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Optimal damping aims at determining a vector of damping coefficients $\nu$ that maximizes the decay rate of a mechanical system's response. This problem can be formulated as the minimization of the trace of the solution of a Lyapunov…
Stochastic contraction analysis is a recently developed tool for studying the global stability properties of nonlinear stochastic systems, based on a differential analysis of convergence in an appropriate metric. To date, stochastic…
Iterative algorithms are ubiquitous in the field of data mining. Widely known examples of such algorithms are the least mean square algorithm, backpropagation algorithm of neural networks. Our contribution in this paper is an improvement…
In this paper we give a new proof, relying on Banach's contraction mapping principle, of a celebrated theorem of Andr\'e Bloch. Also, via the same contraction mapping principle, we give a proof of a Bloch type theorem for normalised Wu…
In this article, the sufficient Pontryagin's maximum principle for infinite horizon discounted stochastic control problem is established. The sufficiency is ensured by an additional assumption of concavity of the Hamiltonian function.…
A dynamical system is called contractive if any two solutions approach one another at an exponential rate. More precisely, the dynamics contracts lines at an exponential rate. This property implies highly ordered asymptotic behavior…
We consider multiperiod stochastic control problems with non-parametric uncertainty on the underlying probabilistic model. We derive a new metric on the space of probability measures, called the adapted $(p, \infty)$--Wasserstein distance…
We formulate bang-bang, purification, and minimization principles in dual Banach spaces with Gelfand integrals and provide a complete characterization of the saturation property of finite measure spaces. We also present a new application of…
We are interested in risk constraints for infinite horizon discrete time Markov decision processes (MDPs). Starting with average reward MDPs, we show that increasing concave stochastic dominance constraints on the empirical distribution of…
To model combinatorial decision problems involving uncertainty and probability, we introduce stochastic constraint programming. Stochastic constraint programs contain both decision variables (which we can set) and stochastic variables…
Markov Decision Problems (MDPs) provide a foundational framework for modelling sequential decision-making across diverse domains, guided by optimality criteria such as discounted and average rewards. However, these criteria have inherent…
This paper is devoted to studying constrained continuous-time Markov decision processes (MDPs) in the class of randomized policies depending on state histories. The transition rates may be unbounded, the reward and costs are admitted to be…
In multi-period stochastic optimization problems, the future optimal decision is a random variable whose distribution depends on the parameters of the optimization problem. We analyze how the expected value of this random variable changes…
We consider the problem of controlling a Markov decision process (MDP) with a large state space, so as to minimize average cost. Since it is intractable to compete with the optimal policy for large scale problems, we pursue the more modest…
Most value-based and actor--critic reinforcement learning methods rely on Bellman-style recursions, yet these recursions collapse under non-exponential discounting common in human preferences and survival processes. We show the breakdown is…
We prove that Riemannian contraction in a supervised learning setting implies generalization. Specifically, we show that if an optimizer is contracting in some Riemannian metric with rate $\lambda > 0$, it is uniformly algorithmically…
The use of convex relaxations has lately gained considerable interest in Power Systems. These relaxations play a major role in providing global optimality guarantees for non-convex optimization problems. For the Optimal Power Flow (OPF)…
We consider the constrained optimal control problem for the gradual-impulsive CTMDP model with the performance criteria being the expected total undiscounted costs (from the running cost and the cost from each time an impulse being…
Optimizing static risk-averse objectives in Markov decision processes is difficult because they do not admit standard dynamic programming equations common in Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms. Dynamic programming decompositions that…
This paper studies dynamic stochastic optimization problems parametrized by a random variable. Such problems arise in many applications in operations research and mathematical finance. We give sufficient conditions for the existence of…