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Stochastic policies (also known as relaxed controls) are widely used in continuous-time reinforcement learning algorithms. However, executing a stochastic policy and evaluating its performance in a continuous-time environment remain open…
We study a stochastic first order primal-dual method for solving convex-concave saddle point problems over real reflexive Banach spaces using Bregman divergences and relative smoothness assumptions, in which we allow for stochastic error in…
Large-scale saddle-point problems arise in such machine learning tasks as GANs and linear models with affine constraints. In this paper, we study distributed saddle-point problems (SPP) with strongly-convex-strongly-concave smooth…
We introduce a new sequential subspace optimization method for large-scale saddle-point problems. It solves iteratively a sequence of auxiliary saddle-point problems in low-dimensional subspaces, spanned by directions derived from…
The convex analytic method has proved to be a very versatile method for the study of infinite horizon average cost optimal stochastic control problems. In this paper, we revisit the convex analytic method and make three primary…
The Primal-Dual (PD) algorithm is widely used in convex optimization to determine saddle points. While the stability of the PD algorithm can be easily guaranteed, strict contraction is nontrivial to establish in most cases. This work…
We present a novel algorithm for non-linear instrumental variable (IV) regression, DualIV, which simplifies traditional two-stage methods via a dual formulation. Inspired by problems in stochastic programming, we show that two-stage…
Projected policy gradient under the simplex parameterization, policy gradient and natural policy gradient under the softmax parameterization, are fundamental algorithms in reinforcement learning. There have been a flurry of recent…
Since the objective functions of reinforcement learning problems are typically highly nonconvex, it is desirable that policy gradient, the most popular algorithm, escapes saddle points and arrives at second-order stationary points. Existing…
We propose a modified primal-dual method for general convex optimization problems with changing constraints. We obtain properties of Lagrangian saddle points for these problems which enable us to establish convergence of the proposed…
Recently, the problem of local minima in very high dimensional non-convex optimization has been challenged and the problem of saddle points has been introduced. This paper introduces a dynamic type of normalization that forces the system to…
We consider large-scale Markov decision processes (MDPs) with an unknown cost function and employ stochastic convex optimization tools to address the problem of imitation learning, which consists of learning a policy from a finite set of…
In this paper we consider a class of optimization problems with a strongly convex objective function and the feasible set given by an intersection of a simple convex set with a set given by a number of linear equality and inequality…
Weak constraint four-dimensional variational data assimilation is an important method for incorporating data (typically observations) into a model. The linearised system arising within the minimisation process can be formulated as a saddle…
We consider a composite convex minimization problem associated with regularized empirical risk minimization, which often arises in machine learning. We propose two new stochastic gradient methods that are based on stochastic dual averaging…
We study a first-order primal-dual subgradient method to optimize risk-constrained risk-penalized optimization problems, where risk is modeled via the popular conditional value at risk (CVaR) measure. The algorithm processes independent and…
Reinforcement learning (RL) problems over general state and action spaces are notoriously challenging. In contrast to the tableau setting, one can not enumerate all the states and then iteratively update the policies for each state. This…
We consider the convex-concave saddle point problem $\min_{x}\max_{y} f(x)+y^\top A x-g(y)$ where $f$ is smooth and convex and $g$ is smooth and strongly convex. We prove that if the coupling matrix $A$ has full column rank, the vanilla…
This paper considers an optimization problem for a dynamical system whose evolution depends on a collection of binary decision variables. We develop scalable approximation algorithms with provable suboptimality bounds to provide…
We study the problem of variable selection in convex nonparametric regression. Under the assumption that the true regression function is convex and sparse, we develop a screening procedure to select a subset of variables that contains the…