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Related papers: Derivative-Free & Order-Robust Optimisation

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Policy Optimization (PO) is a widely used approach to address continuous control tasks. In this paper, we introduce the notion of mediator feedback that frames PO as an online learning problem over the policy space. The additional available…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-16 Alberto Maria Metelli , Matteo Papini , Pierluca D'Oro , Marcello Restelli

This paper proposes a new robust optimization (RO) formulation namely the RO under objective functional uncertainty (ObRO). The ObRO adopts a min-max structure where the inner problem finds the worst-case objective function in a continuous…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-19 Yue Song , Yuxi Lu , Gang Li , Kairui Feng , Qi Liu

The theory of deep learning focuses almost exclusively on supervised learning, non-convex optimization using stochastic gradient descent, and overparametrized neural networks. It is common belief that the optimizer dynamics, network…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-18 Xinyi Chen , Edgar Minasyan , Jason D. Lee , Elad Hazan

We study an online linear optimization (OLO) problem in which the learner is provided access to $K$ "hint" vectors in each round prior to making a decision. In this setting, we devise an algorithm that obtains logarithmic regret whenever…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-08 Aditya Bhaskara , Ashok Cutkosky , Ravi Kumar , Manish Purohit

Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization with ordinal feedback has emerged as a fundamental problem in modern machine learning systems, particularly in human-in-the-loop settings such as reinforcement learning from human feedback, preference…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-12-23 Haishan Ye

Bayesian optimization (BO) is a powerful paradigm for optimizing expensive black-box functions. Traditional BO methods typically rely on separate hand-crafted acquisition functions and surrogate models for the underlying function, and often…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-10 Fengxue Zhang , Yuxin Chen

Optimization models used to make discrete decisions often contain uncertain parameters that are context-dependent and estimated through prediction. To account for the quality of the decision made based on the prediction, decision-focused…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-30 Noah Schutte , Krzysztof Postek , Neil Yorke-Smith

We introduce a new algorithm for online linear-quadratic control in a known system subject to adversarial disturbances. Existing regret bounds for this setting scale as $\sqrt{T}$ unless strong stochastic assumptions are imposed on the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-24 Dylan J. Foster , Max Simchowitz

A central issue lying at the heart of online reinforcement learning (RL) is data efficiency. While a number of recent works achieved asymptotically minimal regret in online RL, the optimality of these results is only guaranteed in a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-30 Zihan Zhang , Yuxin Chen , Jason D. Lee , Simon S. Du

In citep{Hazan-2008-extract}, the authors showed that the regret of online linear optimization can be bounded by the total variation of the cost vectors. In this paper, we extend this result to general online convex optimization. We first…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-06-15 Tianbao Yang , Mehrdad Mahdavi , Rong Jin , Shenghuo Zhu

Derivative Free Optimization is known to be an efficient and robust method to tackle the black-box optimization problem. When it comes to noisy functions, classical comparison-based algorithms are slower than gradient-based algorithms. For…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2016-04-29 Marie-Liesse Cauwet , Olivier Teytaud

Online learning is a powerful tool for analyzing iterative algorithms. However, the classic adversarial setup sometimes fails to capture certain regularity in online problems in practice. Motivated by this, we establish a new setup, called…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-06 Ching-An Cheng , Jonathan Lee , Ken Goldberg , Byron Boots

We propose the first model-free algorithm that achieves low regret performance for decentralized learning in two-player zero-sum tabular stochastic games with infinite-horizon average-reward objective. In decentralized learning, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-16 Romain Cravic , Nicolas Gast , Bruno Gaujal

Nowadays, online learning is an appealing learning paradigm, which is of great interest in practice due to the recent emergence of large scale applications such as online advertising placement and online web ranking. Standard online…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-27 Biyi Fang , Diego Klabjan

In this paper, we propose a learning approach to analyze dynamic systems with asymmetric information structure. Instead of adopting a game theoretic setting, we investigate an online quadratic optimization problem driven by system noises…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-11-05 Cheng Tan , Wing Shing Wong

Bayesian optimisation (BO) is a well-known efficient algorithm for finding the global optimum of expensive, black-box functions. The current practical BO algorithms have regret bounds ranging from $\mathcal{O}(\frac{logN}{\sqrt{N}})$ to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Hung Tran-The , Sunil Gupta , Santu Rana , Svetha Venkatesh

We present new efficient \textit{projection-free} algorithms for online convex optimization (OCO), where by projection-free we refer to algorithms that avoid computing orthogonal projections onto the feasible set, and instead relay on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-21 Dan Garber , Ben Kretzu

We propose a hierarchical version of dual averaging for zeroth-order online non-convex optimization - i.e., learning processes where, at each stage, the optimizer is facing an unknown non-convex loss function and only receives the incurred…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-14 Amélie Héliou , Matthieu Martin , Panayotis Mertikopoulos , Thibaud Rahier

We consider a variant of online convex optimization in which both the instances (input vectors) and the comparator (weight vector) are unconstrained. We exploit a natural scale invariance symmetry in our unconstrained setting: the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-08-24 Wojciech Kotłowski

We consider the problem of tracking the minimum of a time-varying convex optimization problem over a dynamic graph. Motivated by target tracking and parameter estimation problems in intermittently connected robotic and sensor networks, the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-05-20 Rishabh Dixit , Amrit Singh Bedi , Ketan Rajawat