Related papers: Convergent Policy Optimization for Safe Reinforcem…

This paper addresses the challenge of offline policy learning in reinforcement learning with continuous action spaces when unmeasured confounders are present. While most existing research focuses on policy evaluation within partially…

It is well known that the extension of Watkins' algorithm to general function approximation settings is challenging: does the projected Bellman equation have a solution? If so, is the solution useful in the sense of generating a good…

Constrained non-convex optimization is fundamentally challenging, as global solutions are generally intractable and constraint qualifications may not hold. However, in many applications, including safe policy optimization in control and…

In this paper, we consider the problem of minimizing the average of a large number of nonsmooth and convex functions. Such problems often arise in typical machine learning problems as empirical risk minimization, but are computationally…

This paper proposes an on-policy reinforcement learning (RL) control algorithm that solves the optimal regulation problem for a class of uncertain continuous-time nonlinear systems under user-defined state constraints. We formulate the safe…

Policy gradients methods apply to complex, poorly understood, control problems by performing stochastic gradient descent over a parameterized class of polices. Unfortunately, even for simple control problems solvable by standard dynamic…

In this work, we consider constrained stochastic optimization problems under hidden convexity, i.e., those that admit a convex reformulation via non-linear (but invertible) map $c(\cdot)$. A number of non-convex problems ranging from…

Learning to make decisions from observed data in dynamic environments remains a problem of fundamental importance in a number of fields, from artificial intelligence and robotics, to medicine and finance. This paper concerns the problem of…

Efficient methods to provide sub-optimal solutions to non-convex optimization problems with knowledge of the solution's sub-optimality would facilitate the widespread application of nonlinear optimal control algorithms. To that end,…

Min-max problems have broad applications in machine learning, including learning with non-decomposable loss and learning with robustness to data distribution. Convex-concave min-max problem is an active topic of research with efficient…

We consider large-scale Markov decision processes (MDPs) with an unknown cost function and employ stochastic convex optimization tools to address the problem of imitation learning, which consists of learning a policy from a finite set of…

This paper presents a convex optimization-based method for finding the globally optimal solutions of a class of mixed-integer non-convex optimal control problems. We consider problems that are non-convex in the input norm, which is a…

Although learning-based methods have great potential for robotics, one concern is that a robot that updates its parameters might cause large amounts of damage before it learns the optimal policy. We formalize the idea of safe learning in a…

Constrained Optimization solution algorithms are restricted to point based solutions. In practice, single or multiple objectives must be satisfied, wherein both the objective function and constraints can be non-convex resulting in multiple…

Nonconvex sparse models have received significant attention in high-dimensional machine learning. In this paper, we study a new model consisting of a general convex or nonconvex objectives and a variety of continuous nonconvex…

We develop a neural-network framework for multi-period risk--reward stochastic control problems with constrained two-step feedback policies that may be discontinuous in the state. We allow a broad class of objectives built on a…

Enforcing complex (e.g., nonconvex) operational constraints is a critical challenge in real-world learning and control systems. However, existing methods struggle to efficiently enforce general classes of constraints. To address this, we…

Non-convex optimization problems are ubiquitous in machine learning, especially in Deep Learning. While such complex problems can often be successfully optimized in practice by using stochastic gradient descent (SGD), theoretical analysis…

We explore reinforcement learning methods for finding the optimal policy in the linear quadratic regulator (LQR) problem. In particular, we consider the convergence of policy gradient methods in the setting of known and unknown parameters.…

This paper defines a strong convertible nonconvex(SCN) function for solving the unconstrained optimization problems with the nonconvex or nonsmooth(nondifferentiable) function. First, many examples of SCN function are given, where the SCN…