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We propose smoothed primal-dual algorithms for solving stochastic and smooth nonconvex optimization problems with linear inequality constraints. Our algorithms are single-loop and only require a single stochastic gradient based on one…
In this paper we consider a class of optimization problems with a strongly convex objective function and the feasible set given by an intersection of a simple convex set with a set given by a number of linear equality and inequality…
In this paper, we consider a nonsmooth convex finite-sum problem with a conic constraint. To overcome the challenge of projecting onto the constraint set and computing the full (sub)gradient, we introduce a primal-dual incremental gradient…
We study the general approach to accelerating the convergence of the most widely used solution method of Markov decision processes with the total expected discounted reward. Inspired by the monotone behavior of the contraction mappings in…
Probabilistic model checking aims to prove whether a Markov decision process (MDP) satisfies a temporal logic specification. The underlying methods rely on an often unrealistic assumption that the MDP is precisely known. Consequently,…
In this paper, we propose a new decomposition approach named the proximal primal dual algorithm (Prox-PDA) for smooth nonconvex linearly constrained optimization problems. The proposed approach is primal-dual based, where the primal step…
We describe convergence acceleration schemes for multistep optimization algorithms. The extrapolated solution is written as a nonlinear average of the iterates produced by the original optimization method. Our analysis does not need the…
We consider a class of multi-agent cooperative consensus optimization problems with local nonlinear convex constraints where only those agents connected by an edge can directly communicate, hence, the optimal consensus decision lies in the…
We present a novel accelerated primal-dual (APD) method for solving a class of deterministic and stochastic saddle point problems (SPP). The basic idea of this algorithm is to incorporate a multi-step acceleration scheme into the…
Constrained Markov decision processes (CMDPs) model scenarios of sequential decision making with multiple objectives that are increasingly important in many applications. However, the model is often unknown and must be learned online while…
Markov decision processes (MDPs) are a popular model for performance analysis and optimization of stochastic systems. The parameters of stochastic behavior of MDPs are estimates from empirical observations of a system; their values are not…
This paper explores numerical methods for solving a convex differentiable semi-infinite program. We introduce a primal-dual gradient method which performs three updates iteratively: a momentum gradient ascend step to update the constraint…
We consider the problem of designing policies for Markov decision processes (MDPs) with dynamic coherent risk objectives and constraints. We begin by formulating the problem in a Lagrangian framework. Under the assumption that the risk…
Nonconvex and nonsmooth optimization problems are frequently encountered in much of statistics, business, science and engineering, but they are not yet widely recognized as a technology in the sense of scalability. A reason for this…
Previous studies on stochastic primal-dual algorithms for solving min-max problems with faster convergence heavily rely on the bilinear structure of the problem, which restricts their applicability to a narrowed range of problems. The main…
We present the first finite time global convergence analysis of policy gradient in the context of infinite horizon average reward Markov decision processes (MDPs). Specifically, we focus on ergodic tabular MDPs with finite state and action…
Recently, some studies have utilized the Markov Decision Process for diversifying (MDP-DIV) the search results in information retrieval. Though promising performances can be delivered, MDP-DIV suffers from a very slow convergence, which…
This paper studies distributed convex optimization with both affine equality and nonlinear inequality couplings through the duality analysis. We first formulate the dual of the coupling-constraint problem and reformulate it as a consensus…
In this paper, we propose a second-order continuous primal-dual dynamical system with time-dependent positive damping terms for a separable convex optimization problem with linear equality constraints. By the Lyapunov function approach, we…
This note summarizes the optimization formulations used in the study of Markov decision processes. We consider both the discounted and undiscounted processes under the standard and the entropy-regularized settings. For each setting, we…