Related papers: Approximate Dynamic Programming via Sum of Squares…
We propose a randomized second-order method for optimization known as the Newton Sketch: it is based on performing an approximate Newton step using a randomly projected or sub-sampled Hessian. For self-concordant functions, we prove that…
We consider the problem of finding optimally stable polynomial approximations to the exponential for application to one-step integration of initial value ordinary and partial differential equations. The objective is to find the largest…
The construction of effective and informative landscapes for stochastic dynamical systems has proven a long-standing and complex problem. In many situations, the dynamics may be described by a Langevin equation while constructing a…
In this paper, we introduce a new stochastic approximation (SA) type algorithm, namely the randomized stochastic gradient (RSG) method, for solving an important class of nonlinear (possibly nonconvex) stochastic programming (SP) problems.…
A classic result by Cook, Gerards, Schrijver, and Tardos provides an upper bound of $n \Delta$ on the proximity of optimal solutions of an Integer Linear Programming problem and its standard linear relaxation. In this bound, $n$ is the…
We develop a new Approximate Dynamic Programming (ADP) method for infinite horizon discounted reward Markov Decision Processes (MDP) based on projection onto a subsemimodule. We approximate the value function in terms of a $(\min,+)$ linear…
We study the problem of estimating the value function of discrete-time switched systems under arbitrary switching. Unlike the switched LQR problem, where both inputs and mode sequences are optimized, we consider the case where switching is…
Approximate dynamic programming is a popular method for solving large Markov decision processes. This paper describes a new class of approximate dynamic programming (ADP) methods- distributionally robust ADP-that address the curse of…
We consider a class of distributed optimization problem where the objective function consists of a sum of strongly convex and smooth functions and a (possibly nonsmooth) convex regularizer. A multi-agent network is assumed, where each agent…
We study a signature-driven numerical scheme to solve multi-dimensional linear-quadratic (LQ) stochastic control problems. Using that linear signature functionals are dense in the natural class of admissible controls, we show that our…
This paper presents a practical method for finding the globally optimal solution to the sum-of-ratios problem arising in image processing, engineering and management. Unlike traditional methods which may get trapped in local minima due to…
Policy iteration and value iteration are at the core of many (approximate) dynamic programming methods. For Markov Decision Processes with finite state and action spaces, we show that they are instances of semismooth Newton-type methods to…
In this paper, we study numerical approximations for optimal control of a class of stochastic partial differential equations with partial observations. The system state evolves in a Hilbert space, whereas observations are given in…
We present an algorithm called Tropical Dynamic Programming (TDP) which builds upper and lower approximations of the Bellman value functions in risk-neutral Multistage Stochastic Programming (MSP), with independent noises of finite…
We establish an algorithm to learn feedback maps from data for a class of robust model predictive control (MPC) problems. The algorithm accounts for the approximation errors due to the learning directly at the synthesis stage, ensuring…
We consider the problem of approximating the reachable set of a discrete-time polynomial system from a semialgebraic set of initial conditions under general semialgebraic set constraints. Assuming inclusion in a given simple set like a box…
We revisit the linear programming approach to deterministic, continuous time, infinite horizon discounted optimal control problems. In the first part, we relax the original problem to an infinite-dimensional linear program over a measure…
We present an accelerated algorithm for the solution of static Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equations related to optimal control problems. Our scheme is based on a classic policy iteration procedure, which is known to have superlinear…
Markov Decision Processes (MDP) is an useful framework to cast optimal sequential decision making problems. Given any MDP the aim is to find the optimal action selection mechanism i.e., the optimal policy. Typically, the optimal policy…
This paper studies an optimal control problem for continuous-time stochastic systems subject to reachability objectives specified in a subclass of metric interval temporal logic specifications, a temporal logic with real-time constraints.…