Related papers: Optimal Competitive-Ratio Control
We study the $K$-armed contextual dueling bandit problem, a sequential decision making setting in which the learner uses contextual information to make two decisions, but only observes \emph{preference-based feedback} suggesting that one…
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…
We study the problem of online learning with a notion of regret defined with respect to a set of strategies. We develop tools for analyzing the minimax rates and for deriving regret-minimization algorithms in this scenario. While the…
When sales of a product are affected by randomness in demand, retailers can use dynamic pricing strategies to maximise their profits. In this article the pricing problem is formulated as a stochastic optimal control problem, where the…
In this work we consider the online control of a known linear dynamic system with adversarial disturbance and adversarial controller cost. The goal in online control is to minimize the regret, defined as the difference between cumulative…
A natural goal when designing online learning algorithms for non-stationary environments is to bound the regret of the algorithm in terms of the temporal variation of the input sequence. Intuitively, when the variation is small, it should…
Linear dynamical systems that obey stochastic differential equations are canonical models. While optimal control of known systems has a rich literature, the problem is technically hard under model uncertainty and there are hardly any…
We consider the problem of controlling an unknown linear dynamical system under a stochastic convex cost and full feedback of both the state and cost function. We present a computationally efficient algorithm that attains an optimal…
This paper addresses the inverse optimal control problem of finding the state weighting function that leads to a quadratic value function when the cost on the input is fixed to be quadratic. The paper focuses on a class of infinite horizon…
Online learning and model reference adaptive control have many interesting intersections. One area where they differ however is in how the algorithms are analyzed and what objective or metric is used to discriminate "good" algorithms from…
We study a two-sided market, wherein, price-sensitive heterogeneous customers and servers arrive and join their respective queues. A compatible customer-server pair can then be matched by the platform, at which point, they leave the system.…
We devise an online learning algorithm -- titled Switching via Monotone Adapted Regret Traces (SMART) -- that adapts to the data and achieves regret that is instance optimal, i.e., simultaneously competitive on every input sequence compared…
In this paper we focus on the solution of online problems with time-varying, linear equality and inequality constraints. Our approach is to design a novel online algorithm by leveraging the tools of control theory. In particular, for the…
Follow-The-Regularized-Leader (FTRL) is known as an effective and versatile approach in online learning, where appropriate choice of the learning rate is crucial for smaller regret. To this end, we formulate the problem of adjusting FTRL's…
Recent literature on online learning has focused on developing adaptive algorithms that take advantage of a regularity of the sequence of observations, yet retain worst-case performance guarantees. A complementary direction is to develop…
This paper focuses on optimal control problem for a class of discrete-time nonlinear systems. In practical applications, computation time is a crucial consideration when solving nonlinear optimal control problems, especially under real-time…
This paper considers online convex optimization with long term constraints, where constraints can be violated in intermediate rounds, but need to be satisfied in the long run. The cumulative constraint violation is used as the metric to…
Unlike classical control theory, such as Linear Quadratic Control (LQC), real-world control problems are highly complex. These problems often involve adversarial perturbations, bandit feedback models, and non-quadratic, adversarially chosen…
We study reinforcement learning (RL) for a class of continuous-time linear-quadratic (LQ) control problems for diffusions, where states are scalar-valued and running control rewards are absent but volatilities of the state processes depend…
In the secretary problem, a set of secretary candidates arrive in a uniformly random order and reveal their values one by one. A company, who can only hire one candidate and hopes to maximize the expected value of its hire, needs to make…