DVI), called optimal control…
The paper describes a continuous second-variation algorithm to solve optimal control problems where the control is defined on a closed set. A second order expansion of a Lagrangian provides linear updates of the control to construct a…
In this paper we present a new steepest-descent type algorithm for convex optimization problems. Our algorithm pieces the unknown into sub-blocs of unknowns and considers a partial optimization over each sub-bloc. In quadratic optimization,…
Conic programming has well-documented merits in a gamut of signal processing and machine learning tasks. This contribution revisits a recently developed first-order conic descent (CD) solver, and advances it in three aspects: intuition,…
We consider the approximation of some optimal control problems for the Navier-Stokes equation via a Dynamic Programming approach. These control problems arise in many industrial applications and are very challenging from the numerical point…
We consider an optimal control problem (OCP) for a partial differential equation (PDE) with random coefficients. The optimal control function is a deterministic, distributed forcing term that minimizes an expected quadratic regularized loss…
Reward fine-tuning of diffusion and flow models and sampling from tilted or Boltzmann distributions can both be formulated as stochastic optimal control (SOC) problems, where learning an optimal generative dynamics corresponds to optimizing…
In this paper, we study the learning of safe policies in the setting of reinforcement learning problems. This is, we aim to control a Markov Decision Process (MDP) of which we do not know the transition probabilities, but we have access to…
This paper is about how to partition decision variables while decomposing a large-scale optimization problem for the best performance of distributed solution methods. Solving a large-scale optimization problem sequen- tially can be…
This paper proposes three strong second order cone programming (SOCP) relaxations for the AC optimal power flow (OPF) problem. These three relaxations are incomparable to each other and two of them are incomparable to the standard SDP…