Related papers: Safe non-smooth black-box optimization with applic…
As we transition towards the deployment of data-driven controllers for black-box cyberphysical systems, complying with hard safety constraints becomes a primary concern. Two key aspects should be addressed when input-output data are…
Saddle point optimization is a critical problem employed in numerous real-world applications, including portfolio optimization, generative adversarial networks, and robotics. It has been extensively studied in cases where the objective…
Many scientific and engineering applications feature nonsmooth convex minimization problems over convex sets. In this paper, we address an important instance of this broad class where we assume that the nonsmooth objective is equipped with…
This paper addresses stochastic optimization of Lipschitz-continuous, nonsmooth and nonconvex objectives over compact convex sets, where only noisy function evaluations are available. While gradient-free methods have been developed for…
This paper presents a novel approach to solving large-scale minimax problems with nonsmooth regularizers. We propose a stochastic implicit proximal point algorithm with variance reduction techniques where stochastic oracles are selected in…
We lower bound the complexity of finding $\epsilon$-stationary points (with gradient norm at most $\epsilon$) using stochastic first-order methods. In a well-studied model where algorithms access smooth, potentially non-convex functions…
In this paper, we consider non-convex optimization problems under \textit{unknown} yet safety-critical constraints. Such problems naturally arise in a variety of domains including robotics, manufacturing, and medical procedures, where it is…
Frequently, the burgeoning field of black-box optimization encounters challenges due to a limited understanding of the mechanisms of the objective function. To address such problems, in this work we focus on the deterministic concept of…
Finite-difference methods are a class of algorithms designed to solve black-box optimization problems by approximating a gradient of the target function on a set of directions. In black-box optimization, the non-smooth setting is…
Inspired by regularization techniques in statistics and machine learning, we study complementary composite minimization in the stochastic setting. This problem corresponds to the minimization of the sum of a (weakly) smooth function endowed…
We study the problem of \textit{safe control of linear dynamical systems corrupted with non-stochastic noise}, and provide an algorithm that guarantees (i) zero constraint violation of convex time-varying constraints, and (ii) bounded…
Stochastic first-order methods are standard for training large-scale machine learning models. Random behavior may cause a particular run of an algorithm to result in a highly suboptimal objective value, whereas theoretical guarantees are…
This paper studies first order methods for solving smooth minimax optimization problems $\min_x \max_y g(x,y)$ where $g(\cdot,\cdot)$ is smooth and $g(x,\cdot)$ is concave for each $x$. In terms of $g(\cdot,y)$, we consider two settings --…
We introduce and analyze an algorithm for the minimization of convex functions that are the sum of differentiable terms and proximable terms composed with linear operators. The method builds upon the recently developed smoothed gap…
We consider the problem of sequentially maximizing an unknown function $f$ over a set of actions of the form $(s,\mathbf{x})$, where the selected actions must satisfy a safety constraint with respect to an unknown safety function $g$. We…
This paper presents a novel convex optimization-based method for finding the globally optimal solutions of a class of mixed-integer non-convex optimal control problems. We consider problems with non-convex constraints that restrict the…
In this paper, we propose an inexact block coordinate descent algorithm for large-scale nonsmooth nonconvex optimization problems. At each iteration, a particular block variable is selected and updated by inexactly solving the original…
Non-smoothness at optimal points is a common phenomenon in many eigenvalue optimization problems. We consider two recent algorithms to minimize the largest eigenvalue of a Hermitian matrix dependent on one parameter, both proven to be…
We consider the problem of controlling an unknown linear time-invariant dynamical system from a single chain of black-box interactions, with no access to resets or offline simulation. Under the assumption that the system is controllable, we…
In this paper, we study the problem of constrained robust (min-max) optimization ina black-box setting, where the desired optimizer cannot access the gradients of the objective function but may query its values. We present a principled…