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We introduce a doubly stochastic proximal gradient algorithm for optimizing a finite average of smooth convex functions, whose gradients depend on numerically expensive expectations. Our main motivation is the acceleration of the…
Submodular functions, defined on continuous or discrete domains, arise in numerous applications. We study the minimization of the difference of two submodular (DS) functions, over both domains, extending prior work restricted to set…
In this paper, we address stochastic optimization problems involving a composition of a non-smooth outer function and a smooth inner function, a formulation frequently encountered in machine learning and operations research. To deal with…
The popularity of Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR), a risk functional from finance, has been growing in the control systems community due to its intuitive interpretation and axiomatic foundation. We consider a nonstandard optimal control…
In stochastic convex optimization the goal is to minimize a convex function $F(x) \doteq {\mathbf E}_{{\mathbf f}\sim D}[{\mathbf f}(x)]$ over a convex set $\cal K \subset {\mathbb R}^d$ where $D$ is some unknown distribution and each…
Derivative-free optimization (DFO) is the mathematical study of the optimization algorithms that do not use derivatives. One branch of DFO focuses on model-based DFO methods, where an approximation of the objective function is used to guide…
Optimization of conditional convex risk measure is a central theme in dynamic portfolio selection theory, which has not yet systematically studied in the previous literature perhaps since conditional convex risk measures are neither random…
Choosing the optimization algorithm that performs best on a given machine learning problem is often delicate, and there is no guarantee that current state-of-the-art algorithms will perform well across all tasks. Consequently, the more…
The entropic value-at-risk (EVaR) is a new coherent risk measure, which is an upper bound for both the value-at-risk (VaR) and conditional value-at-risk (CVaR). As important properties, the EVaR is strongly monotone over its domain and…
The theory of convex risk functions has now been well established as the basis for identifying the families of risk functions that should be used in risk averse optimization problems. Despite its theoretical appeal, the implementation of a…
We provide a general framework to construct finite dimensional approximations of the space of convex functions, which also applies to the space of c-convex functions and to the space of support functions of convex bodies. We give estimates…
The paper introduces the first formulation of convex Q-learning for Markov decision processes with function approximation. The algorithms and theory rest on a relaxation of a dual of Manne's celebrated linear programming characterization of…
This paper presents a directional proximal point method (DPPM) to derive the minimum of any C1-smooth function f. The proposed method requires a function persistent a local convex segment along the descent direction at any non-critical…
Consider the following distributed optimization scenario. A worker has access to training data that it uses to compute the gradients while a server decides when to stop iterative computation based on its target accuracy or delay…
In this paper, we design and apply novel inexact adaptive algorithms to deal with minimizing difference-of-convex (DC) functions in Hilbert spaces. We first introduce I-ADCA, an inexact adaptive counterpart of the well-recognized DCA…
Mirror descent (MD) is a powerful first-order optimization technique that subsumes several optimization algorithms including gradient descent (GD). In this work, we develop a semi-definite programming (SDP) framework to analyze the…
In many sequential decision-making problems we may want to manage risk by minimizing some measure of variability in costs in addition to minimizing a standard criterion. Conditional value-at-risk (CVaR) is a relatively new risk measure that…
We introduce new global and local inexact oracle concepts for a wide class of convex functions in composite convex minimization. Such inexact oracles naturally come from primal-dual framework, barrier smoothing, inexact computations of…
In this paper, we study a variant of the quadratic penalty method for linearly constrained convex problems, which has already been widely used but actually lacks theoretical justification. Namely, the penalty parameter steadily increases…
In this paper we consider minimization of a difference-of-convex (DC) function with and without linear constraints. We first study a smooth approximation of a generic DC function, termed difference-of-Moreau-envelopes (DME) smoothing, where…