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We study a primal-dual (PD) reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm for online constrained Markov decision processes (CMDPs). Despite its widespread practical use, the existing theoretical literature on PD-RL algorithms for this problem only…

We develop algorithms for inner approximating the cone of positive semidefinite matrices via linear programming and second order cone programming. Starting with an initial linear algebraic approximation suggested recently by Ahmadi and…

We study the optimization landscape of a smooth nonconvex program arising from synchronization over the two-element group $\mathbf{Z}_2$, that is, recovering $z_1, \dots, z_n \in \{\pm 1\}$ from (noisy) relative measurements $R_{ij} \approx…

Submodular maximization generalizes many fundamental problems in discrete optimization, including Max-Cut in directed/undirected graphs, maximum coverage, maximum facility location and marketing over social networks. In this paper we…

We address high-dimensional zero-one random parameters in two-stage convex conic optimization problems. Such parameters typically represent failures of network elements and constitute rare, high-impact random events in several applications.…

We develop two penalty based difference of convex (DC) algorithms for solving chance constrained programs. First, leveraging a rank-based DC decomposition of the chance constraint, we propose a proximal penalty based DC algorithm in the…

We consider the problem of learning a graph modeling the statistical relations of the $d$ variables from a dataset with $n$ samples $X \in \mathbb{R}^{n \times d}$. Standard approaches amount to searching for a precision matrix $\Theta$…

We address the optimization problem in a data-driven variational reconstruction framework, where the regularizer is parameterized by an input-convex neural network (ICNN). While gradient-based methods are commonly used to solve such…

We study the minmax optimization problem introduced in [22] for computing policies for batch mode reinforcement learning in a deterministic setting. First, we show that this problem is NP-hard. In the two-stage case, we provide two…

We propose a randomized second-order method for optimization known as the Newton Sketch: it is based on performing an approximate Newton step using a randomly projected or sub-sampled Hessian. For self-concordant functions, we prove that…

We introduce a randomly extrapolated primal-dual coordinate descent method that adapts to sparsity of the data matrix and the favorable structures of the objective function. Our method updates only a subset of primal and dual variables with…

We investigate the problem of best policy identification in discounted linear Markov Decision Processes in the fixed confidence setting under a generative model. We first derive an instance-specific lower bound on the expected number of…

We consider the densest submatrix problem, which seeks the submatrix of fixed size of a given binary matrix that contains the most nonzero entries. This problem is a natural generalization of fundamental problems in combinatorial…

This paper develops a continuous-time primal-dual accelerated method with an increasing damping coefficient for a class of convex optimization problems with affine equality constraints. This paper analyzes critical values for parameters in…

We explore computational aspects of maximum likelihood estimation of the mixture proportions of a nonparametric finite mixture model -- a convex optimization problem with old roots in statistics and a key member of the modern data analysis…

By exploiting double-penalty terms for the primal subproblem, we develop a novel relaxed augmented Lagrangian method for solving a family of convex optimization problems subject to equality or inequality constraints. The method is then…

When solving decision-making problems with mathematical optimization, some constraints or objectives may lack analytic expressions but can be approximated from data. When an approximation is made by neural networks, the underlying problem…

In this paper, we consider a nonsmooth convex finite-sum problem with a conic constraint. To overcome the challenge of projecting onto the constraint set and computing the full (sub)gradient, we introduce a primal-dual incremental gradient…

Denote by $A$ the adjacency matrix of an Erdos-Renyi graph with bounded average degree. We consider the problem of maximizing $\langle A-E\{A\},X\rangle$ over the set of positive semidefinite matrices $X$ with diagonal entries $X_{ii}=1$.…

We derive computationally tractable formulations of the robust counterparts of convex quadratic and conic quadratic constraints that are concave in matrix-valued uncertain parameters. We do this for a broad range of uncertainty sets. In…