Related papers: Constrained Optimization with Dynamic Bound-scalin…
The softmax function combined with a cross-entropy loss is a principled approach to modeling probability distributions that has become ubiquitous in deep learning. The softmax function is defined by a lone hyperparameter, the temperature,…
In this work, we study contextual strongly convex simulation optimization and adopt an "optimize then predict" (OTP) approach for real-time decision making. In the offline stage, simulation optimization is conducted across a set of…
This article reviews recent inverse statistical-mechanical methodologies that we have devised to optimize interaction potentials in soft matter systems that correspond to stable "target" structures. We are interested in finding the…
Deploying Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents in the real-world require that the agents satisfy safety constraints. Current RL agents explore the environment without considering these constraints, which can lead to damage to the hardware or…
Our goal is to compute a policy that guarantees improved return over a baseline policy even when the available MDP model is inaccurate. The inaccurate model may be constructed, for example, by system identification techniques when the true…
Safe Reinforcement Learning (RL) often faces significant issues such as constraint violations and instability, necessitating the use of constrained policy optimization, which seeks optimal policies while ensuring adherence to specific…
Quadratic programming is a workhorse of modern nonlinear optimization, control, and data science. Although regularized methods offer convergence guarantees under minimal assumptions on the problem data, they can exhibit the slow…
Optimization analyses for cross-entropy training rely on local Taylor models of the loss to predict whether a proposed step will decrease the objective. These surrogates are reliable only inside the Taylor convergence radius of the true…
Modern second order solvers for convex optimisation, such as interior point methods, rely on primal dual information and are difficult to warm start, limiting their applicability in real time control. We propose the PVM, a duality free…
The introduction of robust optimisation has pushed the state-of-the-art in defending against adversarial attacks. Notably, the state-of-the-art projected gradient descent (PGD)-based training method has been shown to be universally and…
This work presents PANTR, an efficient solver for nonconvex constrained optimization problems, that is well-suited as an inner solver for an augmented Lagrangian method. The proposed scheme combines forward-backward iterations with…
Constrained optimization of the parameters of a simulator plays a crucial role in a design process. These problems become challenging when the simulator is stochastic, computationally expensive, and the parameter space is high-dimensional.…
This paper addresses the problem of safe optimization under a single smooth constraint, a scenario that arises in diverse real-world applications such as robotics and autonomous navigation. The objective of safe optimization is to solve a…
A novel inner approximation algorithm is proposed for dynamic optimization problems to ensure strict satisfaction of path constraints. Distinct from traditional methods relying on interval analysis, the proposed algorithm leverages the…
We consider the problem of computing the optimal solution and objective of a linear program under linearly changing linear constraints. The problem studied is given by $\min c^t x \text{ s.t } Ax + \lambda Dx \leq b$ where $\lambda$ belongs…
Decentralized min-max optimization allows multi-agent systems to collaboratively solve global min-max optimization problems by facilitating the exchange of model updates among neighboring agents, eliminating the need for a central server.…
Recent studies have pointed out that natural language processing (NLP) models are vulnerable to backdoor attacks. A backdoored model produces normal outputs on the clean samples while performing improperly on the texts with triggers that…
The ability to engineer high-fidelity gates on quantum processors in the presence of systematic errors remains the primary barrier to achieving quantum advantage. Quantum optimal control methods have proven effective in experimentally…
Nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) seeks a low-rank approximation $X \approx UV^T$ with nonnegative factors and is commonly solved using interior methods that enforce feasibility throughout optimization. We show that such…
Diffusion models (DMs) are advanced deep learning models that achieved state-of-the-art capability on a wide range of generative tasks. However, recent studies have shown their vulnerability regarding backdoor attacks, in which backdoored…