Related papers: Safe non-smooth black-box optimization with applic…
We study a class of statistical inverse problems with non-linear pointwise operators motivated by concrete statistical applications. A two-step procedure is proposed, where the first step smoothes the data and inverts the non-linearity.…
We propose a unifying algorithm for non-smooth non-convex optimization. The algorithm approximates the objective function by a convex model function and finds an approximate (Bregman) proximal point of the convex model. This approximate…
This paper presents a Successive Convexification ($ \texttt{SCvx} $) algorithm to solve a class of non-convex optimal control problems with certain types of state constraints. Sources of non-convexity may include nonlinear dynamics and…
We study the problem of estimating low-rank matrices from linear measurements (a.k.a., matrix sensing) through nonconvex optimization. We propose an efficient stochastic variance reduced gradient descent algorithm to solve a nonconvex…
Motivated by a class of applied problems arising from physical layer based security in a digital communication system, in particular, by a secrecy sum-rate maximization problem, this paper studies a nonsmooth, difference-of-convex (dc)…
Given a matrix M of low-rank, we consider the problem of reconstructing it from noisy observations of a small, random subset of its entries. The problem arises in a variety of applications, from collaborative filtering (the `Netflix…
This work proposes an algorithm to bound the minimum distance between points on trajectories of a dynamical system and points on an unsafe set. Prior work on certifying safety of trajectories includes barrier and density methods, which do…
We propose a zero-order optimization method for sequential min-max problems based on two populations of interacting particles. The systems are coupled so that one population aims to solve the inner maximization problem, while the other aims…
We present safe control of partially-observed linear time-varying systems in the presence of unknown and unpredictable process and measurement noise. We introduce a control algorithm that minimizes dynamic regret, i.e., that minimizes the…
We address the problem of finding a local solution to a nonconvex-nonconcave minmax optimization using Newton type methods, including interior-point ones. We modify the Hessian matrix of these methods such that, at each step, the modified…
In this paper we address the convergence of stochastic approximation when the functions to be minimized are not convex and nonsmooth. We show that the "mean-limit" approach to the convergence which leads, for smooth problems, to the ODE…
This work addresses the problem of risk-sensitive control for nonlinear systems with imperfect state observations, extending results for the linear case. In particular, we derive an algorithm that can compute local solutions with…
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,…
Stochastic optimization has found wide applications in minimizing objective functions in machine learning, which motivates a lot of theoretical studies to understand its practical success. Most of existing studies focus on the convergence…
In this paper, we propose a successive pseudo-convex approximation algorithm to efficiently compute stationary points for a large class of possibly nonconvex optimization problems. The stationary points are obtained by solving a sequence of…
This paper presents a novel stochastic gradient descent algorithm for constrained optimization. The proposed algorithm randomly samples constraints and components of the finite sum objective function and relies on a relaxed logarithmic…
Learning-based control algorithms require data collection with abundant supervision for training. Safe exploration algorithms ensure the safety of this data collection process even when only partial knowledge is available. We present a new…
In order to solve the minimization of a nonsmooth convex function, we design an inertial second-order dynamic algorithm, which is obtained by approximating the nonsmooth function by a class of smooth functions. By studying the asymptotic…
In this paper, we introduce a class of nonsmooth nonconvex least square optimization problem using convex analysis tools and we propose to use the iterative minimization-majorization (MM) algorithm on a convex set with initializer away from…
Constrained optimization problems where both the objective and constraints may be nonsmooth and nonconvex arise across many learning and data science settings. In this paper, we show for any Lipschitz, weakly convex objectives and…