Related papers: On sample average approximation for two-stage stoc…
Trajectory optimization under uncertainty underpins a wide range of applications in robotics. However, existing methods are limited in terms of reasoning about sources of epistemic and aleatoric uncertainty, space and time correlations,…
The standard theory of stochastic approximation (SA) is extended to the case when the constraint set is a Riemannian manifold. Specifically, the standard ODE method for analyzing SA schemes is extended to iterations constrained to stay on a…
In this work we introduce a novel approach, based on sampling, for finding assignments that are likely to be solutions to stochastic constraint satisfaction problems and constraint optimisation problems. Our approach reduces the size of the…
We introduce a new method for solving nonlinear continuous optimization problems with chance constraints. Our method is based on a reformulation of the probabilistic constraint as a quantile function. The quantile function is approximated…
We study constrained nested stochastic optimization problems in which the objective function is a composition of two smooth functions whose exact values and derivatives are not available. We propose a single time-scale stochastic…
Motivated by their broad applications in reinforcement learning, we study the linear two-time-scale stochastic approximation, an iterative method using two different step sizes for finding the solutions of a system of two equations. Our…
Validating and controlling safety-critical systems in uncertain environments necessitates probabilistic reachable sets of future state evolutions. The existing methods of computing probabilistic reachable sets normally assume that…
This paper presents a stochastic approximation proximal subgradient (SAPS) method for stochastic convex-concave minimax optimization. By accessing unbiased and variance bounded approximate subgradients, we show that this algorithm exhibits…
Stochastic variance reduced methods have shown strong performance in solving finite-sum problems. However, these methods usually require the users to manually tune the step-size, which is time-consuming or even infeasible for some…
We consider stochastic unconstrained bilevel optimization problems when only the first-order gradient oracles are available. While numerous optimization methods have been proposed for tackling bilevel problems, existing methods either tend…
A maximum likelihood methodology for the parameters of models with an intractable likelihood is introduced. We produce a likelihood-free version of the stochastic approximation expectation-maximization (SAEM) algorithm to maximize the…
In this paper, we investigate an optimal control problem with terminal stochastic linear complementarity constraints (SLCC), and its discrete approximation using the relaxation, the sample average approximation (SAA) and the implicit Euler…
In optimization problems, the quality of a candidate solution can be characterized by the optimality gap. For most stochastic optimization problems, this gap must be statistically estimated. We show that for risk-averse problems, standard…
The average properties of the well-known Subset Sum Problem can be studied by the means of its randomised version, where we are given a target value $z$, random variables $X_1, \ldots, X_n$, and an error parameter $\varepsilon > 0$, and we…
Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) is a popular computational method for likelihood-free Bayesian inference. The term "likelihood-free" refers to problems where the likelihood is intractable to compute or estimate directly, but where it…
We give sufficient conditions for the expected excess and the upper semideviation of recourse functions to be strongly convex. This is done in the setting of two-stage stochastic programs with complete linear recourse and random right-hand…
Stochastic approximation (SA) algorithms are widely used in system optimization problems when only noisy measurements of the system are available. This paper studies two types of SA algorithms in a multivariate Kiefer-Wolfowitz setting:…
Large sectors of the recent optimization literature focused in the last decade on the development of optimal stochastic first order schemes for constrained convex models under progressively relaxed assumptions. Stochastic proximal point is…
We develop a stochastic approximation-type algorithm to solve finite state/action, infinite-horizon, risk-aware Markov decision processes. Our algorithm has two loops. The inner loop computes the risk by solving a stochastic saddle-point…
This paper provides a finite-time analysis of linear stochastic approximation (LSA) algorithms with fixed step size, a core method in statistics and machine learning. LSA is used to compute approximate solutions of a $d$-dimensional linear…