Related papers: Stochastic approximation on non-compact measure sp…
We study infinite-horizon robust Markov decision processes (MDPs) on continuous state spaces with structured rectangular ambiguity set. The proposed ambiguity set falls within the convex hull of unknown generating kernels. We utilize the…
For finite-dimensional problems, stochastic approximation methods have long been used to solve stochastic optimization problems. Their application to infinite-dimensional problems is less understood, particularly for nonconvex objectives.…
Majorization-minimization schemes are a broad class of iterative methods targeting general optimization problems, including nonconvex, nonsmooth and stochastic. These algorithms minimize successively a sequence of upper bounds of the…
Stochastic nonconvex optimization problems with nonlinear constraints have a broad range of applications in intelligent transportation, cyber-security, and smart grids. In this paper, first, we propose an inexact-proximal accelerated…
Stochastic Approximation (SA) is a popular approach for solving fixed-point equations where the information is corrupted by noise. In this paper, we consider an SA involving a contraction mapping with respect to an arbitrary norm, and show…
In this paper we develop proximal methods for statistical learning. Proximal point algorithms are useful in statistics and machine learning for obtaining optimization solutions for composite functions. Our approach exploits closed-form…
We consider structured approximation of measures in Wasserstein space $\mathrm{W}_p(\mathbb{R}^d)$ for $p\in[1,\infty)$ using general measure approximants compactly supported on Voronoi regions derived from a scaled Voronoi partition of…
We consider the problem of approximating the reachability probabilities in Markov decision processes (MDP) with uncountable (continuous) state and action spaces. While there are algorithms that, for special classes of such MDP, provide a…
Calculating optimal policies is known to be computationally difficult for Markov decision processes (MDPs) with Borel state and action spaces. This paper studies finite-state approximations of discrete time Markov decision processes with…
The aim of the paper is to establish a convergence theorem for multi-dimensional stochastic approximation when the "innovations" satisfy some "light" averaging properties in the presence of a pathwise Lyapunov function. These averaging…
We prove existence of (at most denumerable many) absolutely continuous invariant probability measures for random one-dimensional dynamical systems with asymptotic expansion. If the rate of expansion (Lyapunov exponents) is bounded away from…
Model Predictive Control (MPC) is well understood in the deterministic setting, yet rigorous stability and performance guarantees for stochastic MPC remain limited to the consideration of terminal constraints and penalties. In contrast,…
Although copulas are used and defined for various infinite-dimensional objects (e.g. Gaussian processes and Markov processes), there is no prevalent notion of a copula that unifies these concepts. We propose a unified approach and define…
Filtering---estimating the state of a partially observable Markov process from a sequence of observations---is one of the most widely studied problems in control theory, AI, and computational statistics. Exact computation of the posterior…
We develop a stochastic approximation-type algorithm to solve finite state/action, infinite-horizon, risk-aware Markov decision processes. Our algorithm has two loops. The inner loop computes the risk by solving a stochastic saddle-point…
We study Nesterov's accelerated gradient method with constant step-size and momentum parameters in the stochastic approximation setting (unbiased gradients with bounded variance) and the finite-sum setting (where randomness is due to…
We study equilibrium selection for invariant measures of stochastic dynamical systems with constant step size, under persistent noise and minimal moment assumptions, in a general quasi-Feller framework. Such dynamics arise in…
We propose a novel stochastic approximation algorithm, termed PMQSopt, for solving weakly convex stochastic optimization problems involving expectation-valued functions. The algorithm is constructed by integrating the proximal method of…
Functional inequalities such as the Poincar\'e and log-Sobolev inequalities quantify convergence to equilibrium in continuous-time Markov chains by linking generator properties to variance and entropy decay. However, many applications,…
We introduce a new distance, a Lipschitz-Prokhorov distance $d_{LP}$, on the set $\mathcal {PM}$ of isomorphism classes of pairs $(X, P)$ where $X$ is a compact metric space and $P$ is the law of a continuous stochastic process on $X$. We…