Related papers: Understanding the Effect of Stochasticity in Polic…
The coordinated and efficient distribution of limited resources by individual decisions is a fundamental, unsolved problem. When individuals compete for road capacities, time, space, money, goods, etc., they normally make decisions based on…
We consider policy gradient methods for stochastic optimal control problem in continuous time. In particular, we analyze the gradient flow for the control, viewed as a continuous time limit of the policy gradient method. We prove the global…
We systematically develop a learning-based treatment of stochastic optimal control (SOC), relying on direct optimization of parametric control policies. We propose a derivation of adjoint sensitivity results for stochastic differential…
The input to the stochastic orienteering problem consists of a budget $B$ and metric $(V,d)$ where each vertex $v$ has a job with deterministic reward and random processing time (drawn from a known distribution). The processing times are…
Policy gradient methods are widely used in reinforcement learning. Yet, the nonconvexity of policy optimization poses significant challenges in understanding the global convergence of policy gradient methods. For a class of finite-horizon…
We analyze the convergence of gradient-based optimization algorithms that base their updates on delayed stochastic gradient information. The main application of our results is to the development of gradient-based distributed optimization…
Stochastic policies (also known as relaxed controls) are widely used in continuous-time reinforcement learning algorithms. However, executing a stochastic policy and evaluating its performance in a continuous-time environment remain open…
We study worst-case guarantees on the expected return of fixed-dataset policy optimization algorithms. Our core contribution is a unified conceptual and mathematical framework for the study of algorithms in this regime. This analysis…
This paper deals with optimal policy learning (OPL) with observational data, i.e. data-driven optimal decision-making, in multi-action (or multi-arm) settings, where a finite set of decision options is available. It is organized in three…
Policy gradients methods apply to complex, poorly understood, control problems by performing stochastic gradient descent over a parameterized class of polices. Unfortunately, even for simple control problems solvable by standard dynamic…
Human preferences are not always represented via complete linear orders: It is natural to employ partially-ordered preferences for expressing incomparable outcomes. In this work, we consider decision-making and probabilistic planning in…
Policy gradient methods are powerful reinforcement learning algorithms and have been demonstrated to solve many complex tasks. However, these methods are also data-inefficient, afflicted with high variance gradient estimates, and frequently…
We propose a novel gradient-based online optimization framework for solving stochastic programming problems that frequently arise in the context of cyber-physical and robotic systems. Our problem formulation accommodates constraints that…
We provide a novel computer-assisted technique for systematically analyzing first-order methods for optimization. In contrast with previous works, the approach is particularly suited for handling sublinear convergence rates and stochastic…
Approaches to policy optimization have been motivated from diverse principles, based on how the parametric model is interpreted (e.g. value versus policy representation) or how the learning objective is formulated, yet they share a common…
Multi-stage decision-making under uncertainty, where decisions are taken under sequentially revealing uncertain problem parameters, is often essential to faithfully model managerial problems. Given the significant computational challenges…
In this article, we discuss two algorithms tailored to discrete-time deterministic finite-horizon nonlinear optimal control problems or so-called deterministic trajectory optimization problems. Both algorithms can be derived from an…
The convex analytic method has proved to be a very versatile method for the study of infinite horizon average cost optimal stochastic control problems. In this paper, we revisit the convex analytic method and make three primary…
Rolling forecasts have been almost overlooked in the renewable energy storage literature. In this paper, we provide a new approach for handling uncertainty not just in the accuracy of a forecast, but in the evolution of forecasts over time.…
Stochastic optimization finds a wide range of applications in operations research and management science. However, existing stochastic optimization techniques usually require the information of random samples (e.g., demands in the…