Related papers: Neural Stochastic Dual Dynamic Programming
A stochastic program typically involves several parameters, including deterministic first-stage parameters and stochastic second-stage elements that serve as input data. These programs are re-solved whenever any input parameter changes.…
Deep learning is a popular machine learning technique and has been applied to many real-world problems. However, training a deep neural network is very time-consuming, especially on big data. It has become difficult for a single machine to…
A widely used heuristic for solving stochastic optimization problems is to use a deterministic rolling horizon procedure, which has been modified to handle uncertainty (e.g. buffer stocks, schedule slack). This approach has been criticized…
Low-rank methods for semidefinite programming (SDP) have gained a lot of interest recently, especially in machine learning applications. Their analysis often involves determinant-based or Schatten-norm penalties, which are hard to implement…
We consider convex-concave saddle point problems, and more generally convex optimization problems we refer to as $\textit{saddle problems}$, which include the partial supremum or infimum of convex-concave saddle functions. Saddle problems…
This paper studies stochastic optimization problems and associated Bellman equations in formats that allow for reduced dimensionality of the cost-to-go functions. In particular, we study stochastic control problems in the…
Dynamic Programming (DP) and Constraint Programming (CP) are well-established paradigms for solving combinatorial optimization problems. Usually, these two approaches are used separately. This paper aims to show that the two can be combined…
Despite the numerous uses of semidefinite programming (SDP) and its universal solvability via interior point methods (IPMs), it is rarely applied to practical large-scale problems. This mainly owes to the computational cost of IPMs that…
Multistage stochastic programming is a powerful tool allowing decision-makers to revise their decisions at each stage based on the realized uncertainty. However, in practice, organizations are not able to be fully flexible, as decisions…
We propose a memory efficient method, named Stochastic Backpropagation (SBP), for training deep neural networks on videos. It is based on the finding that gradients from incomplete execution for backpropagation can still effectively train…
This paper introduces a novel Differential Dynamic Programming (DDP) algorithm for solving discrete-time finite-horizon optimal control problems with inequality constraints. Two variants, namely Feasible- and Infeasible-IPDDP algorithms,…
This paper presents a novel adaptive-sparse polynomial dimensional decomposition (PDD) method for stochastic design optimization of complex systems. The method entails an adaptive-sparse PDD approximation of a high-dimensional stochastic…
This paper proposes SplitSGD, a new dynamic learning rate schedule for stochastic optimization. This method decreases the learning rate for better adaptation to the local geometry of the objective function whenever a stationary phase is…
The Markov decision process (MDP) formulation used to model many real-world sequential decision making problems does not efficiently capture the setting where the set of available decisions (actions) at each time step is stochastic.…
We consider stochastic convex optimization problems where the objective is an expectation over smooth functions. For this setting we suggest a novel gradient estimate that combines two recent mechanism that are related to notion of…
We consider a general class of Dynamic Programming (DP) problems with non-separable objective functions. We show that for any problem in this class, there exists an augmented-state DP problem which satisfies the Principle of Optimality and…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) now acts as a fundamental part of optimization in current machine learning. Meanwhile, deep learning architectures have shown outstanding performance in a wide range of fields, such as natural language…
Stochastic optimisation algorithms are the de facto standard for machine learning with large amounts of data. Handling only a subset of available data in each optimisation step dramatically reduces the per-iteration computational costs,…
This paper introduces OptimizedDP, a high-performance software library for several common grid-based dynamic programming (DP) algorithms used in control theory and robotics. Specifically, OptimizedDP provides functions to numerically solve…
Safe operation of systems such as robots requires them to plan and execute trajectories subject to safety constraints. When those systems are subject to uncertainties in their dynamics, it is challenging to ensure that the constraints are…