Related papers: A Multiscale Analysis of Multi-Agent Coverage Cont…
We apply a recently developed framework for analyzing the convergence of stochastic algorithms to the general problem of large-scale nonconvex composite optimization more generally, and nonconvex likelihood maximization in particular. Our…
This paper addresses the sweep coverage problem of multi-agent systems in uncertain regions. A new formulation of distributed sweep coverage is proposed to cooperatively complete the workload in the uncertain region. Specifically, each…
We introduce a clipping strategy for Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) which uses quantiles of the gradient norm as clipping thresholds. We prove that this new strategy provides a robust and efficient optimization algorithm for smooth…
We address the optimization problem of simultaneously minimizing multiple objective functionals over a family of probability distributions. This type of Multi-Objective Distributional Optimization commonly arises in machine learning and…
Distributed Optimization is an increasingly important subject area with the rise of multi-agent control and optimization. We consider a decentralized stochastic optimization problem where the agents on a graph aim to asynchronously optimize…
In this paper, we propose a novel distributed algorithm to optimize the emergent macroscopic behavior of large-scale multi-agent systems via microscopic actions. We cast this task as a bilevel optimization problem, where the upper level…
This paper develops algorithms for high-dimensional stochastic control problems based on deep learning and dynamic programming. Unlike classical approximate dynamic programming approaches, we first approximate the optimal policy by means of…
We study a distributed consensus-based stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm and show that the rate of convergence involves the spectral properties of two matrices: the standard spectral gap of a weight matrix from the network…
This paper extends algorithms that remove the fixed point bias of decentralized gradient descent to solve the more general problem of distributed optimization over subspace constraints. Leveraging the integral quadratic constraint…
Gradient descent is one of the most widely used iterative algorithms in modern statistical learning. However, its precise algorithmic dynamics in high-dimensional settings remain only partially understood, which has limited its broader…
This paper develops an algorithm that guides a multi-robot system in an unknown environment in search of fixed targets. The area to be scanned contains an unknown number of convex obstacles of unknown size and shape. The algorithm covers…
We consider a setting in which one swarm of agents is to service or track a second swarm, and formulate an optimal control problem which trades off between the competing objectives of servicing and motion costs. We consider the continuum…
The stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method is a widely used approach for solving stochastic optimization problems, but its convergence is typically slow. Existing variance reduction techniques, such as SAGA, improve convergence by…
Decentralized control of mobile robotic sensor networks is a fundamental problem in robotics that has attracted intensive research in recent decades. Most of the existing works dealt with two-dimensional spaces. This report is concerned…
We consider a decentralized learning setting in which data is distributed over nodes in a graph. The goal is to learn a global model on the distributed data without involving any central entity that needs to be trusted. While gossip-based…
We study the problem of allocating many mobile robots for the execution of a pre-defined sweep schedule in a known two-dimensional environment, with applications toward search and rescue, coverage, surveillance, monitoring, pursuit-evasion,…
Consider the global optimisation of a function $U$ defined on a finite set $V$ endowed with an irreducible and reversible Markov generator.By integration, we extend $U$ to the set $\mathcal{P}(V)$ of probability distributions on $V$ and we…
We describe in this paper an optimal control strategy for shaping a large-scale swarm of particles using boundary global actuation. This problem arises as a key challenge in many swarm robotics applications, especially when the robots are…
The distributed subgradient method (DSG) is a widely discussed algorithm to cope with large-scale distributed optimization problems in the arising machine learning applications. Most exisiting works on DSG focus on ideal communication…
The proximal algorithm is a powerful tool to minimize nonlinear and nonsmooth functionals in a general metric space. Motivated by the recent progress in studying the training dynamics of the noisy gradient descent algorithm on two-layer…