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Iterative optimization algorithms depend on access to information about the objective function. In a differentiable programming framework, this information, such as gradients, can be automatically derived from the computational graph. We…
We design and implement a Python library to help the non-expert using all these powerful tools in a way that is efficient, extensible, and simple to incorporate into the workflow of the data scientist, practitioner, and applied researcher.…
Nonlinear optimization methods are typically iterative and make use of gradient information to determine a direction of improvement and function information to effectively check for progress. When this information is corrupted by noise,…
This paper describes a method for solving smooth nonconvex minimization problems subject to bound constraints with good worst-case complexity guarantees and practical performance. The method contains elements of two existing methods: the…
Nonlinear conjugate gradients are among the most popular techniques for solving continuous optimization problems. Although these schemes have long been studied from a global convergence standpoint, their worst-case complexity properties…
There has been much recent interest in finding unconstrained local minima of smooth functions, due in part of the prevalence of such problems in machine learning and robust statistics. A particular focus is algorithms with good complexity…
A classical approach for solving discrete time nonlinear control on a finite horizon consists in repeatedly minimizing linear quadratic approximations of the original problem around current candidate solutions. While widely popular in many…
In this paper, we present a generic framework to extend existing uniformly optimal convex programming algorithms to solve more general nonlinear, possibly nonconvex, optimization problems. The basic idea is to incorporate a local search…
We consider minimization of a smooth nonconvex objective function using an iterative algorithm based on Newton's method and the linear conjugate gradient algorithm, with explicit detection and use of negative curvature directions for the…
This paper introduces a family of iterative algorithms for unconstrained nonlinear optimal control. We generalize the well-known iLQR algorithm to different multiple-shooting variants, combining advantages like straight-forward…
Iterative gradient-based optimization algorithms are widely used to solve difficult or large-scale optimization problems. There are many algorithms to choose from, such as gradient descent and its accelerated variants such as Polyak's Heavy…
Gradient-based iterative optimization methods are the workhorse of modern machine learning. They crucially rely on careful tuning of parameters like learning rate and momentum. However, one typically sets them using heuristic approaches…
Policy gradient algorithms are widely used in reinforcement learning and belong to the class of approximate dynamic programming methods. This paper studies two key policy gradient algorithms, the Natural Policy Gradient and the Gauss-Newton…
Projected Gradient Descent denotes a class of iterative methods for solving optimization programs. Its applicability to convex optimization programs has gained significant popularity for its intuitive implementation that involves only…
Motivated by emerging applications in machine learning, we consider an optimization problem in a general form where the gradient of the objective function is available through a biased stochastic oracle. We assume a bias-control parameter…
An efficient algorithm for computing lower bounds on the global linear complexity of nonlinearly filtered PN-sequences is presented. The technique here developed is based exclusively on the realization of bit wise logic operations, which…
Under data distributions which may be heavy-tailed, many stochastic gradient-based learning algorithms are driven by feedback queried at points with almost no performance guarantees on their own. Here we explore a modified "anytime…
Non-linear least squares solvers are used across a broad range of offline and real-time model fitting problems. Most improvements of the basic Gauss-Newton algorithm tackle convergence guarantees or leverage the sparsity of the underlying…
Probabilistic models such as Gaussian processes (GPs) are powerful tools to learn unknown dynamical systems from data for subsequent use in control design. While learning-based control has the potential to yield superior performance in…
Nonconvex and nonsmooth optimization problems are frequently encountered in much of statistics, business, science and engineering, but they are not yet widely recognized as a technology in the sense of scalability. A reason for this…