Related papers: Learning Stochastic Optimal Policies via Gradient …
Stochastic Gradient (SG) is the defacto iterative technique to solve stochastic optimization (SO) problems with a smooth (non-convex) objective $f$ and a stochastic first-order oracle. SG's attractiveness is due in part to its simplicity of…
Decentralized solutions to finite-sum minimization are of significant importance in many signal processing, control, and machine learning applications. In such settings, the data is distributed over a network of arbitrarily-connected nodes…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a powerful optimization technique that is particularly useful in online learning scenarios. Its convergence analysis is relatively well understood under the assumption that the data samples are…
Stochastic optimal control, which has the goal of driving the behavior of noisy systems, is broadly applicable in science, engineering and artificial intelligence. Our work introduces Stochastic Optimal Control Matching (SOCM), a novel…
Feedback optimization is an increasingly popular control paradigm to optimize dynamical systems, accounting for control objectives that concern the system operation at steady-state. Existing feedback optimization techniques heavily rely on…
Learning to optimize - the idea that we can learn from data algorithms that optimize a numerical criterion - has recently been at the heart of a growing number of research efforts. One of the most challenging issues within this approach is…
In this paper, we discuss an application of the SDDP type algorithm to nested risk-averse formulations of Stochastic Optimal Control (SOC) problems. We propose a construction of a statistical upper bound for the optimal value of risk-averse…
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…
This study proposes a method for designing stabilizing suboptimal controllers for nonlinear stochastic systems. These systems include time-invariant stochastic parameters that represent uncertainty of dynamics, posing two key difficulties…
We present a unified framework for learning continuous control policies using backpropagation. It supports stochastic control by treating stochasticity in the Bellman equation as a deterministic function of exogenous noise. The product is a…
In reinforcement learning (RL), offline learning decoupled learning from data collection and is useful in dealing with exploration-exploitation tradeoff and enables data reuse in many applications. In this work, we study two offline…
Stochastic Optimal Control Problems (SOCPs) plays a major role in the sequential decision-making challenges. There exist various iterative algorithms, under framework of stochastic maximum principle, that sequentially find the optimal…
Stochastic gradient descent is an optimisation method that combines classical gradient descent with random subsampling within the target functional. In this work, we introduce the stochastic gradient process as a continuous-time…
This paper presents a novel stochastic gradient descent algorithm for constrained optimization. The proposed algorithm randomly samples constraints and components of the finite sum objective function and relies on a relaxed logarithmic…
In this paper, we study the conditional stochastic optimization (CSO) problem which covers a variety of applications including portfolio selection, reinforcement learning, robust learning, causal inference, etc. The sample-averaged gradient…
Variational Optimization forms a differentiable upper bound on an objective. We show that approaches such as Natural Evolution Strategies and Gaussian Perturbation, are special cases of Variational Optimization in which the expectations are…
There is a growing literature adopting a stochastic optimal control (SOC) perspective to fine-tune diffusion models and related generative policies. A prominent class of methods, known as iterative diffusion optimization, solves the SOC…
We study the distributed stochastic compositional optimization problems over directed communication networks in which agents privately own a stochastic compositional objective function and collaborate to minimize the sum of all objective…
Selecting the best hyperparameters for a particular optimization instance, such as the learning rate and momentum, is an important but nonconvex problem. As a result, iterative optimization methods such as hypergradient descent lack global…
Stochastic convex optimization algorithms are the most popular way to train machine learning models on large-scale data. Scaling up the training process of these models is crucial, but the most popular algorithm, Stochastic Gradient Descent…