Related papers: Non-stationary Stochastic Optimization
Many contemporary applications in signal processing and machine learning give rise to structured non-convex non-smooth optimization problems that can often be tackled by simple iterative methods quite effectively. One of the keys to…
Nonconvex and nonsmooth optimization problems are frequently encountered in much of statistics, business, science and engineering, but they are not yet widely recognized as a technology in the sense of scalability. A reason for this…
We study the problem of Online Convex Optimization (OCO) with memory, which allows loss functions to depend on past decisions and thus captures temporal effects of learning problems. In this paper, we introduce dynamic policy regret as the…
In this paper we deal with stochastic optimization problems where the data distributions change in response to the decision variables. Traditionally, the study of optimization problems with decision-dependent distributions has assumed…
This paper is devoted to studying the stationary solutions of a general constrained optimization problem through its associated unconstrained penalized problems. We aim to answer the question, "what do the stationary solutions of a…
In this article, we consider the problem of unconstrained time-varying convex optimization, where the cost function changes with time. We provide an in-depth technical analysis of the problem and argue why freezing the cost at each time…
We consider the problem of minimizing a convex function that is evolving according to unknown and possibly stochastic dynamics, which may depend jointly on time and on the decision variable itself. Such problems abound in the machine…
In this paper, we consider the classic stochastic (dynamic) knapsack problem, a fundamental mathematical model in revenue management, with general time-varying random demand. Our main goal is to study the optimal policies, which can be…
Optimality conditions in the form of a variational inequality are proved for a class of constrained optimal control problems of stochastic differential equations. The cost function and the inequality constraints are functions of the…
In this paper we study the non-stationary stochastic optimization question with bandit feedback and dynamic regret measures. The seminal work of Besbes et al. (2015) shows that, when aggregated function changes is known a priori, a simple…
We look at a stochastic time-varying optimization problem and we formulate online algorithms to find and track its optimizers in expectation. The algorithms are derived from the intuition that standard prediction and correction steps can be…
We propose a variational method to solve all three estimation problems for nonlinear stochastic dynamical systems: prediction, filtering, and smoothing. Our new approach is based upon a proper choice of cost function, termed the {\it…
This paper is concerned with a finite-horizon inverse control problem, which has the goal of reconstructing, from observations, the possibly non-convex and non-stationary cost driving the actions of an agent. In this context, we present a…
This paper studies an online selection problem, where a seller seeks to sequentially sell multiple copies of an item to arriving buyers. We consider an adversarial setting, making no modeling assumptions about buyers' valuations for the…
We study the problem of estimating the fixed point of a contractive operator defined on a separable Banach space. Focusing on a stochastic query model that provides noisy evaluations of the operator, we analyze a variance-reduced stochastic…
We consider the problem of fitting variational posterior approximations using stochastic optimization methods. The performance of these approximations depends on (1) how well the variational family matches the true posterior…
In the online non-stochastic control problem, an agent sequentially selects control inputs for a linear dynamical system when facing unknown and adversarially selected convex costs and disturbances. A common metric for evaluating control…
A number of optimization approaches have been proposed for optimizing nonconvex objectives (e.g. deep learning models), such as batch gradient descent, stochastic gradient descent and stochastic variance reduced gradient descent. Theory…
This paper considers a distributed stochastic optimization problem where the goal is to minimize the time average of a cost function subject to a set of constraints on the time averages of a related stochastic processes called penalties. We…
In robust combinatorial optimization, we would like to find a solution that performs well under all realizations of an uncertainty set of possible parameter values. How we model this uncertainty set has a decisive influence on the…