Related papers: An Optimizer's Approach to Stochastic Control Prob…
Motivated by emerging applications in machine learning, we consider an optimization problem in a general form where the gradient of the objective function is available through a biased stochastic oracle. We assume a bias-control parameter…
We study high-dimensional stochastic optimal control problems in which many agents cooperate to minimize a convex cost functional. We consider both the full-information problem, in which each agent observes the states of all other agents,…
This paper considers the optimal control for hybrid systems whose trajectories transition between distinct subsystems when state-dependent constraints are satisfied. Though this class of systems is useful while modeling a variety of…
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…
Efficient methods to provide sub-optimal solutions to non-convex optimization problems with knowledge of the solution's sub-optimality would facilitate the widespread application of nonlinear optimal control algorithms. To that end,…
We consider a stochastic control problem where the set of controls is not necessarily convex and the system is governed by a nonlinear backward stochastic differential equation. We establish necessary as well as sufficient conditions of…
In this paper we consider non convex control problems of stochastic differential equations driven by relaxed controls. We present existence of optimal controls and then develop necessary conditions of optimality. We cover both continuous…
This article presents a constrained policy optimization approach for the optimal control of systems under nonstationary uncertainties. We introduce an assumption that we call Markov embeddability that allows us to cast the stochastic…
Optimal control under uncertainty is a prevailing challenge for many reasons. One of the critical difficulties lies in producing tractable solutions for the underlying stochastic optimization problem. We show how advanced approximate…
We present the viewpoint that optimization problems encountered in machine learning can often be interpreted as minimizing a convex functional over a function space, but with a non-convex constraint set introduced by model parameterization.…
The entropy regularization is inspired by information entropy from machine learning and the ideas of exploration and exploitation in reinforcement learning, which appears in the control problem to design an approximating algorithm for the…
Optimal control problems involving hybrid binary-continuous control costs are challenging due to their lack of convexity and weak lower semicontinuity. Replacing such costs with their convex relaxation leads to a primal-dual optimality…
This paper focuses on stochastic proximal gradient methods for optimizing a smooth non-convex loss function with a non-smooth non-convex regularizer and convex constraints. To the best of our knowledge we present the first non-asymptotic…
We consider a stochastic control problem which is composed of a controlled stochastic differential equation, and whose associated cost functional is defined through a controlled backward stochastic differential equation. Under appropriate…
In this article, we propose a data-enabled economic predictive control method for a class of nonlinear systems, which aims to optimize the economic operational performance while handling hard constraints on the system outputs. Two lifting…
Inverse optimization refers to the inference of unknown parameters of an optimization problem based on knowledge of its optimal solutions. This paper considers inverse optimization in the setting where measurements of the optimal solutions…
In this paper, we propose a multilevel stochastic framework for the solution of nonconvex unconstrained optimization problems. The proposed approach uses random regularized first-order models that exploit an available hierarchical…
The maximum hands-off control is the optimal solution to the L0 optimal control problem. It has the minimum support length among all feasible control inputs. To avoid computational difficulties arising from its combinatorial nature, the…
This paper is concerned with data-driven optimal control of nonlinear systems. We present a convex formulation to the optimal control problem (OCP) with a discounted cost function. We consider OCP with both positive and negative discount…
The first part of this paper proposed a family of penalized convex relaxations for solving optimization problems with bilinear matrix inequality (BMI) constraints. In this part, we generalize our approach to a sequential scheme which starts…