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We consider nonconvex obstacle avoidance where a robot described by nonlinear dynamics and a nonconvex shape has to avoid nonconvex obstacles. Obstacle avoidance is a fundamental problem in robotics and well studied in control. However,…
Functional data analysis has been a growing field of study in recent decades, and one fundamental task in functional data analysis is estimating the sample location. A notion called statistical depth has been extended from multivariate data…
In this paper, we present a method for the accurate estimation of the derivative (aka.~sensitivity) of expectations of functions involving an indicator function by combining a stochastic algorithmic differentiation and a regression. The…
Many real-world optimization problems contain parameters that are unknown before deployment time, either due to stochasticity or to lack of information (e.g., demand or travel times in delivery problems). A common strategy in such cases is…
We propose a fundamental metric for measuring the distance between two distributions. This metric, referred to as the decision-focused (DF) divergence, is tailored to stochastic linear optimization problems in which the objective…
Stochastic dual dynamic programming (SDDP) is a state-of-the-art method for solving multi-stage stochastic optimization, widely used for modeling real-world process optimization tasks. Unfortunately, SDDP has a worst-case complexity that…
We analyze the variance of stochastic gradients along negative curvature directions in certain non-convex machine learning models and show that stochastic gradients exhibit a strong component along these directions. Furthermore, we show…
Despite more than 40 years of research in condensed-matter physics, state-of-the-art approaches for simulating the radial distribution function (RDF) g(r) still rely on binning pair-separations into a histogram. Such methods suffer from…
We propose a stochastic optimization method for minimizing loss functions, expressed as an expected value, that adaptively controls the batch size used in the computation of gradient approximations and the step size used to move along such…
Many spatial processes exhibit nonstationary features. We estimate a variance function from a single process observation where the errors are nonstationary and correlated. We propose a difference-based approach for a one-dimensional…
Our research proposes a novel method for reducing the dimensionality of functional data, specifically for the case where the response is a scalar and the predictor is a random function. Our method utilizes distance covariance, and has…
We consider unconstrained optimization problems where only "stochastic" estimates of the objective function are observable as replicates from a Monte Carlo oracle. The Monte Carlo oracle is assumed to provide no direct observations of the…
Learning from Demonstration (LfD) has emerged as a crucial method for robots to acquire new skills. However, when given suboptimal task trajectory demonstrations with shape characteristics reflecting human preferences but subpar dynamic…
When the nonconvex problem is complicated by stochasticity, the sample complexity of stochastic first-order methods may depend linearly on the problem dimension, which is undesirable for large-scale problems. In this work, we propose…
The primary objective of Stochastic Frontier (SF) Analysis is the deconvolution of the estimated composed error terms into noise and inefficiency. Assuming a parametric production function (e.g. Cobb-Douglas, Translog, etc.), might lead to…
We consider risk-averse convex stochastic programs expressed in terms of extended polyhedral risk measures. We derive computable confidence intervals on the optimal value of such stochastic programs using the Robust Stochastic Approximation…
SGD with momentum (SGDM) has been widely applied in many machine learning tasks, and it is often applied with dynamic stepsizes and momentum weights tuned in a stagewise manner. Despite of its empirical advantage over SGD, the role of…
This paper proposes a statistically optimal approach for learning a function value using a confidence interval in a wide range of models, including general non-parametric estimation of an expected loss described as a stochastic programming…
The multi-configurational self-consistent field theory is considered the standard starting point for almost all multireference approaches required for strongly-correlated molecular problems. The limitation of the approach is generally given…
Minimizing finite sums of functions is a central problem in optimization, arising in numerous practical applications. Such problems are commonly addressed using first-order optimization methods. However, these procedures cannot be used in…