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We consider a periodic-review, fixed-lifetime perishable inventory control problem where demand is a general stochastic process. The optimal solution for this problem is intractable due to "curse of dimensionality". In this paper, we first…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2016-05-10 Can Zhang , Turgay Ayer , Chelsea C. White

Black-box optimization is a powerful approach for discovering global optima in noisy and expensive black-box functions, a problem widely encountered in real-world scenarios. Recently, there has been a growing interest in leveraging domain…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-06 Dat Phan-Trong , Hung The Tran , Alistair Shilton , Sunil Gupta

We study a generalization of the manifold-valued Rudin-Osher-Fatemi (ROF) model, which involves an initial datum $f$ mapping from a curved compact surface with smooth boundary to a complete, connected and smooth $n$-dimensional Riemannian…

Analysis of PDEs · Mathematics 2026-03-31 Esther Cabezas-Rivas , Salvador Moll , Vicent Pallardó-Julià

In stochastic zeroth-order optimization, a problem of practical relevance is understanding how to fully exploit the local geometry of the underlying objective function. We consider a fundamental setting in which the objective function is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-27 Qian Yu , Yining Wang , Baihe Huang , Qi Lei , Jason D. Lee

We study the problem of black-box optimization of a function f of any dimension, given function evaluations perturbed by noise. The function is assumed to be locally smooth around one of its global optima, but this smoothness is unknown.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-05 Jean-Bastien Grill , Michal Valko , Rémi Munos

Tight estimation of the Lipschitz constant for deep neural networks (DNNs) is useful in many applications ranging from robustness certification of classifiers to stability analysis of closed-loop systems with reinforcement learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-18 Mahyar Fazlyab , Alexander Robey , Hamed Hassani , Manfred Morari , George J. Pappas

Non-analytical objectives and constraints often arise in control systems, particularly in problems with complex dynamics, which are challenging yet lack efficient solution methods. In this work, we consider general constrained optimization…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-07-16 Yuke Zhou , Ruiyang Jin , Siyang Gao , Jianxiao Wang , Jie Song

We consider the Ordered Open End Bin Packing problem. Items of sizes in $(0,1]$ are presented one by one, to be assigned to bins in this order. An item can be assigned to any bin for which the current total size strictly below $1$. This…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2020-10-15 János Balogh , Leah Epstein , Asaf Levin

In this paper, we study the standard formulation of an optimization problem when the computation of gradient is not available. Such a problem can be classified as a "black box" optimization problem, since the oracle returns only the value…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-09-30 Aleksandr Lobanov , Nail Bashirov , Alexander Gasnikov

We study distributed inner product estimation for $n$-qubit states using local randomized measurements, for which rigorous worst-case guarantees are less understood. We first reduce the minimax kernel optimization to Hamming-distance…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2026-05-15 Zhenyuan Huang , Kun Wang , Ping Xu

First-order algorithms have been popular for solving convex and non-convex optimization problems. A key assumption for the majority of these algorithms is that the gradient of the objective function is globally Lipschitz continuous, but…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-02-07 Junyu Zhang , Mingyi Hong

We introduce the model selection problem in pure exploration linear bandits, where the learner needs to adapt to the instance-dependent complexity measure of the smallest hypothesis class containing the true model. We design algorithms in…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-03-18 Yinglun Zhu , Julian Katz-Samuels , Robert Nowak

We study the fundamental problem of estimating an unknown discrete distribution $p$ over $d$ symbols, given $n$ i.i.d. samples from the distribution. We are interested in minimizing the KL divergence between the true distribution and the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-05-30 Jiayuan Ye , Vitaly Feldman , Kunal Talwar

In this paper, we develop an optimization-based framework for solving coupled forward-backward stochastic differential equations. We introduce an integral-form objective function and prove its equivalence to the error between consecutive…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-07-22 Yutian Wang , Yuan-Hua Ni , Xun Li

We consider the closely related problems of bandit convex optimization with two-point feedback, and zero-order stochastic convex optimization with two function evaluations per round. We provide a simple algorithm and analysis which is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-08-03 Ohad Shamir

$\ell_0$ constrained optimization is prevalent in machine learning, particularly for high-dimensional problems, because it is a fundamental approach to achieve sparse learning. Hard-thresholding gradient descent is a dominant technique to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-19 William de Vazelhes , Hualin Zhang , Huimin Wu , Xiao-Tong Yuan , Bin Gu

Zeroth-order optimization aims to minimize an objective function using only function evaluations, and is therefore fundamental in black-box optimization, hyperparameter tuning, bandit learning, and adversarial machine learning. While…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-28 Haishan Ye

In the (1-dimensional) bin packing problem, we are asked to pack all the given items into bins, each of capacity one, so that the number of non-empty bins is minimized. Zhu~[Chaos, Solitons \& Fractals 2016] proposed an approximation…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Hiroshi Fujiwara , Rina Atsumi , Hiroaki Yamamoto

In this paper we consider the minimization of a continuous function that is potentially not differentiable or not twice differentiable on the boundary of the feasible region. By exploiting an interior point technique, we present first- and…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2017-02-15 Gabriel Haeser , Hongcheng Liu , Yinyu Ye

In the stochastic contextual bandit setting, regret-minimizing algorithms have been extensively researched, but their instance-minimizing best-arm identification counterparts remain seldom studied. In this work, we focus on the stochastic…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-10-04 Zhaoqi Li , Lillian Ratliff , Houssam Nassif , Kevin Jamieson , Lalit Jain