Related papers: Stochastic Artificial Potentials for Online Safe N…
Given a convex quadratic potential of which its minimum is the agent's goal and a Euclidean space populated with ellipsoidal obstacles, one can construct a Rimon-Koditschek (RK) artificial potential to navigate. Its negative gradient…
Given a convex potential in a space with convex obstacles, an artificial potential is used to navigate to the minimum of the natural potential while avoiding collisions. The artificial potential combines the natural potential with…
We consider a family of algorithms that successively sample and minimize simple stochastic models of the objective function. We show that under reasonable conditions on approximation quality and regularity of the models, any such algorithm…
Navigation tasks often cannot be defined in terms of a target, either because global position information is unavailable or unreliable or because target location is not explicitly known a priori. This task is then often defined indirectly…
An usual problem in statistics consists in estimating the minimizer of a convex function. When we have to deal with large samples taking values in high dimensional spaces, stochastic gradient algorithms and their averaged versions are…
We consider the problem of minimizing the sum of two convex functions: one is the average of a large number of smooth component functions, and the other is a general convex function that admits a simple proximal mapping. We assume the whole…
Preconditioning is a crucial operation in gradient-based numerical optimisation. It helps decrease the local condition number of a function by appropriately transforming its gradient. For a convex function, where the gradient can be…
We prove novel convergence results for a stochastic proximal gradient algorithm suitable for solving a large class of convex optimization problems, where a convex objective function is given by the sum of a smooth and a possibly non-smooth…
In this paper we consider convex optimization problems with stochastic composite objective function subject to (possibly) infinite intersection of constraints. The objective function is expressed in terms of expectation operator over a sum…
Stochastic differentiable approximation schemes are widely used for solving high dimensional problems. Most of existing methods satisfy some desirable properties, including conditional descent inequalities, and almost sure (a.s.)…
We present a uniform analysis of biased stochastic gradient methods for minimizing convex, strongly convex, and non-convex composite objectives, and identify settings where bias is useful in stochastic gradient estimation. The framework we…
This work proposes an algorithm to bound the minimum distance between points on trajectories of a dynamical system and points on an unsafe set. Prior work on certifying safety of trajectories includes barrier and density methods, which do…
This work studies constrained stochastic optimization problems where the objective and constraint functions are convex and expressed as compositions of stochastic functions. The problem arises in the context of fair classification, fair…
In this paper, we study the problem of distributed multi-agent optimization over a network, where each agent possesses a local cost function that is smooth and strongly convex. The global objective is to find a common solution that…
We consider minimization of a smooth nonconvex function with inexact oracle access to gradient and Hessian (without assuming access to the function value) to achieve approximate second-order optimality. A novel feature of our method is that…
In this paper, we present a stochastic gradient algorithm for minimizing a smooth objective function that is an expectation over noisy cost samples, and only the latter are observed for any given parameter. Our algorithm employs a gradient…
We study online convex optimization under stochastic sub-gradient observation faults, where we introduce adaptive algorithms with minimax optimal regret guarantees. We specifically study scenarios where our sub-gradient observations can be…
We analyze stochastic gradient descent for optimizing non-convex functions. In many cases for non-convex functions the goal is to find a reasonable local minimum, and the main concern is that gradient updates are trapped in saddle points.…
A variant of consensus based distributed gradient descent (\textbf{DGD}) is studied for finite sums of smooth but possibly non-convex functions. In particular, the local gradient term in the fixed step-size iteration of each agent is…
Distributionally-robust optimization is often studied for a fixed set of distributions rather than time-varying distributions that can drift significantly over time (which is, for instance, the case in finance and sociology due to…