Related papers: On Monte-Carlo methods in convex stochastic optimi…

We investigate constrained optimal control problems for linear stochastic dynamical systems evolving in discrete time. We consider minimization of an expected value cost over a finite horizon. Hard constraints are introduced first, and then…

This paper focuses on stochastic proximal gradient methods for optimizing a smooth non-convex loss function with a non-smooth non-convex regularizer and convex constraints. To the best of our knowledge we present the first non-asymptotic…

We consider the optimization of active extension portfolios. For this purpose, the optimization problem is rewritten as a stochastic programming model and solved using a clever multi-start local search heuristic, which turns out to provide…

In statistical data assimilation one seeks the largest maximum of the conditional probability distribution $P(\mathbf{X},\mathbf{p}|\mathbf{Y})$ of model states, $\mathbf{X}$, and parameters,$\mathbf{p}$, conditioned on observations…

This paper focuses on investigating an inexact stochastic model-based optimization algorithm that integrates preconditioning techniques for solving stochastic composite optimization problems. The proposed framework unifies and extends the…

This paper investigates methods for estimating the optimal stochastic control policy for a Markov Decision Process with unknown transition dynamics and an unknown reward function. This form of model-free reinforcement learning comprises…

We extend the Longstaff-Schwartz algorithm for approximately solving optimal stopping problems on high-dimensional state spaces. We reformulate the optimal stopping problem for Markov processes in discrete time as a generalized statistical…

In this work, we investigate a stochastic control framework for global optimization over both Euclidean spaces and the Wasserstein space of probability measures, where the objective function may be non-convex and/or non-differentiable. In…

We analyze convergence rates of stochastic optimization procedures for non-smooth convex optimization problems. By combining randomized smoothing techniques with accelerated gradient methods, we obtain convergence rates of stochastic…

An algorithm is proposed to solve robust control problems constrained by partial differential equations with uncertain coefficients, based on the so-called MG/OPT framework. The levels in this MG/OPT hierarchy correspond to discretization…

This paper proposes to decouple performance optimization and enforcement of asymptotic convergence in Model Predictive Control (MPC) so that convergence to a given terminal set is achieved independently of how much performance is optimized…

We derive new and improved non-asymptotic deviation inequalities for the sample average approximation (SAA) of an optimization problem. Our results give strong error probability bounds that are "sub-Gaussian"~even when the randomness of the…

Practitioners of Bayesian statistics have long depended on Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) to obtain samples from intractable posterior distributions. Unfortunately, MCMC algorithms are typically serial, and do not scale to the large…

The present paper provides a study of high-dimensional statistical arbitrage that combines factor models with the tools from stochastic control, obtaining closed-form optimal strategies which are both interpretable and computationally…

We consider the problem of stochastic convex optimization under convex constraints. We analyze the behavior of a natural variance reduced proximal gradient (VRPG) algorithm for this problem. Our main result is a non-asymptotic guarantee for…

We consider stochastic optimization when one only has access to biased stochastic oracles of the objective and the gradient, and obtaining stochastic gradients with low biases comes at high costs. This setting captures various optimization…

We study stochastic optimization of nonconvex loss functions, which are typical objectives for training neural networks. We propose stochastic approximation algorithms which optimize a series of regularized, nonlinearized losses on large…

We present an efficient computational approach to sample the histories of nonlinear stochastic processes. This framework builds upon recent work on casting a $d$-dimensional stochastic dynamical system into a $d+1$-dimensional equilibrium…

This paper considers time-average stochastic optimization, where a time average decision vector, an average of decision vectors chosen in every time step from a time-varying (possibly non-convex) set, minimizes a convex objective function…

Many causal estimands, such as average treatment effects under unconfoundedness, can be written as continuous linear functionals of an unknown regression function. We study a weighting estimator that sets weights by a minimax procedure:…