Related papers: Constrained stochastic blackbox optimization using…
In many high-throughput experimental design settings, such as those common in biochemical engineering, batched queries are more cost effective than one-by-one sequential queries. Furthermore, it is often not possible to directly choose…
This paper studies constrained Markov decision processes (CMDPs) with constraints against stochastic thresholds, aiming at safety of reinforcement learning in unknown and uncertain environments. We leverage a Growing-Window estimator…
This paper designs a model predictive control (MPC) law for constrained linear systems with stochastic additive disturbances and noisy measurements, minimising a discounted cost subject to a discounted expectation constraint. It is assumed…
This paper addresses the problem of constrained multi-objective optimization over black-box objective functions with practitioner-specified preferences over the objectives when a large fraction of the input space is infeasible (i.e.,…
This paper considers stochastic optimization problems for a large class of objective functions, including convex and continuous submodular. Stochastic proximal gradient methods have been widely used to solve such problems; however, their…
We study a stochastically perturbed version of the well-known Krasnoselski--Mann iteration for computing fixed points of nonexpansive maps in finite dimensional normed spaces. We discuss sufficient conditions on the stochastic noise and…
For a wide range of applications the structure of systems like Neural Networks or complex simulations, is unknown and approximation is costly or even impossible. Black-box optimization seeks to find optimal (hyper-) parameters for these…
Black-box policy optimization is a class of reinforcement learning algorithms that explores and updates the policies at the parameter level. This class of algorithms is widely applied in robotics with movement primitives or…
We consider the stochastic optimization problem with smooth but not necessarily convex objectives in the heavy-tailed noise regime, where the stochastic gradient's noise is assumed to have bounded $p$th moment ($p\in(1,2]$). Zhang et al.…
We present a probabilistic model for stochastic iterative algorithms with the use case of optimization algorithms in mind. Based on this model, we present PAC-Bayesian generalization bounds for functions that are defined on the trajectory…
Stochastic constraints, which incorporate both deterministic parameters and random variables, extend classical deterministic constraints by explicitly accounting for uncertainty. These constraints are increasingly prevalent in data science,…
We consider an unconstrained continuous optimization problem where, in each iteration, gradient estimates may be arbitrarily corrupted with a probability greater than 1/2. Additionally, function value estimates may exhibit heavy-tailed…
This paper considers the problem of minimizing an expectation function over a closed convex set, coupled with a {\color{black} functional or expectation} constraint on either decision variables or problem parameters. We first present a new…
We consider stochastic optimization problems with non-convex functional constraints, such as those arising in trajectory generation, sparse approximation, and robust classification. To this end, we put forth a recursive momentum-based…
Polynomial chaos based methods enable the efficient computation of output variability in the presence of input uncertainty in complex models. Consequently, they have been used extensively for propagating uncertainty through a wide variety…
This work proposes a framework, embedded within the Performance Estimation framework (PEP), for obtaining worst-case performance guarantees on stochastic first-order methods. Given a first-order method, a function class, and a noise model…
We introduce a new approach to develop stochastic optimization algorithms for a class of stochastic composite and possibly nonconvex optimization problems. The main idea is to combine two stochastic estimators to create a new hybrid one. We…
Constrained optimization of the parameters of a simulator plays a crucial role in a design process. These problems become challenging when the simulator is stochastic, computationally expensive, and the parameter space is high-dimensional.…
A number of problems in relational Artificial Intelligence can be viewed as Stochastic Constraint Optimization Problems (SCOPs). These are constraint optimization problems that involve objectives or constraints with a stochastic component.…
We consider quantile optimization of black-box functions that are estimated with noise. We propose two new iterative three-timescale local search algorithms. The first algorithm uses an appropriately modified finite-difference-based…