Related papers: GuSTO: Guaranteed Sequential Trajectory Optimizati…
Machine learning (ML) approaches are increasingly being used to accelerate combinatorial optimization (CO) problems. We investigate the Set Cover Problem (SCP) and propose Graph-SCP, a graph neural network method that augments existing…
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…
Safe path planning is a crucial component in autonomous robotics. The many approaches to find a collision free path can be categorically divided into trajectory optimisers and sampling-based methods. When planning using occupancy maps, the…
Efficient performance of a number of engineering systems is achieved through different modes of operation - yielding systems described as "hybrid", containing both real-valued and discrete decision variables. Prominent examples of such…
This paper introduces a new formulation for stochastic optimal control and stochastic dynamic optimization that ensures safety with respect to state and control constraints. The proposed methodology brings together concepts such as…
In this paper, we address the trajectory planning problem in uncertain nonconvex static and dynamic environments that contain obstacles with probabilistic location, size, and geometry. To address this problem, we provide a risk bounded…
Stochastic Optimization is a cornerstone of operations research, providing a framework to solve optimization problems under uncertainty. Despite the development of numerous algorithms to tackle these problems, several persistent challenges…
This paper investigates group distributionally robust optimization (GDRO) with the goal of learning a model that performs well over $m$ different distributions. First, we formulate GDRO as a stochastic convex-concave saddle-point problem,…
Achieving reactive robot behavior in complex dynamic environments is still challenging as it relies on being able to solve trajectory optimization problems quickly enough, such that we can replan the future motion at frequencies which are…
Data-driven Model Predictive Control (MPC), where the system model is learned from data with machine learning, has recently gained increasing interests in the control community. Gaussian Processes (GP), as a type of statistical models, are…
We study the problem of safe online convex optimization, where the action at each time step must satisfy a set of linear safety constraints. The goal is to select a sequence of actions to minimize the regret without violating the safety…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is one of the simplest and most popular stochastic optimization methods. While it has already been theoretically studied for decades, the classical analysis usually required non-trivial smoothness…
In the recent past, several sampling-based algorithms have been proposed to compute trajectories that are collision-free and dynamically-feasible. However, the outputs of such algorithms are notoriously jagged. In this paper, by focusing on…
In this paper, we propose a successive pseudo-convex approximation algorithm to efficiently compute stationary points for a large class of possibly nonconvex optimization problems. The stationary points are obtained by solving a sequence of…
Stochastic compositional optimization (SCO) has attracted considerable attention because of its broad applicability to important real-world problems. However, existing works on SCO assume that the projection within a solution update is…
Convolved Gaussian Process (CGP) is able to capture the correlations not only between inputs and outputs but also among the outputs. This allows a superior performance of using CGP than standard Gaussian Process (GP) in the modelling of…
We present two stochastic descent algorithms that apply to unconstrained optimization and are particularly efficient when the objective function is slow to evaluate and gradients are not easily obtained, as in some PDE-constrained…
In this work, we propose an optimization-based trajectory planner for tractor-trailer vehicles on curvy roads. The lack of analytical expression for the trailer's errors to the center line pose a great challenge to the trajectory planning…
The scenario-based optimization approach (`scenario approach') provides an intuitive way of approximating the solution to chance-constrained optimization programs, based on finding the optimal solution under a finite number of sampled…
We consider stochastic convex optimization problems where the objective is an expectation over smooth functions. For this setting we suggest a novel gradient estimate that combines two recent mechanism that are related to notion of…