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Related papers: Primal-Dual Stochastic Mirror Descent for MDPs

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Safety is an essential requirement for reinforcement learning systems. The newly emerging framework of robust constrained Markov decision processes allows learning policies that satisfy long-term constraints while providing guarantees under…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-19 David M. Bossens , Atsushi Nitanda

Multi-period mean-variance optimization is a long-standing problem, caused by the failure of dynamic programming principle. This paper studies the mean-variance optimization in a setting of finite-horizon discrete-time Markov decision…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-07-31 Li Xia , Zhihui Yu

Saddle point problems, ubiquitous in optimization, extend beyond game theory to diverse domains like power networks and reinforcement learning. This paper presents novel approaches to tackle saddle point problem, with a focus on…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-04-09 Anik Kumar Paul , Arun D Mahindrakar , Rachel K Kalaimani

In this note, we consider infinite horizon optimal control problems with deterministic systems. Since exact solutions to these problems are often intractable, we propose a parallel model predictive control (MPC) method that provides an…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-04-29 Yuchao Li , Aren Karapetyan , Niklas Schmid , John Lygeros , Karl H. Johansson , Jonas Mårtensson

We extend a primal-dual fixed point algorithm (PDFP) proposed in [5] to solve two kinds of separable multi-block minimization problems, arising in signal processing and imaging science. This work shows the flexibility of applying PDFP…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2016-02-02 Peijun Chen , Jianguo Huang , Xiaoqun Zhang

We develop a first-order accelerated algorithm for a class of constrained bilinear saddle-point problems with applications to network systems. The algorithm is a modified time-varying primal-dual version of an accelerated mirror-descent…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-10-04 Weijian Li , Xianlin Zeng , Lacra Pavel

In this paper we propose a parallel coordinate descent algorithm for solving smooth convex optimization problems with separable constraints that may arise e.g. in distributed model predictive control (MPC) for linear network systems. Our…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2014-11-19 Ion Necoara , Dragos Clipici

We develop several new algorithms for learning Markov Decision Processes in an infinite-horizon average-reward setting with linear function approximation. Using the optimism principle and assuming that the MDP has a linear structure, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-27 Chen-Yu Wei , Mehdi Jafarnia-Jahromi , Haipeng Luo , Rahul Jain

Value iteration-type methods have been extensively studied for computing a nearly optimal value function in reinforcement learning (RL). Under a generative sampling model, these methods can achieve sharper sample complexity than policy…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-08 Zhichao Jia , Guanghui Lan

Constrained decision-making is essential for designing safe policies in real-world control systems, yet simulated environments often fail to capture real-world adversities. We consider the problem of learning a policy that will maximize the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Sourav Ganguly , Kishan Panaganti , Arnob Ghosh , Adam Wierman

It is common to address the curse of dimensionality in Markov decision processes (MDPs) by exploiting low-rank representations. This motivates much of the recent theoretical study on linear MDPs. However, most approaches require a given…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-09 Tianjun Zhang , Tongzheng Ren , Mengjiao Yang , Joseph E. Gonzalez , Dale Schuurmans , Bo Dai

We consider finite Markov decision processes (MDPs) with convex constraints and known dynamics. In principle, this problem is amenable to off-the-shelf convex optimization solvers, but typically this approach suffers from poor scalability.…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-12-19 Panagiotis D. Grontas , Anastasios Tsiamis , John Lygeros

Modern policy optimization methods roughly follow the policy mirror descent (PMD) algorithmic template, for which there are by now numerous theoretical convergence results. However, most of these either target tabular environments, or can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Uri Sherman , Tomer Koren , Yishay Mansour

Model-free reinforcement learning is known to be memory and computation efficient and more amendable to large scale problems. In this paper, two model-free algorithms are introduced for learning infinite-horizon average-reward Markov…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-26 Chen-Yu Wei , Mehdi Jafarnia-Jahromi , Haipeng Luo , Hiteshi Sharma , Rahul Jain

Dual-based proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controllers are often employed in practice to solve online allocation problems with global constraints, such as budget pacing in online advertising. However, controllers are used in a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-12-21 Santiago R. Balseiro , Haihao Lu , Vahab Mirrokni , Balasubramanian Sivan

Simultaneously performing variable selection and inference in high-dimensional regression models is an open challenge in statistics and machine learning. The increasing availability of vast amounts of variables requires the adoption of…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-05-08 Marco Molinari , Magne Thoresen

Learning-to-optimize (L2O) is an emerging research area in large-scale optimization with applications in data science. Recently, researchers have proposed a novel L2O framework called learned mirror descent (LMD), based on the classical…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-05-13 Hong Ye Tan , Subhadip Mukherjee , Junqi Tang , Carola-Bibiane Schönlieb

A large class of decision making under uncertainty problems can be described via Markov decision processes (MDPs) or partially observable MDPs (POMDPs), with application to artificial intelligence and operations research, among others.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-09-10 Mohamadreza Ahmadi , Ugo Rosolia , Michel D. Ingham , Richard M. Murray , Aaron D. Ames

We develop a novel unified randomized block-coordinate primal-dual algorithm to solve a class of nonsmooth constrained convex optimization problems, which covers different existing variants and model settings from the literature. We prove…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-10-29 Quoc Tran-Dinh , Deyi Liu

We consider convex-concave saddle point problems with a separable structure and non-strongly convex functions. We propose an efficient stochastic block coordinate descent method using adaptive primal-dual updates, which enables flexible…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-11-24 Zhanxing Zhu , Amos J. Storkey