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The naive application of Reinforcement Learning algorithms to continuous control problems -- such as locomotion and manipulation -- often results in policies which rely on high-amplitude, high-frequency control signals, known colloquially…
Computational approaches to PDE-constrained optimization under uncertainty may involve finite-dimensional approximations of control and state spaces, sample average approximations of measures of risk and reliability, smooth approximations…
Finding parameters that minimise a loss function is at the core of many machine learning methods. The Stochastic Gradient Descent algorithm is widely used and delivers state of the art results for many problems. Nonetheless, Stochastic…
Policy gradient (PG) methods are successful approaches to deal with continuous reinforcement learning (RL) problems. They learn stochastic parametric (hyper)policies by either exploring in the space of actions or in the space of parameters.…
In the application of the Expectation Maximization algorithm to identification of dynamical systems, internal states are typically chosen as latent variables, for simplicity. In this work, we propose a different choice of latent variables,…
Stochastic optimization algorithms update models with cheap per-iteration costs sequentially, which makes them amenable for large-scale data analysis. Such algorithms have been widely studied for structured sparse models where the sparsity…
This paper deals with shape optimization for elastic materials under stochastic loads. It transfers the paradigm of stochastic dominance, which allows for flexible risk aversion via comparison with benchmark random variables, from…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is commonly used for optimization in large-scale machine learning problems. Langford et al. (2009) introduce a sparse online learning method to induce sparsity via truncated gradient. With high-dimensional…
In this paper, we consider the linear programming (LP) formulation for deep reinforcement learning. The number of the constraints depends on the size of state and action spaces, which makes the problem intractable in large or continuous…
Based on the complete-lattice approach, a new Lagrangian duality theory for set-valued optimization problems is presented. In contrast to previous approaches, set-valued versions for the known scalar formulas involving infimum and supremum…
It seems that in the current age, computers, computation, and data have an increasingly important role to play in scientific research and discovery. This is reflected in part by the rise of machine learning and artificial intelligence,…
In reinforcement learning (RL), it is often advantageous to consider additional constraints on the action space to ensure safety or action relevance. Existing work on such action-constrained RL faces challenges regarding effective policy…
In this paper we analyze a zeroth-order proximal stochastic gradient method suitable for the minimization of weakly convex stochastic optimization problems. We consider nonsmooth and nonlinear stochastic composite problems, for which…
We consider stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for least-squares regression with potentially several passes over the data. While several passes have been widely reported to perform practically better in terms of predictive performance on…
In this paper, we propose a stochastic search algorithm for solving general optimization problems with little structure. The algorithm iteratively finds high quality solutions by randomly sampling candidate solutions from a parameterized…
We consider a continuous time stochastic optimal control problem under both equality and inequality constraints on the expectation of some functionals of the controlled process. Under a qualification condition, we show that the problem is…
In this work, we develop analysis and algorithms for a class of (stochastic) bilevel optimization problems whose lower-level (LL) problem is strongly convex and linearly constrained. Most existing approaches for solving such problems rely…
This paper presents an algorithmic framework for solving unconstrained stochastic optimization problems using only stochastic function evaluations. We employ central finite-difference based gradient estimation methods to approximate the…
Majorization-minimization algorithms consist of iteratively minimizing a majorizing surrogate of an objective function. Because of its simplicity and its wide applicability, this principle has been very popular in statistics and in signal…
The application of stochastic variance reduction to optimization has shown remarkable recent theoretical and practical success. The applicability of these techniques to the hard non-convex optimization problems encountered during training…