Related papers: Stochastic Variance Reduction Methods for Policy E…
We propose a formulation of the stochastic cutting stock problem as a discounted infinite-horizon Markov decision process. At each decision epoch, given current inventory of items, an agent chooses in which patterns to cut objects in stock…
The recently developed Distributed Block Proximal Method, for solving stochastic big-data convex optimization problems, is studied in this paper under the assumption of constant stepsizes and strongly convex (possibly non-smooth) local…
Direct policy gradient methods for reinforcement learning and continuous control problems are a popular approach for a variety of reasons: 1) they are easy to implement without explicit knowledge of the underlying model 2) they are an…
Quadratic programming is a workhorse of modern nonlinear optimization, control, and data science. Although regularized methods offer convergence guarantees under minimal assumptions on the problem data, they can exhibit the slow…
This paper develops algorithms for high-dimensional stochastic control problems based on deep learning and dynamic programming. Unlike classical approximate dynamic programming approaches, we first approximate the optimal policy by means of…
Temporal-Difference (TD) learning with nonlinear smooth function approximation for policy evaluation has achieved great success in modern reinforcement learning. It is shown that such a problem can be reformulated as a stochastic…
Optimal stopping is the problem of determining when to stop a stochastic system in order to maximize reward, which is of practical importance in domains such as finance, operations management and healthcare. Existing methods for…
We consider a two-stage stochastic optimization problem, in which a long-term optimization variable is coupled with a set of short-term optimization variables in both objective and constraint functions. Despite that two-stage stochastic…
We present a parallelized primal-dual algorithm for solving constrained convex optimization problems. The algorithm is "block-based," in that vectors of primal and dual variables are partitioned into blocks, each of which is updated only by…
We consider strongly-convex-strongly-concave saddle-point problems with general non-bilinear objective and different condition numbers with respect to the primal and the dual variables. First, we consider such problems with smooth composite…
We present an algorithm to approximate the solutions to variational problems where set of admissible functions consists of convex functions. The main motivator behind this numerical method is estimating solutions to Adverse Selection…
In reinforcement learning, classic on-policy evaluation methods often suffer from high variance and require massive online data to attain the desired accuracy. Previous studies attempt to reduce evaluation variance by searching for or…
In this work, we consider solving optimization problems with a stochastic objective and deterministic equality constraints. We propose a Trust-Region Sequential Quadratic Programming method to find both first- and second-order stationary…
We consider the solution of a stochastic convex optimization problem $\mathbb{E}[f(x;\theta^*,\xi)]$ over a closed and convex set $X$ in a regime where $\theta^*$ is unavailable and $\xi$ is a suitably defined random variable. Instead,…
In this paper, we develop a new accelerated stochastic gradient method for efficiently solving the convex regularized empirical risk minimization problem in mini-batch settings. The use of mini-batches is becoming a golden standard in the…
In this paper, we explore a broad class of constrained saddle point problems with a bilevel structure, wherein the upper-level objective function is nonconvex-concave and smooth over compact and convex constraint sets, subject to a strongly…
Increasing effort is put into the development of methods for learning mechanistic models from data. This task entails not only the accurate estimation of parameters but also a suitable model structure. Recent work on the discovery of…
Regularized empirical risk minimization problem with linear predictor appears frequently in machine learning. In this paper, we propose a new stochastic primal-dual method to solve this class of problems. Different from existing methods,…
Adversarial neural networks solve many important problems in data science, but are notoriously difficult to train. These difficulties come from the fact that optimal weights for adversarial nets correspond to saddle points, and not…
We consider the problem of finding a saddle point for the convex-concave objective $\min_x \max_y f(x) + \langle Ax, y\rangle - g^*(y)$, where $f$ is a convex function with locally Lipschitz gradient and $g$ is convex and possibly…