Related papers: A Modified Method of Successive Approximations for…
We study a class of nonconvex nonsmooth optimization problems in which the objective is a sum of two functions: One function is the average of a large number of differentiable functions, while the other function is proper, lower…
This article presents a constrained policy optimization approach for the optimal control of systems under nonstationary uncertainties. We introduce an assumption that we call Markov embeddability that allows us to cast the stochastic…
A basic simulation-based reinforcement learning algorithm is the Monte Carlo Exploring States (MCES) method, also known as optimistic policy iteration, in which the value function is approximated by simulated returns and a greedy policy is…
In this paper, we study the generalized mean-field stochastic control problem when the usual stochastic maximum principle (SMP) is not applicable due to the singularity of the Hamiltonian function. In this case, we derive a second order…
The entropy regularization is inspired by information entropy from machine learning and the ideas of exploration and exploitation in reinforcement learning, which appears in the control problem to design an approximating algorithm for the…
The considered optimal control problem of a stochastic power system, is to select the set of power supply vectors which infimizes the probability that the phase-angle differences of any power flow of the network, endangers the transient…
The stochastic simulation algorithm (SSA) is widely used to perform exact forward simulation of discrete stochastic processes in biology. However, the computational cost, driven by sequential event-by-event sampling across large ensembles,…
In this paper, we study a delayed forward-backward stochastic control system in which all the coefficients depend on the state and control terms, and the control domain is not necessarily convex. A global stochastic maximum principle is…
Majorization-minimization algorithms consist of iteratively minimizing a majorizing surrogate of an objective function. Because of its simplicity and its wide applicability, this principle has been very popular in statistics and in signal…
In this paper, we consider the mixed optimal control of a linear stochastic system with a quadratic cost functional, with two controllers-one can choose only deterministic time functions, called the deterministic controller, while the other…
In this paper, we introduce a new stochastic approximation (SA) type algorithm, namely the randomized stochastic gradient (RSG) method, for solving an important class of nonlinear (possibly nonconvex) stochastic programming (SP) problems.…
This work develops a stochastic model predictive controller~(SMPC) for uncertain linear systems with additive Gaussian noise subject to state and control constraints. The proposed approach is based on the recently developed finite-horizon…
This paper is devoted to a global stochastic maximum principle for conditional mean-field forward-backward stochastic differential equations (FBSDEs, for short) with regime switching. The control domain is unnecessarily convex and the…
We consider control constrained optimal control problems governed by parameterized stationary Maxwell's system with the Gauss's law. The parameters enter through dielectric, magnetic permeability, and charge density. Moreover, the parameter…
For obtaining optimal first-order convergence guarantee for stochastic optimization, it is necessary to use a recurrent data sampling algorithm that samples every data point with sufficient frequency. Most commonly used data sampling…
We propose a stochastic approximation method for approximating the efficient frontier of chance-constrained nonlinear programs. Our approach is based on a bi-objective viewpoint of chance-constrained programs that seeks solutions on the…
We consider the optimal control problem of stochastic evolution equations in a Hilbert space under a recursive utility, which is described as the solution of a backward stochastic differential equation (BSDE). A very general maximum…
We study PCA as a stochastic optimization problem and propose a novel stochastic approximation algorithm which we refer to as "Matrix Stochastic Gradient" (MSG), as well as a practical variant, Capped MSG. We study the method both…
The optimal control problem of stochastic systems is commonly solved via robust or scenario-based optimization methods, which are both challenging to scale to long optimization horizons. We cast the optimal control problem of a stochastic…
The Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) has been studied for years. The traditional ADMM algorithm needs to compute, at each iteration, an (empirical) expected loss function on all training examples, resulting in a…